Blink [ペーパーバック]

『Blink』は、第一印象の最初の2秒間――瞬間的な理解を得るための決定的な一瞥――の重要性を説く本だ。ベストセラー『The Tipping Point』(邦題『ティッピング・ポイント――いかにして「小さな変化」が「大きな変化」を生み出すか』)の著者グラッドウェルは、本書『Blink』のなかで、研究成果を見事な物語に変換する才能を駆使し、直感的な判断と読心術の素晴しさを力説している。結婚、心臓発作のトリアージ、速攻のデート、ゴルフコースでの呼吸困難、車販売、軍隊の機動作戦などを例に論拠を固めながら、小さなことをよく考え、薄切りにした行動の意味に意識を集中せよと読者を説き伏せていく。大切なのは、適応力のある無意識――年中無休の精神の従者――に頼ること。その無意識こそが、危険を警告し、他人の心を読み、新しいアイディアに反応するための直感的で高度な情報を提供してくれるのだ。

同時に、グラッドウェルは結論にとびつくなという警告も発している。販売員が我々の第一印象を操作することもあるし、強い興奮を覚える瞬間が心の目をくらませ、誤った手がかりに集中したすえに、ウォーレン・ハーディング効果(すなわち、ハンサムだが無力な大統領に投票してしまう行為)に対して無防備になってしまうこともある。直感のダークサイドを暴く刺激的な章では、ブロンクスで起きた白人警官によるアフリカ系移民アマドゥ・ディアロの悲劇的な射殺事件を取り上げ、安易な認知という過ちに光をあてている。さらに、自閉症や、顔の表情を読む方法、心臓機能の上昇に関する研究成果を示し、いちかばちかの判断の質を高めるトレーニングを薦めている。刺激的ですばらしい本書にこれ以上望むものといえば、「Blink Camp」(ひらめき合宿)とはどんなものかというグラッドウェルの見解を、もう少し厚切りに見せてほしかったということくらいだ。(Amazon.com バーバラ・マッコフ)

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of thin slices of behavior. The key is to rely on our adaptive unconscious--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us mind blind, focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to the Warren Harding Effect (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the dark side of blink, he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff
--このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。

Intuition is often presented as the opposite of structured achievement. There are people who intuit the answer to a problem, and there are those who work it out the long and hard way. This distinction is false: intuitive facilities turn out to be gifts that are developed and educated by practice and experience. --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

: For Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling The Tipping Point explores the extraordinarily perceptive and deceptive power of the sub-conscious mind. Gladwell痴 major claim is that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as a decision made cautiously and deliberately. What we are actually doing is what Gladwell calls 奏hin-slicing. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us looking for a pattern, throwing out the irrelevant information and zeroing in on what really matters. Our unconscious mind is so good at this that it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking. Much of this is utterly mysterious but some of the most astonishing and useful examples of thin-slicing can be learned.



Gladwell hopes to convince us that our snap judgements and first impressions can be educated and controlled so instead of merely praising the mysterious process of instinct and intuition he is interested in those moments when our instincts betray us, the situations where our powers of rapid cognition can go awry, where we fail to read the signs. Most disturbing of all is the degree to which culturally determined preconceptions and prejudices control us. Without reducing matters to racism and sexism Gladwell shows us that there are facts about people痴 appearance葉heir size or shape or color or sex葉hat can trigger a very similar set of powerful associations which explains why utter mediocrities (such as U.S. President Warren Harding) can sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility; or why tall people earn substantially more than their shorter colleagues; or why car salesmen unconsciously charge prices according to race and gender.



Gladwell痴 conversational prose style is concise, informative, accessible and entertaining. The stories, scientific findings and psychological tests are consistently surprising whether he is dealing with speed-dating, record promotions, police shoot-outs, the human face, or the reasons doctors get sued. --Larry Brown END --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Starred Review. Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people's intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it's the right input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing "a rogue military commander" in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell's dazzle, some questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor's decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor's hands altogether and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own evident pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an underlying truth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of thin slices of behavior. The key is to rely on our adaptive unconscious--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us mind blind, focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to the Warren Harding Effect (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the dark side of blink, he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff

Author, journalist, and cultural commentator Malcolm Gladwell was born in 1963. He has worked for the Washinton Post and the New Yorker. His 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. --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。