Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Introduction-Chapter 2

Reading Check

1. A Greek sculpture of a nude male (Introduction)

2. $10 million (Introduction)

3. 14 months (Introduction)

4. John Gottman (Chapter 1)

5. Five to one (Chapter 1)

6. The style and/or cadence of the operators’ clicks (Chapter 1)

7. Default on a serve (Chapter 2)

8. He gets a queasy stomach or feels “off balance.” (Chapter 2)

9. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Chapter 2)

Short Answer

1. Scientists provided their subjects with four card decks (two red, two blue) and asked them to play various games. It turned out that the red decks tended to lose, while the blue decks tended to win. Subjects declared a preference for the blue deck after about 50 cards; but it took only 10 cards for subjects to instinctively understand how the game worked. Thus, this experiment demonstrated that people tend to form intuition/instincts relatively quickly, even before their forming a conscious preference/opinion. (Introduction)

2. Blink has three purposes: (1) to demonstrate the power of snap judgments, (2) to show how they can go astray, and (3) to demonstrate how they can be enhanced.