Malcolm Gladwell: Learning to Rethink

 

Malcolm Gladwell (born September 3, 1963 in Fareham, England) is a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He grew up in Ontario, Canada, in a Mennonite community and was a star mile runner. Although Gladwell has become a successful author, the adjective “Gladwellian” has been used to describe the unconventional writing style he uses.

His early career was uncommon in its challenges and ups and downs. Gladwell graduated from the University of Ontario’s Trinity College in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in history but he did not have acceptable grades for graduate school. He described himself as “slightly lost” as he pursued a career in advertising that proved unsuccessful, finally moving to Indiana for a position at The American Spectator, a conservative monthly magazine covering news and politics.  He was let go from his position in 1985, for, he says, his tendency to oversleep. His work started to appear in the Washington Post in 1987, where he covered the business and science sections. When he joined The New Yorker in 1996, Gladwell had approximately 10 years, or 10,000 hours, of experience as a journalist, the number of hours he discussed as necessary to master one’s field in his book Outliers. His 10,000 hour-rule became a widely known theory around 2008 when Outliers was published. Gladwell is an outlier himself; he, as described by Robert Colvile, “spen[t] hours getting really good at writing and reporting, just as Mozart… Bill Gates [etc] spent 10,000 hours… then, he had to be lucky…”. Gladwell’s books aim to change the way people think, and they have influenced me to a certain extent: I have learned that talent is not everything, sheer effort really does pay off, some problems are better solved with a different approach, that an instinctive feeling can be very useful, and other interesting life-changing quirks of society.

A broken window in a city, in the grand scheme of things, seems like a very minor problem. Gladwell, however, presents the Broken Windows Theory in The Tipping Point, which argues that a small crime, such as breaking a window, that remains unchecked, promotes more crime, in this case more broken windows. The theory was first put into major use in the 1980s in the NYC subway system, starting with fare-beaters. Preventing minor crimes discouraged major crimes and kept criminals out of the subway system, thus reducing the crime rate. This change in policing created a transformation in the subway system; many people detained for fare beating were found to be carrying weapons, to have criminal records, or to have a warrant for their arrest. When Rudolph Giuliani became the mayor of NYC, he recognized the drastic improvement in the subway system and applied the theory to the city, which lowered crime rates to a quarter of the levels they had been at when Giuliani first took office.

I thought about this as I witnessed the fitness center at my school falling into a state of disrepair. For some strange reason, our P.E. department decided that the fitness unit should take place in the fitness center. Due to its lack of use, although the windows are still intact, the equipment is dated and worn, missing pins, and, in some cases, broken. Misuse is likely the most prominent of reasons for the condition of equipment, and if the Broken Windows Theory is applied, is the basis of additional misuse. Patching the pads on the fitness equipment and supervising students to ensure proper usage of the equipment would be the best course of action to counteract the deterioration of the fitness center. As the general environment in the fitness center improves, the students will, hopefully, be more careful with the equipment. In other schools with few resources, such as the poorly funded schools in villages in the Third World, students are more careful with the limited resources, showing an inverse relationship between broken windows in certain needy communities.

The Tipping Point, Gladwell’s first book, was published in 2000, named for his 1996 article “The Tipping Point” for the New Yorker. The Tipping Point expands from that ’96 article into epidemics, their causes, and why some trends fail to become viral. Gladwell examines three types of people in society: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. Mavens are the know-it-alls, the information gatherers, those with esoteric knowledge who are eager to share it for the benefit of everyone. Salesmen, as their name implies, are charismatic and persuasive, capable of persuading people to hop on the latest bandwagon, thus allowing the latest trend to take off. After reading about the three types of people, Connectors appear to be the most functional of the three. Connectors are the people in society who have many acquaintances, thereby possessing a large circle of friends spanning many different occupations and niches. Certainly, a Connector cannot have a close relationship with everyone, by virtue of the sheer number of people, but, counter-intuitively, weak ties are much better than close friends (or strong ties) are, at enabling the Connector to meet new people, creating new opportunities. For Gladwell, the strength of a weak tie is its ability to connect individuals who one would otherwise be unlikely to meet. Average groups of friends share similar interests; therefore the scope of finding new acquaintances is limited, but two weak ties and a Connector can facilitate a connection over a great distance, whether in space or within different, seldomly overlapping communities. The concept of Connectors provides impetus to be friendly; the more friends an individual has, especially acquaintances, the more the individual’s possibilities for opportunities expand. With the invention of the Internet, and subsequently MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, the job of a Connector has been simplified greatly through the much more effortless means of a mass e-mail or a tweet. Paul Revere was an 18th century Connector and his best means of communication was a midnight ride through the countryside. I could be a modern-day Connector who has over a thousand friends on Facebook and could inform every one of them about the latest university application requirements with a quick post on my wall. The spread of information has unquestionably become readily available, evident by the quantity and rate at which videos and images go viral on the Internet. This overload of information, however, has its flaws as discussed by Gladwell in his book What the Dog Saw, a collection of essays from The New Yorker. He deciphers a mammography and sifts through the financial reports of large corporations, demonstrating how an abundance of information impedes efficient use of the information.

