'Blink' Author to Speak at University of Arkansas

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Malcolm Gladwell

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Malcolm Gladwell, best selling author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, will give a lecture based on his book at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 29, at the Fayetteville Town Center. Gladwell will speak as part of the University of Arkansas Distinguished Lecture Series. There will be a question and answer period after his lecture.

The event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required. The Town Center has a seating capacity of about 1,400 people.

Gladwell will also take part in a question and answer session with students from 4-5:15 p.m. Tuesday, April 29, in the Reynolds Center Auditorium. Anyone with a student I.D. is welcome to attend.

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine who has placed two books on top of the New York Times bestseller’s list. The most recent, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), is about instinctive reasoning, the process the mind uses to make snap decisions and arrive at first impressions.

Gladwell opens the book with an impressive example: three art experts each give a statue one brief look and “know” it’s a fake, contradicting months of highly technical investigation; the three can’t explain how they know, but it turns out they are right.

The book also offers a much darker example: four plainclothes New York City policemen instantly “know” that a man standing in a doorway is an armed criminal; they chase, shoot and kill the terrified and unarmed Amadou Diallo.

Between these two extremes Gladwell explores recent psychological research into how the mind performs instant and unconscious reasoning, how this ability is developed and how it can go wrong. Along the way he offers informative and entertaining stories about car salesmen, speed-dating, the road to success in the music business, military war games and commodity trading, the Iraq War and the battle of Chancellorsville, the unexpected danger of high speed chases, the best way to audition classical musicians and many more topics. He cites studies showing how much information the mind can take in and process unconsciously and he describes situations in which too much information leads to faulty decisions.

In the end Gladwell builds a compelling case for the advantages of “blink” reasoning, while also recognizing its limitations. He has said he got the idea for the book after letting his hair grow and discovering that people’s impressions of him had changed drastically: among other things he started getting stopped more often by the police.

Gladwell’s lecture will build on the thesis of his book, including new information and examples he’s learned since its publication.

Gladwell’s previous bestseller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, (2000), presented the idea of “social epidemics.” He studied ways that ideas, behavior, messages and even products can cause sudden and dramatic changes in much the same way as a medical epidemic. The book itself demonstrated its own thesis, as “tipping point” entered the popular vocabulary, changing approaches to business and social issues, among other things.

Gladwell is a native of rural Ontario, Canada, but now lives in New York City.

The Distinguished Lecture Series is supported by student activity fees, the Associated Student Government and the University of Arkansas. Past lecturers have included Anderson Cooper, Apolo Ohno, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Al Franken and Ben Stein, Robert Redford, Benazir Bhutto, Ehud Barak and James Earl Jones.