The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Gladwell, Malcolm - Essay Example

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Gladwell, MalcolmSummaryHumans’ conscious minds have extremely limited understanding of their tendency of make accurate judgments rapidly. Human perception of the decision making process is often very misguided. Humans often underestimate the impact of external factors on the unconscious processes of decision making. Gladwell has illustrated these points through discussion of numerous experiments. In one such experiment, the participants had to join scrambled words to construct sentences.

The words included subtle cues like words related to politeness or old age. After completing the experiment, the participants had unconsciously acquired the attitudes they were suggested subtly through the sentences. Gladwell talks about the “storytelling problem” which is essentially a concept that tells how humans develop wrong accounts of their choices and attitudes. Humans create stories unconsciously which support their decisions and actions. ReflectionI do believe that the state of mind an individual is has a great impact on his/her decision making skills, and the state of mind is controlled to a large extent by the environment.

The author’s process as a writer was generally quite fair. I agree with most of the author’s points, though I slightly disagree occasionally. What I like in it is that the author has attempted to make the audiences realize the impact of environment on their decisions that they conventionally consider coming entirely from them. This suggests that selection of the right place and the right time are pre-requisites of making a right decision. I find the storytelling problem a little confusing, because I personally don’t quite agree that humans tend to develop wrong accounts of their own behaviors.

Works Cited:Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York, 2005. Print.