Pros And Cons Of Blink By Malcolm Gladwell

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell persuades the readers how powerful a human’s subconscious is through the experiments of other people. He show how important it is and how it is not a bad way to judge a situation. Snap judgements are created by the subconscious from the tiniest bit of information taken from our surroundings. Snap judgements can also be called thin slicing or rapid cognition. Gladwell shows there are pros and cons to the this method. He teaches us the two states of the mind, the conscious also known as the rational mind and the subconscious. The conscious uses lots of information and evidence to create a decision, while the subconscious uses little bits of information gather from a person’s surroundings. The subconscious is …show more content…
Gladwell gives an example about a marine named Paul Van Riper. Riper lead one side of the army in a mock battle, he used his rapid cognition, while the opponent used information from all the latest technology they had. Yet Riper land a strong attack on the opponent leaving them stunned by his surprising attack. Riper used older tactics from his past experiences to advance his army. Another example of rapid cognition being helpful was with firefighters. Sometimes rapid cognition gives you information for dangerous situations. Gladwell wrote of a firefighter who told the others to evacuate and it saved their lives because the floor collapsed. The surrounds gave information of the situation and the subconscious processed it and add information from past experiences or knowledge to warn the person of danger. Each mindset was created for a reason and both of them put together help people create the best possible decision for a situation. Sometimes the mindsets have different ideas about something. An example given was race, in the an test, people tend to associate black with violence even if they believed in equality. This is due to rapid cognition