Enlightened Librarian: Malcolm Gladwell reconsidered

Malcolm Gladwell reconsidered · Feb 28, 12:29 AM

Since accepting the grownup pleasure and duty that is a subscription to The New Yorker, I have become a keen follower of its most intellectually flamboyant journalist, Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is easy to admire. He has become justly famous for lateral thinking about everyday things—ketchup, messy desks, epidemics—using choice nuggets from the great dross of academic research to create startling arguments about the state of the world. We read Gladwell because his arguments are often breathtaking. He joins ideas from far right and left field on his balance beam of simple sentences, and dazzles us with his wry, make-it-look-easy style as he trips across the high wire.

For me, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is one of the more astonishing books of the last five years. Gladwell’s application of research on epidemics to social phenomena such as fashion and crime is beautifully cohesive, slick and persuasive. And since its appearance in 2000, the book has sunk into the culture with remarkable speed: we now have a language for qualifying the spread of fashions and the influence of charismatic people. The book’s success is even more remarkable because of its persistent word-of-mouth popularity. The Tipping Point has become a confirming test case of its own theories of how to set a social epidemic on its feet.

So why is Gladwell’s latest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, such a disappointment? Gladwell displays his customary insight and wit, this time in discussing the remarkable feats of rapid, unconscious decisionmaking of experts in areas such as art appraisal, couples therapy and law enforcement. But where in The Tipping Point he assembled a powerful manifesto that actually gets one thinking about how to put his theories into action, in Blink Gladwell settles on amusing, but ultimately directionless, storytelling. Gladwell aspires to be a popularizer of obscure theories that have the potential to change how people live, but his conclusion in Blink, that individuals can learn to read people and situations in split-second moments if they practice enough, is left entirely unexplored.

Near the end of Blink Gladwell mentions the cognitive grouping and patterning activities that are the heart of how a novice turns into an expert. (A police officer’s training to build the instincts to function in an emergency, for example, involves countless hours of practice and tedious repetition.) But Gladwell simply overlooks an entire literature of cognitive science that explores the techniques of how mental patterning occurs, which might have fulfilled his promise to have us live better lives by improving our mental filtration and concentration.

Then again, Blink might have turned out more instructive, but it may also have ground to a halt in a closer look at the extreme—and, to an outsider, mind-numbing—training at the heart of true expertise. As they stand, the book’s breezy, overlapping anecdotes are fun to read. Unfortunately at the centre of Blink is a lack of forthcomingness that Gladwell cannot entirely obscure with rhetorical dips and doodles.

Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown, 2000.
—. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.

* * *