The Getty Museum pays $10 million for a kouros statue after scientific analysis spanning many months confirms its apparent authenticity.

Leading antiquities experts view the Getty kouros and immediately declare the statue a fake based solely on their first impressions.

The Getty kouros is confirmed a modern forgery, proving the experts' instant judgment more reliable than months of scientific study.

Psychologist John Gottman establishes a love lab where married couples discuss conflicts while hooked up to sensors and filmed.

Gottman identifies contempt expressed by either spouse as the single most dangerous predictor of a failing marriage.

John Bargh's priming experiment shows that words hidden inside a test quietly change how subjects behave in a hallway immediately after.

Warren Harding wins the US presidency largely because voters are unconsciously drawn to his imposing, commanding physical appearance.

Implicit association tests reveal that more than 80% of all test takers, including many Black participants, hold unconscious pro-white bias.

Retired Marine Paul Van Riper is recruited to lead a Red Team against the US military in the Millennium Challenge war games.

Van Riper's Red Team launches a surprise missile attack and sinks 16 Blue Team naval vessels in the war game simulation.

The Pentagon rewrites the Millennium Challenge rules after the defeat, allowing the data-driven Blue Team to claim a manufactured victory.

Plainclothes officers chase Amadou Diallo, misread his wallet as a weapon, and shoot him dead outside his own building.

Trombonist Abbie Conant performs behind an audition screen and is immediately chosen by Munich Philharmonic judges over all other candidates.

Munich Philharmonic leaders discover Conant is a woman and launch a campaign of demotions and pay cuts to force her out.

After Conant wins her lawsuit, orchestras widely adopt blind auditions behind screens and the number of women players increases fivefold.

The book opens with the Getty Museum's costly mistake of purchasing a fake kouros sculpture despite instant expert warnings, illustrating how instinct can outperform painstaking scientific analysis. Psychologist John Gottman's love lab shows how thin slices of behavior—especially contempt—can predict marital fate with remarkable accuracy. The story of Warren Harding's presidency and the unconscious bias revealed by implicit association tests demonstrate how snap judgments can dangerously mislead. Paul Van Riper's stunning victory in military war games then proves that intuition can defeat overwhelming data-driven planning, though the Pentagon's response reveals institutional resistance to that lesson. The tragic killing of Amadou Diallo shows how rapid cognition can catastrophically fail under extreme stress. The book closes with Abbie Conant's blind audition victory, demonstrating how small environmental tweaks can strip away bias and let genuine talent speak instantly.

The headline events that drive Blink's central argument.

In a card game experiment, subjects' palms begin sweating after just 10 cards, long before any conscious recognition of the pattern.

Students shown two-second video clips of teachers rate their effectiveness as accurately as students who attended a full semester of classes.

British women intercepting wartime German Morse transmissions learn to identify individual enemy operators by their distinctive personal sending style.

Samuel Gosling finds that strangers visiting a student's dorm room for just 15 minutes accurately assess three of five key personality traits.

A research study reveals that a doctor's tone of voice alone accurately predicts which physicians will eventually face malpractice lawsuits.

A new group of observers watches 30-second Gottman video clips and achieves over 80% accuracy predicting which marriages will survive.

Tennis coach Vic Braden correctly predicts that a player is about to double-fault on a serve 16 out of 17 times but cannot explain the ability.

Black students asked to indicate their race before a sample GRE exam score roughly half as many correct answers as those who are not.

Car salesman Bob Golomb builds a top sales record by making a firm policy of never prejudging any customer by their outward appearance.

Undercover volunteers discover that Black buyers and women are consistently offered car prices up to $800 higher than those given to white men.

Cook County Hospital applies the Goldman algorithm to patient intake and immediately improves heart attack diagnostic accuracy by 70 percent.

Coca-Cola launches New Coke after it beats Pepsi in blind sip tests, but consumers revolt and Classic Coke is quickly restored.

Marketer Louis Cheskin adds a royal crown and gold foil to Imperial Margarine's packaging and consumers instantly perceive higher quality.

