Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking / Malcolm Gladwell / 286 p.

I've heard several people talk about this book since its publication five years ago, but I just now got around to picking it up myself.  I have a certain prejudice against the idea that we make our best decisions when we do not analyze or make a point of bringing additional information to the question.  Knowing about the recent psychological experiments that show how our instantaneous reactions to photos of people of various ages and races are usually painfully ageist and anti-nonwhite makes me extremely suspicious about any argument extolling the virtue of such instant reactions as the best means of decision making.

For the first chapter or so, this is precisely the idea that the book seems to advance.  However, before very long, Gladwell introduces complications to the idea.  Alongside the many examples of elegantly correct intuition, he shows counterexamples of intuition clouded or distorted by exactly the kind of prejudices I was thinking of; at one point, he even cites the very studies I had read, and in the end, he has some interesting ideas about reducing the impact of prejudice on decision making. He also comes to make a key distinction between the quick judgment of experts and that of non-experts, which addresses another objection of mine.

As with Gladwell's other books, there are parts of the book where the connections among the examples seem stretched, but overall, the book is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.