Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power Of Thinking

Have you ever found yourself saying, “something just doesn’t feel right!” or to some degree along those lines? The book “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell starts out with a similar feeling. Blink opens with the introduction of “The Statute That Didn’t Look Right”, September 1983 an art dealer named Gianfranco entered the Getty Museum located in California. With him he had a brilliantly preserved piece of work that measured near seven feet tall, with a price tag “just under $10 million” (Gladwell, 2005, p.3). As standard protocol, the Getty performed all customary background and authenticity checks to verify the genuineness of the kouros. During a lengthy 14 month investigation conducted by geologists, it was determined that the material that the kouros was made of was from the island of Thasos which then guaranteed that the item was legit, therefore the Getty made the expensive purchase. Shortly afterwards, Federico Zeri and two other art historians instantly …show more content…
The first story we read is about a psychologist named John Gottman. Since the 1980’s, Gottman has worked with over 3,000 married men and women in his small “love room” located on the second floor near the University of Washington campus. Within this “love room”, Gottman will take these married men and women and videotapes them while they have a conversation, in order to make a prediction in regards to the future of their marriage. One would think that we would need to gather much more information on the couple, rather than merely watching video of a conversation. If Gottman watches about an hour of a husband and wife conversing he “can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent” (Gladwell, 2005, p.