Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Blink is one of my favorite books by Malcolm Gladwell. In his usual style, Malcolm opens by describing a concept and then connecting it to several real-world examples of the concept in action. The concept of System 1 thinking which you can find much more about in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow which will get its own post.

The book was first published in 2007 but the concepts still hold and while the examples will be slightly dated the learnings are the same. "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" - unknown I have used the learnings from this book in all of my web and marketing work. It is also now very common in marking on Instagram to create an expectation for people that can be fulfilled when they click the ad and buy the product.

One of my kindle highlights was on the "Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT was devised by Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek". I love the highlighting feature when reading on the kindle because I can read about an idea or a concept that I want to learn more about. I highlight it and keep reading. Then, later on, I go into my highlights and can search and read more about the thing that piqued my interest.

The Harvard project, Project Implicit site is available here.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., black people, gay people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy). The main idea is that making a response is easier when closely related items share the same response key.

I have the kindle version from Amazon.