Snap judgments are sneered at, but should we put more trust in them? Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for 'thin slicing' in Blink

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

Penguin £16.99, pp277

Love at first sight is one of our most endearing beliefs, but it is a romantic delusion. What's happening is not an unmediated explosion of energy and data whizzing down the neural tracks to explode in the sleepy brain centres, but a rapid and automatic shuffling of accumulated experience. The intellect is engaged long before we realise it, rather like a pre-selector gearbox on a Routemaster bus. When we look at something, our brain is testing the evidence against a database of preferences long before we can say 'neurone'.

This unsolicited automatic faculty was called the 'adaptive unconscious' by psychologist Timothy D Wilson. Malcolm Gladwell's argument in Blink is that it can be trained. If so, the implications for business, let alone love, are vast. Car manufacturers, the cosmetics industries, the ragtrade, all depend on favourable spontaneous responses to support new products. The results of consumer clinics, focus groups, blind tastings and fashion shows are all governed by rapid reactions from panellists and critics.

There are moments in Blink when Gladwell seems surprised by this. In the introduction, he tells the story of the Getty Museum buying a Greek kouros which turned out to be what the catalogue now hedges as 'about 530BC, or modern forgery'.

There was perplexity about the purchase and outside experts were consulted. The Met's distinguished director emeritus was not alone in finding the statue imponderably 'fresh'. Others, too, had had reservations, but that is exactly what connoisseurship is all about: instructed taste that powers firm critical judgments. Art historians call it 'having a good eye'. The odd thing is that Getty bought the kouros anyway.

Blink tells more stories about judging from first impressions. Students who were shown silent videos of lecturers and asked to assess teaching ability on appearances alone produced results which closely matched judgments based on broader criteria. A Gladwell coinage is 'the Warren Harding Error', a President elected because of his comely appearance who turned out to be a complete turkey.

Maybe there are local lessons here? Gladwell seems to be astonished that a psychologist can predict the success of a marriage from videos showing a woman going through the full non-verbal vocabulary of disapproval when confronted with her mate. Awesome? Not really.

Gladwell is one of a new generation of American authors who toggle between lit-crit, cultural commentary, self-help, marketing, how to, brain function, business studies and futurology. He is a writer on the New Yorker where he contributes a continuous stream of fascinating school of Nicholson Baker stories, including a recent masterpiece about why tomato ketchup tastes so good.

Gladwell's reputation was made five years ago with a book called The Tipping Point, about how brand whispering can alter the reputation of products. Gladwell called this 'idea epidemics', a coinage that stuck. It was a neat idea and a deserved success; the title, too, has now passed into the language of business. Gladwell has a good eye for the premium-priced, branded concept. He is, as he might put it, brilliant at pattern recognition. The money shot in Blink is 'thin slicing', Gladwell's term for that ability to make a rapid judgment on a small amount of data.

Blink has many of the same attributes as its predecessor (it is the follow-up book the publisher must have been nagging for), but, being a less novel idea, its weaknesses are more visible. There are, for instance, too many words. Gladwell gets very good press in America for being a fine stylist, but here his prose grates. He uses that interrogative, ruminative-rhetorical style that they probably teach in American journalism school. You have a dateline, you name names. You start from a little detail and build to a titanic claim. A sense of authority is achieved, spurious because partly fictionalised. You ask a question. Then explain the question. You answer the question. You repeat the names. Then you tell the reader what the answer was. Possibly repeating the original question for good measure.

Thus: 'It was 07.31 and minus 3 on Labor Day 1983 when Elmer Nerd parked his metallic cherry Popsicle Nissan Maxima XL in the lot of the Acme Surgical Supplies Depot on Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway. Nerd immediately realised his tyres were frozen to the hardstand. "Gee, my tyres are frozen to the hardstand," he said. In that instant, Nerd had an insight that was to change the course of US industrial history.' I have just made that up, but you get the idea.

But the big flaw in Blink is that there is no developed argument, only a succession of more-or-less, often less, interesting anecdotes. The reader is left uncertain whether rapid judgments should necessarily assume priority over measured ones. His examples show that 'intuition' is often over-ruled, as with the Getty Greek statue. This was a mistake. But if it is not, consequences can be equally unfortunate. In blind tastings, Coca-Cola took consumers' first impressions too seriously and disastrously changed the recipe.

And there is evidence against Gladwell: the whole Western intellectual and scientific tradition, for instance. Spontaneous reactions are not always the best ones. Love at first sight? They do say marry in haste, repent at leisure. President Bush would be an example of someone relying more on intuition than analysis. One wishes he would engage faculties higher than the hunch or the gut more often. In Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis has shown how, in modern baseball, the folksy wisdom of the coach is easily bested by computer-aided scrutiny.

Still, if Gladwell's thesis is right, you'll buy the book. Which will prove his point.