Quotes from Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
“There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”
“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.”
“We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it…We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world…decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”
“the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.” ”
“You would think that criticism would be worst,” Gottman says, “because criticism is a global condemnation of a person’s character. But contempt is qualitatively different from criticism. With criticism I might say to my wife, ‘You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive.’ Well, she’s going to respond defensively to that. That’s not very good for our problem solving and interaction. But if I speak from a superior plane, that’s far more damaging…contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community.”
“In one study, we were watching newlyweds, and what often happened with the couples who ended up in divorce is that when one partner would ask for credit, the other spouse wouldn’t give it. And with the happier couples, the spouse would hear it and say, ‘You’re right.’ That stood out. When you nod and say ‘uh-huh’ or ‘yeah,’ you are doing that as a sign of support, and here she never does it, not once in the entire session, which none of us had realized until we did the coding.”
“But in the end it comes down to a matter of respect, and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, and the most corsive tone of voice that a doctor can assume is a dominant tone. ”
“…she picked two patient conversations. Then from each conversation, she selected two ten-second clips of the doctor talking, so her slice was a total of forty seconds. Finally, she content-filtered the slices, which means she removed the high-frequency sounds from speech that enable us to recognize words. What’s left…is a kind of garble that preserves intonation, pitch, and rhythm but erases content….
She had judges rate the slices of garble for such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness, and she found that by using only those ratings, she could predict which surgeons got sued and which ones didn’t.”