“The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”

Most of us assume that thinking over a decision is better than making it immediately – that the first best option for choice is taking our time, gathering information, and being as rational as possible. Gladwell points out this isn’t always the case: that sometimes instinctive decisions can be as good or even potentially better than slow ones, helping us integrate information in a way we might struggle to do consciously. When we’re deciding whether to switch jobs or marry someone, we can certainly draw up a list of pros and cons, Ben Franklin–style, but our instinctive reaction to the choice might actually give us more information as to our true preferences. Though he doesn’t mention it, this is the reasoning that underlies the suggestion that to make a decision, flip a coin until you aren’t unhappy when it lands.

Blink is perhaps the best known pop-social science book out there, and Gladwell is well known for his cocktail-party-appropriate anecdotes and stories. This one follows the trend: some great research is included, from Gottman’s research on marriage durability (the four horsemen of divorce are defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt, of which contempt is the true death knell) to American war games that pitted complex algorithmic strategy against a decentralized, rough and ready approach. As always, it’s also brilliantly written and tremendously engaging.

I’m not quite convinced, though. The problem with instinct, it seems to me, is it is hard to tell whether it’s right or not without deliberation. It may well be just as good in some cases, but without checking, how can we know? That suggests it’s useful only once we have justified its use with deliberation, which seems significantly more subtle than just claiming decisions made quickly can be as good as those made cautiously. That said, we all use instinct sometimes, and we can definitely do better at training and improving our thin-slicing abilities. Blink does a great job giving examples of thin-slicing, and also starts the conversation on how we can do better.