Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking

Psychology Perspectives Application and Critical Book Review

The popular psychology author Malcolm Gladwell presents research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Adaptive unconscious is the mental processes that work rapidly and automatically on relatively little information. Gladwell (2005) uses thin-slicing, which “refers to the ability of our unconscious to ‘find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience’” (p. 50) to address several of the major perspectives in psychology.

Cognitive Perspective

Throughout the book, the cognitive perspective is frequently relative to the concept of thin-slicing in expert judgments,

This is the case that Gladwell brings up with the story of Brendan Reilly and Cook County Hospital. Reilly, in 1996, came to Chicago to become the chairman of the hospital’s Department of Medicine. He arrived to a hospital that was described by Gladwell (2005) as being “the place of last resort for the hundreds of thousand of Chicagoans without health insurance.” (p.273) The hospital was crowded and Reilly needed some way to streamline a number of people that came in every day and get the people who needed the most help in first. Reilly noticed that the people that took up the most resources were those who were potential heart-attack victims, people coming in with severe chest pain and then staying for multiple nights, taking up precious bed space and doctor’s time, only to be sent home fine. That’s when he discovered the work of a cardiologist named Lee Goldman who had come up with an algorithm, an equation, that he thought would be able to take the guesswork about of treating chest pain. Gladwell (2005) writes that Goldman thought that doctors “ought to combine the evidence of the ECG with three of what he called urgent risk factors: (1) Is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina? (2) Is there fluid in the patient’s lungs? and (3) Is the patient’s

The brain tends to be more aware of something that is off or odd, something different and out of place more than anything else, this is especially apparent when the brain has been trained to do so like in an art expert trained to detect fake pieces of art. The brain can also be trained to be more aware of something specific, like with Gottman’s uncanny ability to identify whether a marriage will survive or not. These expert judgments don’t always work, like in the case of the Cook County Hospital, where the experts can be bogged down with excess information that doesn’t allow them to zero in on what actually has a part in the decision that they are trying to make. The cognitive perspective has to do with human thoughts in terms of how we interpret and process events which apply to all of these examples that Gladwell uses. Thin-slicing is a way that we interpret and process events, it is a part of the cognitive perspective, which shows up in everyday life. The art experts at the Getty museum were able to tell that the kouros was a fake based on how they interpreted all aspects of the sculpture and processed those aspects to know that there was something wrong with the statue. Gottman was able to process all aspects of a couple’s relationship and was then able to interpret the