Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas,.....

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a unified trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.

According to research done by Mitchell Chang of the University of California, the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things being equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university's average SAT score.4 The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science.

A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.

they would have worried for my soul. Pronin calls this phenomenon the "illusion of asymmetric insight." She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

This is called the "principle of legitimacy," and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.

We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.

We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.

under time pressure, they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused. they stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system, a stereotype.

Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people… and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition, narcissists tend to "self-nominate"; consequently, when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.

The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.

The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the "Big Fish–Little Pond Effect." The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.

Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major," they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don't.

In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more—which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less.

People at the top are self-conscious about what they say (and rightfully so) because they have position and privilege to protect — and self-consciousness is the enemy of "interestingness.

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

It's challenging, it's not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.

forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish.

We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that—sometimes—we're better off that way. 1.

There's no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.

People are in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotions overrides irritability.