Analysis Of Blink By Malcolm Gladwell

In chapter 2 of Blink, “Malcolm Gladwell explores many different examples based on snap judgement, which is extremely quick, because it is based off of the thinist slice of information. One of the examples Gladwell explores that stood out to me would be priming, and the example in the book had students go through a set of five words, ten sets of them, and they were broken into two groups. In both groups, the students were suppose to make four word sentences out of the five sets of words and they had to do as quickly as they could and when they were done they had to walk down to the person leading the experiment and let them know that they were done. All of the words given to them were jumbled up, and all the words that didn’t belong in the …show more content…
So there was a group of subjects and they had ten minutes to figure out how to connect two ropes together, and the ropes were far apart. There were four solutions to this puzzle. The subjects had different tools and things they could use and the first three solutions always came immediately and easy for the subjects but the fourth solution they couldn’t figure it out time over time and the professor was there watching. The fourth solution was to swing the rope and connect the two, but nobody could figure it out, so what the professor did was walk suddely by one of the ropes so it just brushed his shoulder and moved just moved enough and subjects figure it out. But what was interesting was that when they asked the subjects afterwards how they came up with that fourth solution, and how they came up with the fact that you had to swing it? Every single response was different and the purpose of this theory was that as humans we feel like we have to come up with a story, we feel like we have to come up with a reason why we came up with an answer or a solution. But what’s happening behind that ‘locked door’ your unconcious is constantly working, it is constantly looking for clues and information and trying to come up with a solution and so in that rope example when the professor just walked by that rope and it started swinging just a little bit, it hit, but the subjects could not figure out where it came …show more content…
“Fishman and Iycngar… Find when they compare what speed-daters say they want with what they are actually attracted to in the moment is that those two things don’t match” (66). When comparing what the daters state they are seeking for in an individual, virsus the people they go for, it is complete opposite. The two list do not match exactly. Speed dating is actually a great example of snap judgements in action because it involves making a judgement about someone within several minutes. Usually during a speed dating session, speed daters spend an hour talking to a person for five minutes, and at the end they check the people that they liked, and they exchange contact information from there, but what Gladwell was trying to take from citing this study is to see if people really even know how to explain their snap judgements. In fact I myself have been attracted to someone who wasn’t necessarly my type, or that I didn’t have a definite reason for liking. It actually had started when a friend of mine decided to ‘hook me up’ with one of her childhood friends. From the start I had it in my mind that this person wasn’t really my type and that I didn’t really know if we would get along, and the problem with that is once you try dating a person who isn’t your type with that sort of mindset you are going to come at it from a place of lack of