Summary of Chapter 5 of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
In chapter five of Malcolm Gladwell’s, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, he takes a new twist on the idea of thin-slicing, which he describes as, “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience” (23). Throughout the four previous chapters, he explained how thin-slicing works and how it can be useful in everyday life. However, in this chapter, offers the other side of thin-slicing, demonstrating how it cannot always be trusted. He shows how it can be also be harmful to our lives.
Sometimes humans make snap judgments about things with a very limited amount of information. Without all of
It seemed as though everything went really well and the Coca Cola Company was content with this choice of action. However, when they asked their steadfast consumers what they thought about New Coke, they said they were really disappointed and really disliked it. This little action of adjusting the soda to be sweeter ended up being a catastrophe, causing protests throughout the country. Coca Cola was forced to bring back “Classic Coke” and get rid of “New Coke.” However, even with reverting to the original Coke, Pepsi did not top Coke, and Coke is still the leading soft drink in the world. The issue with these tests was the way they were laid out. A sip test is not an accurate way to test what consumers prefer. When taking a sip of something, human senses are more attracted to the sweeter object. However, when finishing off the rest of the product, this sweet factor might become overbearing or it might lose its sweetness. Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, even though its flavor beings to wear off by the time an entire can is consumed, so it had the advantage in the taste test. As Gladwell put it, “Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip test” (159). Therefore, thin-slicing abilities may be flawed because it can be very hard to get all of the necessary information needed to make an accurate judgment of something