Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking QUOTES

143 " But what does the Goldman algorithm say? Quite the opposite: that all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all; that, in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

144 " By making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

145 " no argument in the book has resonated more with readers than this one. We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

146 " The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us some time to understand that we actually like them. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

147 " When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated—when we have to juggle many different variables—then our unconscious thought processes may be superior. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

148 " We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that- sometimes- we're better off that way. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

149 " A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $100 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid? "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

150 " The Cheskin company demonstrated a particularly elegant example of sensation transference a few years ago, when they studied two competing brands of inexpensive brandy, Christian Brothers and E & J (the latter of which, to give some idea of the market segment to which the two belong, is known to its clientele as Easy Jesus). Their client, Christian Brothers, wanted to know why, after years of being the dominant brand in the category, it was losing market share to E & J. Their brandy wasn’t more expensive. It wasn’t harder to find in the store. And they weren’t being out-advertised (since there is very little advertising at this end of the brandy segment). So, why were they losing ground? Cheskin set up a blind taste test with two hundred brandy drinkers. The two brandies came out roughly the same. Cheskin then decided to go a few steps further. “We went out and did another test with two hundred different people,” explains Darrel Rhea, another principal in the firm. “This time we told people which glass was Christian Brothers and which glass was E & J. Now you are having sensation transference from the name, and this time Christian Brothers’ numbers are up.” Clearly people had more positive associations with the name Christian Brothers than with E & J. That only deepened the mystery, because if Christian Brothers had a stronger brand, why were they losing market share? “So, now we do another two hundred people. This time the actual bottles of each brand are in the background. We don’t ask about the packages, but they are there. And what happens? Now we get a statistical preference for E & J. So we’ve been able to isolate what Christian Brothers’ problem is. The problem is not the product and it’s not the branding. It’s the package.” Rhea pulled out a picture of the two brandy bottles as they appeared in those days. Christian Brothers looked like a bottle of wine: it had a long, slender spout and a simple off-white label. E & J, by contrast, had a far more ornate bottle: more squat, like a decanter, with smoked glass, foil wrapping around the spout, and a dark, richly textured label. To prove their point, Rhea and his colleagues did one more test. They served two hundred people Christian Brothers Brandy out of an E & J bottle, and E & J Brandy out of a Christian Brothers bottle. Which brandy won? Christian Brothers, hands-down, by the biggest margin of all. Now they had the right taste, the right brand, and the right bottle. The company redesigned their bottle to be a lot more like E & J’s, and, sure enough, their problem was solved. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

151 " Cheskin’s offices are just outside San Francisco, and after we talked, Masten and Rhea took me to a Nob Hill Farms supermarket down the street, one of those shiny, cavernous food emporia that populate the American suburbs. “We’ve done work in just about every aisle,” Masten said as we walked in. In front of us was the beverage section. Rhea leaned over and picked up a can of 7-Up. “We tested Seven-Up. We had several versions, and what we found is that if you add fifteen percent more yellow to the green on the package—if you take this green and add more yellow—what people report is that the taste experience has a lot more lime or lemon flavor. And people were upset. ‘You are changing my Seven-Up! Don’t do a ‘New Coke’ on me.’ It’s exactly the same product, but a different set of sensations have been transferred from the bottle, which in this case isn’t necessarily a good thing. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

152 " the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. In fact, he makes an even bolder claim—one central to understanding how mind reading works—and that is that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

153 " psychologist Timothy "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

154 " Neither Masten nor Rhea believes that clever packaging allows a company to put out a bad-tasting product. The taste of the product itself matters a great deal. Their point is simply that when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations, "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

155 " Nuestro inconsciente es una fuerza poderosa, pero falible. Nuestro ordenador interno no siempre se abre paso en las tinieblas ni descubre al instante la «verdad» de una situación. Puede ser derrotado, distraído y neutralizado. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

156 " adolescencia del arte occidental». "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

157 " 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. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

158 " If you want to get a good idea of whether I’d make a good employee, drop by my house one day and take a look around. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking