blink book essay javier

Thin Slicing is a term used by psychologist and philosophers, but what does it mean? According to Malcolm Gladwell, “It’s the tendency that we have as human beings to reach very rapid, very profound and sophisticated conclusions based on very thin slices of experiences.” Blink is a book by Malcolm Gladwell explaining this theory of thin-slicing. In the book Gladwell tells us many different stories that have to do with thin-slicing. The book has examples of successful thin-slicing, examples showing how it works and what it accomplishes. It also has stories teaching us, the reader of thin-slicing and how it isn’t all that great and completely accurate as well. Some stories that can teach us lessons, which we can learn from not to make the same mistakes over and over. This book is about the unconscious mind and how we don’t know it but it affects us at every moment whether we notice or not. How the unconscious mind picks up patterns from small amount of information or experiences and we make snap judgments based on those patterns. Which most of the time we don’t notice, unless of course you have trained your mind to recognize these patterns, which there’s an example of in the book. All this thin-slicing has its pros and cons I believe Gladwell’s theory is correct; all his examples are backed up by his theory of thin-slicing. He gives evidence to how it works both positively and negatively. The theory of thin-slicing is that we have the ability as human beings to instantly identify specific patterns from within small amounts of experience or information, and we make instant or snap judgments based upon those patterns. What does this mean; it means that our unconscious holds on to information from previous events. From that information our unconscious recognizes certain patterns from the past and catches similarities in current experiences or events and reacts. This reaction although it may sound a bit complicated happens in mere seconds.