Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

The irony, thought, is that that very desire for confidence is precisely what ends up undermining the accuracy of their decision

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

Levine's theories are laid out in his book, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2019). If you want to understand how deception works, there is no better

All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.

Success is the result of what sociologists like to call accumulative advantage.

So that then begins a sort of rethinking of my idea of criminology," Weisburd said. "Like most other people, my studies were about people. I said, maybe we ought to be more concerned with places.

But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert.

Because the people and countries who are wealthy enough to pay for things like really small classes have a hard time understanding that the things their wealth can buy might not always make them better off.

MacCurdy argued that when a bomb falls, it divides the affected population into three groups. The first group is the people killed. They are the ones for whom the experience of the bombing is—obviously—the most devastating. But as MacCurdy pointed out (perhaps a bit callously), "the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter.

Thin-slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns ins situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

four different operators in that unit, working on a shift system, each with his own characteristics," says Nigel West, a British military historian. "And invariably, quite apart from the text, there would be the preambles, and the illicit exchanges. How are you today? How's the girlfriend? What's the weather

though? Not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly

Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

But MacCurdy's idea about near and remote misses suggests something quite different—that courage is in some sense acquired.

practical intelligence." To Sternberg, 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." It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it.

It seems the father of the unconscious agreed: 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 systems we set up to determine who gets ahead aren't particularly efficient.

all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us — over-the-counter-ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities

Heath wrote up his findings in a now-famous article for the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol.

Those born in the last quarter of the year might as well give up on hockey too.

talked to every person aged twenty-one