Blink: the power of thinking without thinking Malcolm Gladwell Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 277pp, £16.99 ISBN 0713997273

This wonderful book should be compulsory reading for selection committees, or those on job interview panels, or anyone buying a painting or seeking a new lover. It explains why the Tories are struggling to retain their female candidates, and how I won last year's Celebrity Mastermind.

In 1983, the Getty Museum in California was approached by an art dealer with a stone kouros from the sixth century BC. The dealer wanted $10m for the sculpture and had a sheaf of documents detailing its provenance. It was a stunning find. Scientific tests showed that it was made of the right kind of marble with the right degree of ageing. But when other experts took one look, they immediately said it was a fake.

How could they tell? What warns a firefighter that he must get his team out of a burning building seconds before it collapses? How can a marriage-guidance analyst predict from short video clips which couples will stay together? How can the psychologist guess correctly from a photograph which suspects are lying and which are telling the truth?

It is not mind-reading or a sixth sense, though it can seem that way. Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer on the New Yorker who describes himself as an "intellectual adventurer", argues that our primeval instincts are guiding us, and that we can often trust our hunches. We are "thin-slicing" - that is to say, our unconscious mind is finding patterns in situations and behaviour based on slivers of information. That is why speed dating works, though most participants would be hard-pressed to explain their choices. In fact, the moment anyone tries to rationalise the process, the "feeling" of how they reacted is destroyed. Different parts of the brain are in play; using the verbal, highly developed part will wipe out the underlying primitive response. That is also why sportsmen and women often cannot explain exactly what they do to excel or, if they try, why computer simulation shows that they may be completely mistaken.

Sometimes this instinct should be suppressed. Left to their own devices, British voters would overwhelmingly select heterosexual white men as their MPs. It is a straightforward prejudice mirrored by selection committees, in which unconscious attitudes are at variance with clearly stated, conscious values. But what about the extraordinary success in business of tall men? More than half the chief executives of the Fortune 500 companies are 6ft tall or over. Companies can plausibly claim that the dearth of minorities and women at the top is because earlier discrimination left too few good candidates. "But," writes Gladwell drily, "this is not true of short people." He calls it the "Warren Harding error", after the handsome man who became America's most useless president. It helps explain why Margaret Thatcher had so many good- looking dimwits in her cabinet.

Dear reader, you are above all this. You're colour-blind and gender-neutral, yes? Gladwell suggests taking the tests at www.implicit.harvard.edu. Even when participants are aware of their own nature, the results still shock them. That is because we cannot avoid powerful pre-existing impressions: a female name is associated with "home", a black face with guns or drugs. This applies even to experts, as New York's Metropolitan Opera discovered when screens were introduced for musical auditions. The results were astonishing; the best players hired were women, even for instruments long regarded as "obviously" beyond female capacity.

The grimmest aspect of this superb book is its examination of what goes wrong when instincts predominate, as in a police chase of suspects or a shooting. A black man standing on a Bronx sidewalk after midnight is not necessarily a criminal. It did not occur to four rookie officers of the New York City Police Department in February 1999 that Amadou Diallo, faced with aggressive-looking thugs in plain clothes, thought they were muggers and was reaching in his pocket not for a gun, but for his wallet. Seven seconds and 41 bullets later, he was dead. At the extremes of human terror, when the pulse rate soars above 145bpm, our response is either to fight or to run away. Training can reduce the chances of such terrible mistakes. The new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, should take note.

As for Celebrity Mastermind: in a Dutch experiment, students were split into two groups. One set was asked to write down what it would mean to be a professor; the second what "soccer hooligan" meant. Then they were given Trivial Pursuit questions. The "professor" group outscored the "hooligan" group by 55 per cent to 42 per cent. Why? Because the first lot were subconsciously thinking "smart", the second "stupid". Ask black students to identify their race on a pre-test questionnaire, and their score halves. That tells you loads, doesn't it? And when I sat in the black leather chair, the great scientist Marie Curie was my special subject. I was thinking "clever woman" and, just briefly, that is what I became. So now you know.

The second volume of Edwina Currie's Diaries is published by Little, Brown in April

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