What is the difference between a puzzle and a mystery? According to Gladwell, the difference is subtle: a puzzle requires a key piece of unknown information, while a mystery requires the interpretation of the known. In What the Dog Saw, Gladwell examines the differences in the problem-solving methods of mysteries and puzzles through real world applications. As a student, I apply the problem-solving method of mystery very often when taking tests or doing homework, such as solving for X, programming, and the intricacies of photography. I receive the information necessary to answer the question and manipulate it to solve the problem. When I check answers or ask a teacher for help I treat problems like a puzzle – I compare my answer with the correct answer, the key piece of information, and the teacher indicates the next step to take.  Gladwell discusses the approach that British and US intelligence agencies took to combat the German’s “devastating ‘super weapon'” that was being developed. The intelligence agencies knew neither what the weapon was nor when it would be deployable, and therefore they treated the problem like a puzzle; only a few pieces of information were required to prepare to counteract the weapon. Trying to solve it like a puzzle, they sent spies, who confirmed the construction of a weapons facility; they took aerial photographs, which showed a strange concrete structure pointed towards England… but whether or not the weapon actually existed remained unconfirmed. Both countries, however, had a small group of analysts that listened to German and Japanese propaganda broadcast over radio, scrutinizing what was said to determine the possibility of certain actions that could be taken. These analysts very accurately predicated the progress of the development based solely on the propaganda. The amount of information was sufficient, but their puzzle was not solved. Fortunately, the V-1 rocket, which the mysterious weapon turned out to be, was only used for a few months until the Allied forces invaded France and gained control of all V-1 launch sites.

What the Dog Saw is split into three parts: Obsessives, Pioneers, and other varieties of Minor Genius; Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses; and Personality, Character, and Intelligence. The second part interested me the most. The examination of how people approach problems and the discussion on the amount of importance society places on images leads to enlightening insights on the importance of interpreting information, as discussed above.

Job interviews are flawed, Gladwell argues in What the Dog Saw, because people make assumptions about the way others will act in all situations. Studies have shown that behavior varies according to setting; honesty, for example, is not a constant trait – students were shown to have different affinities for cheating when taking tests at school or at home. Gladwell describes Nolan Myers, an intelligent, successful, Harvard graduate, who had recently spent a lot of time at job interviews. Gladwell states that if he “were an employer looking for bright young college graduates, [he would] hire him in a heartbeat”. However, he has never seen Myers in other settings, nor has he spoken to any of his relatives or professors, and he cannot explain why he likes Myers, but, Gladwell, along with Hadi Partovi, an executive at Tellme, and Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, decided that they approved of Myers in the short time they each spent with him. During Gladwell’s interview with Myers, he asks Myers, “are there things that you think you aren’t good at, which make you worry?” Myers replies with:

“Are there things that I’m not good at, or things that I can’t learn? I think that’s the real question. There are a lot of things I don’t know anything about, but I feel comfortable that given the right environment and the right encouragement I can do well.”

The reply can come off as arrogant or tough and confident, depending solely on one’s expectations. Job interviews, therefore, can be biased, based solely on the interviewer’s initial instinctive feeling. Gladwell describes a few different studies, one of which examined the nonverbal cues of teaching. Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal from Harvard University undertook the study using video clips from a teacher-training program. The observers were shown ten second soundless clips of the teachers and instructed to rate the teachers based on a fifteen-item checklist. The ratings remained the same even when the video clips were shortened to two seconds in length; and when Ambady compared the evaluations to those made by students after a semester of classes, the correlations were high. First impressions can severely bias the general impression the interviewer gets. As a solution, Gladwell presents a different method of interviewing. Justin Menkes, a human-resources consultant, says that the problem with interview questions “is that it’s much too obvious what the interviewee is supposed to say”. Menkes’ suggestion is to rephrase the questions: “At your weekly team meetings, your boss unexpectedly begins aggressively critiquing your performance on a current project. What do you do?” The way the interviewee answers this question enlightens the interviewer on what the interviewee believes the workplace demands. Is it tolerance or confrontation? Much like many of the other ideas Gladwell presents, the problems in job interviews are the less examined problems in society, some of which seem to have relatively simple solutions. The first impression is one of the most important factors when meeting new people, and until job interview questions are modified, Myers suggests that the best way to present oneself to potential employers is to simply “speak clearly and smile”.

       The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath, Gladwell’s five books, are a collection of ideas and theories presented in a riveting fashion. They are designed to provoke thought.