Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

Go to any Western college campus and you'll find that Asian students have a reputation for being in the library long after everyone else has left. Sometimes people of Asian background get offended when their culture is described this way, because they think that the stereotype is being used as a form of disparagement. But a belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty.

That's what happens when you're tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things—things that you would pick up on any other day.

Perhaps the most common—and the most important—forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling

Aplicamos el sesgo de veracidad —aun cuando esa decisión acarrea riesgos terribles— porque no tenemos elección. La sociedad no puede funcionar de otra manera. Y en esos casos raros en los que la confianza termina en traición, aquellos que son victimizados por el sesgo de veracidad merecen nuestra simpatía, no nuestra censura.

they have to overcome a hurdle, they'll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder.

One side made the discussion about racism—looking down at the case from ten thousand feet. The other side examined each detail of each case with a magnifying glass. What was the police officer like? What did he do, precisely? One side saw a forest, but no trees. The other side saw trees and no forest.

The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers.

But a belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty.

When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time.

These are David's opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes:

The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on." To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you. But

This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious—just as a fashion trend is contagious —that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community.

But maybe the simpler answer is that the more a subject matters to you, the harder it is to find a story you want to tell about it.

Psychiatrists talk about criminals as people with stunted psychological development, people who have had pathological relationships with their parents, who lack adequate role models.

practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.

The participants in all conditions grossly overestimated their surprise expressivity," Schützwohl wrote. Why? They "inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event from…folk-psychological beliefs about emotion-face associations." Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we glean from cultural sources such as sitcoms.

The answer, of course, is neither. No one is failing anyone. It's just that the very thing that makes elite schools such wonderful places for those at the top makes them very difficult places for everyone else.

Throughout the majority of human history, encounters—hostile or otherwise—were rarely between strangers.

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.

What is required of us is restraint and humility. We can put up barriers on bridges to make it more difficult for that momentary impulse to become permanent. We can instruct young people that the kind of reckless drinking that takes place at a fraternity party makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger.

Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds...

This is the price we pay for the many benefits of the locked door. When we ask people to explain their thinking -- particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious -- we need to be careful in how we interpret their answers.

That's what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself. Donald