Herman Miller launches the visually unusual Aeron chair despite poor aesthetic test ratings and it becomes the company's best-selling product.

General Robert E. Lee responds to being surrounded at Chancellorsville by attacking Hooker's divided forces from two directions and routing them.

Card game experiments and brief teacher-evaluation studies open the book by showing that the unconscious mind registers patterns far ahead of conscious awareness. Gottman's love lab findings are enriched by wartime code-reading stories and personality research demonstrating how short exposures to behavior can reveal deep truths. Malpractice prediction and car sales bias studies show the real-world consequences of tone, appearance, and unconscious prejudice shaping outcomes. Cook County Hospital's adoption of a simple diagnostic algorithm demonstrates that stripping away excess data can dramatically improve life-or-death decisions. Consumer research failures—including New Coke's spectacular collapse and the Aeron chair's unlikely triumph—illustrate how snap judgments in markets can mislead and surprise in equal measure. General Robert E. Lee's counterintuitive victory at Chancellorsville closes the book by reinforcing the power of instinctive, adaptive decision-making against an opponent overwhelmed by superior information.

The supporting case studies and experiments behind Blink's big ideas.

The Getty Museum's scientific team spends 14 months studying the kouros and concludes it is genuine, missing every significant sign of forgery.

Former Met director Thomas Hoving's first instinctive reaction to the Getty kouros is the word 'fresh'—an unconscious alarm about a supposedly ancient piece.

John Gottman discovers that just three minutes of filmed couple interaction contains enough information to predict long-term marital outcomes with high accuracy.

A speed dating study finds that participants consistently choose romantic partners that contradict the preference types they had explicitly described beforehand.

Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex retain full intelligence but permanently lose the ability to form intuitive snap judgments.

Baseball legend Ted Williams claims he could look the ball onto the bat, a feat physiologists confirm is impossible in the final milliseconds of contact.

A survey of Fortune 500 companies reveals that over half of all CEOs exceed six feet in height, far above the rate in the general population.

Improvisational comedy troupes create full unscripted performances from audience suggestions by following a strict rule of accepting every contribution onstage.

A supermarket jam booth offering 24 varieties generates far fewer actual purchases than an identical booth offering only 6 varieties.

Musician Kenna's innovative rock sound wins over major industry insiders and top executives but repeatedly fails consumer radio market research testing.

Paul Ekman proves that human facial expressions are biologically universal across all cultures, overturning the prevailing assumption that they are learned.

Ekman discovers that deliberately mimicking a specific facial expression causes a person to experience the same physiological state as the genuine emotion.

Eye-tracking cameras monitoring autistic patient Peter as he watches a film reveal he focuses on furniture and objects rather than the actors' faces.

Security expert Gavin de Becker trains bodyguards to remain composed under attack by repeatedly shooting them with painful paint-filled marking capsules.

Thomas Hoving trains himself to receive unbiased first impressions by having assistants suddenly reveal artworks from under a cloth or out of a closet.

The Getty Museum's extended scientific study sets up the book's central irony—that rigorous analysis can blind investigators to what a trained eye sees instantly, as illustrated by Thomas Hoving's single alarming word. Discoveries about the prefrontal cortex and Ted Williams's physiologically impossible self-description show that fast thinking operates at a level completely inaccessible to conscious reflection. Studies on speed dating contradictions, CEO heights, and student race prompts reveal how invisible unconscious forces quietly distort choices and outcomes. Paul Ekman's facial expression research and the disturbing case of autistic patient Peter provide the scientific framework for understanding both the power and fragility of human mind-reading. The story of Amadou Diallo is examined through stress physiology to explain how extreme arousal can render anyone effectively mind-blind, turning protective instincts into catastrophic errors. Finally, examples of jam choice paralysis, Kenna's market research failure, and a security expert's paintball training all demonstrate that fast thinking is not fixed—it can be deliberately refined, protected, and improved.

The key discoveries and turning points that explain why intuition succeeds and fails.