Before you can say 

Malcolm Gladwell's fascinating treatise on snap judgments is sure to inspire a following -- but can it change the world?

By Farhad Manjoo

Jan 13, 2005 | Is there any contemporary American writer more agreeable than Malcolm Gladwell? Any writer, I mean, whose work is as reliably well received by so many different sorts of people -- men and women, liberals and conservatives, business folk and academics, hipsters and wannabes, the serious and the silly? Search all you want: You won't find a reader who doesn't at least like Gladwell, and more often than not your hunt will turn up Gladwell obsessives -- people who may consider the New Yorker's politics communistic, its fiction dry, and its movie reviews inscrutable but who nonetheless subscribe to the thing for the work of just this one staff writer. And when, periodically, one of Gladwell's dispatches pops into the magazine's pages, the Gladwell obsessive will devour the piece, smile broadly and consider his subscription money very well spent, for he's now chock-full of the most precious cocktail party banter -- on why ketchup tastes so good, say, or why disposable diapers are like microchips, or why we ought to appreciate the good work of Ron Popeil.

Brace yourself: The release of "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," Gladwell's delightful new book, is sure to inspire orgies of Gladwell-mania among the with-it set, and obsessives will soon begin popping up all around you. "The Tipping Point," Gladwell's wildly popular first book, established the writer as a cultural force. The phrase "tipping point" -- which refers to the point during the spread of an epidemic or a fad at which a certain critical mass is met and after which, more or less, all hell breaks loose -- is now a permanent fixture in the corporate lexicon, as common a biz-speak crutch as "core competencies" or "going forward." A profile of Gladwell in Fast Company, whose cover this month is graced by the bushy-haired writer, notes that Donald Rumsfeld has even talked about the war in Iraq as being a tipping-point phenomenon.

The Fast Company piece also points out that Gladwell's in high demand in the corporate world, commanding as much as $40,000 per speaking gig at executive conferences. If you are a fan of Gladwell's work, you might characterize the situation thus: Gladwell has tipped. He has achieved the sort of celebrity unknown to most serious writers, and now, with "Blink," he's being called a new guru for our age, our century's Marshall McLuhan or Peter Drucker or William Whyte.

One might suppose that all this attention would have discombobulated Gladwell, or that the hype would have distracted from the work itself, but that didn't happen. The writer is in top form in "Blink," and the reading here is a real pleasure. As in the best of Gladwell's work, "Blink" brims with surprising insights about our world and ourselves, ideas that you'll have a hard time getting out of your head, things you'll itch to share with all your friends. At the heart of the book is a feature of human psychology that Gladwell calls "rapid cognition" -- the ability of our brains to make snap decisions in the background, without our ever really consciously knowing about them.

This itself is a surprising idea; we're not aware, Gladwell says, how much work our brains do for us in secret -- how they're always sizing things up, extracting meaning out of the tiniest details, constantly making sense of the world, even when we think we're not paying attention. What's more, as a culture we're trained to discount such rapid cognition in favor of deeper thinking and greater analysis. First impressions are never thought to be as reliable as lifelong studies.

Gladwell wants us to revisit the first impression. "The first task of 'Blink,'" he writes, "is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately." Listening to our snap judgments can be tricky business, however, and Gladwell documents the many ways in which our "internal computers" can be "thrown off, distracted, and disabled" (or worse -- what if your unconscious is culturally skewed, preferring white people to black people?). He argues that to make the best use of our internal machines we have to learn how rapid cognition works, what screws it up, and how we can control it. That's the real purpose of "Blink": Gladwell believes that if we just paid more attention to how our brains process things, we'd get a much truer, smarter picture of what's going on around us, and perhaps a fairer, more egalitarian world.

It seems unnecessary to ask whether Gladwell proves his theories -- can the reader expect that if the ideas in Gladwell's book took hold, it would, as he argues, "change the way wars are fought, the kinds of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted, and on and on"? Finding an answer is really not so urgent, for Gladwell's not a polemicist, and the breezy way in which he goes about his prose indicates that he's concerned more with ideas and factoids than with outcomes.

This goes to what I mean about Gladwell's being so consistently, good-naturedly agreeable; "Blink" won't be the best book you read this year, but you might find that it's the best book that you and someone with whom you usually disagree with can find some common ground on. There's just no arguing with Gladwell. A good Malcolm Gladwell piece is a kind of magic trick; you read it for the giddy pleasure in learning some delicious anecdotes about our society (like the psychology behind the failure of New Coke, or the secrets to improv comedy) and for the thrill in seeing the writer tie these disparate artifacts into a grand theory. Does the grand theory hold up? Maybe, maybe not. But that's an unfair question, a bit like asking if the magician really sawed his assistant in half.

Next Page: Why we like Tom Hanks, even though we don't know him

• View blog reactions