Last year I read several books by the journalist Malcolm Gladwell. Here is a short review of the books.
The Tipping point: This is probably the book by Gladwell that I like the most. Gladwell puts forward an interesting hypothesis that social behaviour spreads in the same way as biological viruses. According to him, a novel social behaviour usually originates in a small group, then spreads to other groups, often when the group grows to more than 150 people. When a group reaches 150 person limit, it tends to split into other groups, who will bring the social behaviour to other groups. This can lead to almost exponential growth of a social behaviour. Gladwell identifies three principles for social behaviour to spread: First, the social behaviour needs to be contagious or memorable; secondly, the social behaviour is being spread by just a few people: Salesmen (people who promote the behaviour), Mavens (Experts, knowledgeable people who come up with the ideas) and Connectors (people who have many social relations allowing the behaviour to spread quickly). Thirdly, the social context has a need for the behavior. Blink: In this book, Gladwell investigates the concept of intuition or snap judgment; the ability to make good decisions or judgments without thinking. Gladwell's main point of the book is that so called "thin slicing" is the explanation of snap judgments. Thin slicing is the ability to extract a pattern from a limited amount of information. Gladwell's idea is that too much information often can confuse us instead of making us wiser (this idea is related to what another author, Taleb, is putting forward in his book The Black Swan) One must be aware of, however, that even though thin slicing can be effective because it saves time during decision making, it can also lead to stereotyping. Outliers. The story of success: In this book, Gladwell discusses the strong influence of social and cultural context on success. For instance, he demonstrates how Canadian ice hockey players usually are born the first few months of a calendar year. The reason for this is because the earlier a person is born in the year, the more mature he will be during the NHL draft and thus have an advantage over the less mature (that are born later in the year). Gladwell also shows how many succesful people such as Oppenheimer and Bill Gates were successful because their opportunities. In addition, he argues that the many plane crashes of Korean air in the 1990s were due to Korean culture which emphasizes acceptance of authority and indirect communication. The pilot made the error because the co-pilot did not dare to question his authority alternatively could not communicate that the pilot was making an error with enough clarity. What the dog saw: This book is a compilation of articles that Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker. It covers a lot of interesting topics, such as several fairly unknown geniuses, the influence of social factors on phenomena such as intelligence and the menstruation cycle, late bloomers (people who had little talent initially but developed ability through hard work and time), and a criticism of criminal profiling. Malcolm Gladwell has also given an interesting tedtalk: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce In this talk, he discusses psychophysics, which is the psychological discipline that investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the psychological perceptions and sensations of the physical stimuli. This research has applications in areas such as food science. When food manufacturers want to create taste sensations that are most appealing to consumers, they can use psychophysics research. Gladwell's point of the speech, however, is that there is no ideal taste of a product, because taste preference is very individual and is not distributed in a bell curve. This is the reason why there are so many varieties of products, because people prefer different types of food and tastes. Gladwell's tedtalk is a good illustration of the qualitative approach to behavior. Qualitative researchers, believe, unlike quantitative researchers, that there is no "average" behavior for a particular situation but a variety of behaviors. Thus, a qualitative approach to psychological research is to describe rather than generalize. In the speech, Gladwell also makes the point that experimental research is superior to qualitative research when it comes to taste preference, because people do not always consciously know what they desire.
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AuthorThis is my class blog for IB Psychology. Here I will publish reflections on psychology, reviews of psychology books, recommended links, lecture notes, and information on psychology topics that are not covered by the syllabus. You are free to add comments or ask me questions. Archives
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