E-Mail This Article to a Friend A beautiful mind Malcolm Gladwell’s tasty thin slices BY JON GARELICK
	Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking By Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown, 288 pages, $25.95

It’s a bit disheartening to find blurbs on the back of New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell’s new book that hail his previous book, The Tipping Point, as a great "how-to" for business types. Such endorsements underrate Gladwell’s ability as a storyteller, the literary quality of his prose, the sheer playfulness with which he treats big ideas. There’s something French about his love of ideas as ideas, even if his subject matter is often the very American practicality of the marketplace and the empiricism of the scientific method: focus groups and research labs, marketers and behavioralists.

The Tipping Point was subtitled How Little Things Make a Big Difference, and one of the pleasures it afforded was in watching how Gladwell’s mind worked, the connections he made. The book was about "social epidemics," how ideas spread, and it didn’t appear to take much for Gladwell to get from Paul Revere spreading a simple idea ("The British are coming") to market researchers checking out fashion trends in sneakers in the Bronx, and from there to urban crime waves.

Blink takes another simple idea — the power of first impressions — and likewise turns it this way and that and travels an enormous distance in a short space. Again Gladwell is able to cross one discipline after another, one subset of behavioral psychology after another. He begins with a discussion of art experts, of how the gut, split-second reaction of a couple of connoisseurs can overturn weeks of scientific research and rational deduction. He moves on to the science of political marketing ("The Warren Harding Error: How We Fall for Tall, Dark, and Handsome Men"), military science and war games, taste testers, hitmaking in the music industry, and finally, and curiously, as in The Tipping Point, urban crime, as he dissects the killing of Amadou Diallo by New York City police in 1999 (in a chapter called "Seven Seconds in the Bronx"). And that’s not to mention the sections of "mind-reading" through non-verbal facial cues, with its subplots on autism and marriage counseling and the creation of the doomed "New Coke."

On its surface, Blink would seem to argue for its own slightness, from its title to its length. But a glance at the end notes belies that impression. How many books went into making this little book, and how many other writers could make these kind of cognitive leaps? There aren’t that many pages between the discussions of how we rate the flavor of different kinds of jams and how Amadou Diallo was shot to death — but the latter doesn’t feel trivialized. Gladwell makes a strong case for the power of initial impressions, and for "thin-slicing" — "the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience." He shows the strength of racial prejudice in even the most open-minded and avowedly liberal types, using as evidence the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which demonstrates how we "make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us."

Gladwell begins with the IAT for gender, which provides the expected results regarding male-female stereotypes, and then moves on to race. He reveals that he’s taken the Race IAT several times himself and that "the result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy." Because, of course, African-Americans tend to have predominantly negative implicit associations. He points out that it never matters how often people take the test, they can never "beat" it. He says that finally he "didn’t do quite so badly" on the Race IAT, having only a "moderate automatic preference for whites." But then again, he adds, "I’m half black. (My mother is Jamaican.)"

Does this prove that Gladwell is a racist or at best "a self-hating black person"? Not exactly. Rather, he points out, it’s proof that "our attitudes toward things like race or gender operate on two levels," the conscious, or "what we choose to believe," and our "unconscious" attitudes, which might not make us behave in a racist way but can seriously affect our relationships with other people.

Yet the Diallo case as it’s presented isn’t about race per se. If the art-expert anecdote shows how the "trained" unconscious can be a productive tool, the Diallo case shows how destructive the untutored unconscious can be: fail to "read" a face or gesture correctly in a bad neighborhood at night and things can get out of control very fast. Gladwell establishes the power of unconscious instincts, even the necessity for "snap judgments," but also the need to understand and even educate those instincts.

True to form, he tells one wonderful story after another in Blink; there are mini-portraits of the various behavioralists, the military science expert, the "mind-readers." But the real weight of the book comes from that distillation of ideas, those startling connections.

I do have my quibbles. Maybe Gladwell has been reading too many of his business-magazine blurbs, but he’s developed a tendency to address his reader as part of a group ("I imagine that some of you . . . "), as if we were at a corporate seminar. And it’s a little cutesy of him to tell us to pay attention to our gut feelings about a doctor, since people tend to sue doctors they don’t like. After all, he’s just demonstrated that people can sometimes sue the wrong doctor just because of a poor bedside manner. But these are quibbles only. The real thin slice in Blink is between the amusing and the profound.

Malcolm Gladwell talks and signs books as part of the Harvard Book Store series this Monday, February 7, at 6:30 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street in Harvard Square; call (617) 661-1515.