What problems of society are exposed? How does the author respond to the social issue? How are social distinctions identified?

Malcolm Gladwell explores human decision making, especially the choices we make in the "blink" of an eye. He uses a social psychology approach, drawing on several sciences to analyze cognitive capabilities as influenced by social conditioning and immediate context.
While Gladwell is interested how hunan beings come to know—to be certain about—what we know, he is more concerned with the quick decision based on our understanding than with how we accumulate knowledge.
The author considers a wide array of problems, starting with the obscure and elite: identifying an ancient Greek statue as genuine or fake. He considers the personal in one's choice of romantic partner or spouse: how can one know a marriage will last? Broader social issues considered include attitudes toward presidential candidates.
He provides an analysis of human mental pattern making, or "thin slicing," based on small amounts of information. This ability, so crucial to our species survival, allows us to process complex information very quickly. He discusses how useful it has been in military situations, such as finding patterns in enemy radio broadcasts.
The downsides of split second judgments are numerous and sometimes fatal. Patterned negative associations of gender, ethnicity, and race unfortunately generate profiling. At worst, pattern projection misinterprets cues; a police officer expecting to see a gun might see one, except that the object was a cellphone, as occurred in the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York. Less drastically, it can affect whether a person can rent an apartment, pay a lower price for a car, or buy a 10 million dollar "ancient" statue.

In his popular book Blink, journalist Malcolm Gladwell focuses on the issue of how we make judgments based on intuition. He argues that in the first few seconds of meeting a person or experiencing something we use "thin slices" of information to create general opinions or value judgments. He recounts some anecdotes which argue that our intuitive judgments can be very misleading, as when we stereotype people by race or social class but that we can train our intuitions to be more effective. He argues that we often make social distinctions based on superficial information such as looks, and mistake a certain type of appearance for a deeper reality. A striking example of this is Warren Harding, an American president Gladwell claims was elected to a degree on his good looks and proved highly incompetent. 
The major social problem Gladwell engages in this work is that of stereotyping. He argues that our habits of making quick judgments based on thin slices of information lead to reinforcing racial stereotyping. He argues that we need to deliberately train our intuitive mechanisms so as to overcome this instinct to assess people based on their race or external appearance. He gives an example of a car dealer who was unusually successful because, unlike other salesmen at his company, he treated people as individuals rather than stereotyping on the basis of race and gender.