Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is on multiple bestseller lists. With the notable exception of The New Republic, critics have received it well. Here is a book that purports to explore a powerful way of thinking that will help improve the world, presented by an author with a long list of articles on science, technology, and society. Gladwell is not an antiscience polemicist, an antirationalist religious fundamentalist, or a New Age mystic. Nonetheless, Gladwell promotes a program of not thinking that is hostile to the primary rules of rational discourse in a book that is fraught with logical failings, misuses of evidence, and anecdotal liberties.

It is worth identifying the flaws of the opening anecdote in Blink, as it provides a fairly comprehensive overview of the problems that recur throughout the book. Gladwell relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. The centerpiece of each chapter is a short story or series of stories that are supposed to illustrate some aspect of his theory of snap judgments. His opening chapter, for instance, starts with the story of a Greek statue the J. Paul Getty Museum in California had agreed to buy. Just prior to handing over the money, two art experts saw the statue and immediately knew it was a fake. They didn't know how they knew; they just "knew" (5). Of course, as the tale unfolds we discover that the two critics were right, that a scientist who had tested a sample of the statue was wrong, and that "In the first two seconds of looking--in a single glance--they [the critics] were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months" (8). As in the tales presented in other chapters, intuitive feeling triumphs over careful study.

Or did it? The difficulties with Gladwell's anecdote are manifold. First, one case does not an argument make. The long history of museums and collectors buying forgeries demonstrates quite forcefully that critics are often wrong in their judgments, snap or otherwise. The falsification of numerous Ming period vases and the controversy surrounding the paintings of Vermeer should give one pause before hastily siding with the intuition of art critics.

Second, and particularly disturbing, is the anecdote's attack on scientific analysis. Gladwell gives us another in a long line of stories wherein human intuition, represented by the art critics, triumphs over plodding science, in the guise of geologist Stanley Margolis. Predictably, the researcher who does a comprehensive study of the statue is presented as a plodding dupe. Margolis "spent two days examining the surface of the statue with a high-resolution stereomicroscope ... removed a core sample measuring one centimeter in diameter and two centimeters in length ... analyzed it using an electron microscope, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray fluorescence"(4). His conclusion, "the statue was old ... [not] some contemporary fake" (4). Poor Margolis spent days studying this statue with all kinds of high-tech equipment and didn't learn as much as two art critics in seconds. Conclusion: careful study fails where snap judgment succeeds.

But was the science wrong? The statue turns out not to be old, as the geologist Margolis had concluded, but of recent origin. So Margolis's inference of age was incorrect. But were his measurements? Was his sample contaminated? Did he make an error in analyzing his sample? We are never told exactly what went wrong with Margolis's analysis, which makes it impossible to judge the nature of his error. That scientists make errors is hardly a novel concept. That a particular researcher should be held up for either scorn or pity--it is hard to tell which Gladwell wishes us to feel--based on a single false conclusion without any mention of his methodology or results is inexcusable in a book purportedly exploring the nature of thinking. Repeatedly in Blink, single failures of analysis are used as proof of a general shortfall in an entire method of evaluation. The cumulative message is quite clear: Careful scientific analysis does not work very well.

The third difficulty with Gladwell's opening anecdote is that it does not support his thesis. The snap moment of intuition the two art critics experienced does not solve the problem of how to determine whether or not a piece of art is a fake. Gladwell suggests we should trust the critics, not the scientists. Okay, but which critics? If there is critical difference of opinion about a piece of art, whom do we trust? Are we to make a snap decision about which art critics' snap decisions are to be trusted? This would put museums in the untenable, not to mention irrational, position of defending multimillion-dollar purchases solely on the basis of personal affinity with particular critics. Such mistakes have been made in past and will likely be made in the future, but that does not make them rational. In this case, the Getty trustees did what any responsible party would do; they consulted experts in a number of fields relating to the subject with which they were concerned. When presented with conflicting evidence, the Getty trustees pursued further research. Not a blink, but months and months of careful study by dozens of experts. Throughout the book, Gladwell presents anecdotes that do not, in the end, provide any concrete insight into how to usefully apply "blink think" strategies to real-world problems.

The greatest difficulty with Gladwell's first anecdote highlights another broad failing in his book: he misrepresents his evidence. The Getty anecdote is not simply a poor example of his point; it is misleadingly presented. At the end of the first chapter he asks why the Getty's own experts were misled about the statue after months of study. This is the first we have heard of the Getty experts and their months of study. In the initial telling of the anecdote we have the scientist testing the statue, then the arrival of the outside art critics. Why not mention that the Getty's critics had studied the statue even before Margolis was called in to run his tests? One suspects that if Gladwell mentions that other critics had seen the statue and responded intuitively that the statue was genuine, then the problem of trusting intuitive judgments is highlighted rather than the heartwarming, but inaccurate, tale of the triumph of human intuition over cold science. Repeatedly, Gladwell provides a single, and singularly convenient, interpretation of information that could be understood in many different ways. The charge of misrepresenting evidence is sufficiently serious to warrant a second example. Consider the case of "Kenna's Dilemma." Gladwell presents the story of Kenna, a talented young musician loved by musicians, managers, and industry insiders but who cannot get his big break because he scores poorly in focus group studies carried out by radio stations and music distributors. Gladwell tells us that "the world of radio is not as savvy" (187) as others who have known when to push an exciting new product despite initially cool public response. If radio stations knew what they were about, if they used the kind of blink think strategies Gladwell outlines, then they would give airtime to an artist like Kenna. The managers, musicians, and talent scouts knew immediately he was good, and now the radio stations and public are missing out. This thesis might be true.

The problem is that Gladwell presents the reader with a false dilemma by excluding all the other possibilities. Either Kenna is promoted, or radio stations are wrongheaded. Gladwell does not allow that Kenna might be bad. The artists, managers, and talent scouts might be wrong about him and the radio stations might be right. Or, Kenna might be a great musician who will receive wide critical, though limited popular, success. Further, the people who love Kenna are interested primarily in music while the radio stations are interested primarily in money. This divergence of interests is in and of itself enough to explain a difference in response to the same artist. Unfortunately, each of these very real possibilities fails to support Gladwell's thesis and are never considered.

Consistently, Gladwell presents neat stories as if they provided clear evidence for his point when, as in the case of Kenna's Dilemma and the Getty statue, they really suggest any number of possibilities. Gladwell's steadfast refusal to consider alternative interpretations of his evidence is misleading. Poor logic, narrowly interpreted evidence, and a failure to consider any complicating factors mar the entire book.

By the measure of books by New Age mystics or anti-science religious fundamentalists, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is not exceptionally irrational. However, due to its popularity and critical acclaim, Blink stands as potentially far more damaging to rational discourse. Replete with errors both logical and factual, it advances an argument hostile to the traditions of reasoned thought: that one can think without thinking. Primarily, Gladwell's Blink demonstrates that the dangers of not thinking are as prevalent as ever.