Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [0]
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Author, journalist, cultural commentator and intellectual adventurer, Malcolm Gladwell was born in 1963 in England to a Jamaican mother and an English mathematician father. He grew up in Canada and graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto in 1984. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, first as a science writer and then as New York City bureau chief. Since 1996, he has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. His curiosity and breadth of interests are shown in New Yorker articles ranging over a wide array of subjects including early childhood development and the flu, not to mention hair dye, shopping and what it takes to be cool. His phenomenal bestseller The Tipping Point captured the world’s attention with its theory that a curiously small change can have unforeseen effects, and the phrase has become part of our language, used by writers, politicians and business people everywhere to describe cultural trends and strange phenomena.
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The Power
of Thinking
Without Thinking
MALCOLM GLADWELL
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Little, Brown and Company 2005
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
17
Copyright © Malcolm Gladwell, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Photographs in chapter 3 by Brooke Williams
The author is grateful for permission to use the following previously copyrighted material: Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States 1900–1925, vol. 6, The Twenties (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 16; Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 46–47; and David Klinger, Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193018-3
To my parents, Joyce and Graham Gladwell
Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Statue That Didn’t Look Right
ONE
The Theory of Thin Slices: How a Little Bit of Knowledge Goes a Long Way
TWO
The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions
THREE
The Warren Harding Error: Why We Fall For Tall, Dark, and Handsome Men
FOUR
Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory: Creating Structure for Spontaneity
FIVE
Kenna’s Dilemma: The Right — and Wrong — Way to Ask People What They Want
SIX
Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading
CONCLUSION
Listening with Your Eyes: The Lessons of Blink
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Introduction
The Statue That Didn’t Look Right
In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul