Outliers Book Report

Throughout history stereotyping has been used to generalize a race class. Although when a race is being stereotyped it can be done in a positive way, in many cases it has also been done in order to keep a minority group inferior. In the article, “Thin Ice” by Claude M. Steele, Steele shows how African Americans who are stereotyped or have the mental image of being stereotyped negatively can affect their success in their academic success. In the other hand, in Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s “The Asian American Achievement Paradox” demonstrates when a stereotype is positive it can feed one’s ego and deliver better outcomes in a people’s academic achievements. Even though a large population of people can be stereotyped in a certain way through false concepts, it can affect the mindset of a single individual.

Author Shankar Vedantam in his science article “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance” implies that if a person is subjected to stereotypes it can affect your performance. The author develops this idea by first introducing his theme with a question, then he tells of experiments others have made to support this idea, and finally he wraps it up by telling us that companies and schools are victim to stereotypes and needs to stop. The author’s purpose is to explain to us how stereotypes can affect our lives in order to call out to people so we can lower the rates of stereotyping. The author establishes a educated tone for people who are interested in research and global

Clark’s work on identity and stereotyping has continued and has extended to not only minority groups, but to white-Americans and women as well. Research on prejudices and stereotyping has continued in the area of education. According to Steele (2004), the framework of one’s life can be controlled by their social identity and that individuals must contend to the prejudices and stereotypes that they socially must identify with. Further research suggests that those who are exposed to negative stereotypes are influenced either by believing or mimicking the stereotype or, both (Steele, 2004). Steele (2004) found that stereotypes have contributed to the underperformance of minority groups in the school setting. As suggested by Clark, Steele (2004) also believes that conforming to suggested stereotypes weakens the social identity and brings severe deficits to the ability of student to excel in the classroom. Clark’s ideas on stereotyping were elaborated in the notion that stereotype threat does not only affect minority groups, but can exhibit deficits in any group of individuals. For instance, Steele (2004) offers the example of white vs. black athletes and how in many sports (e.g. basketball or football) white athletes have shown to feel less competent in comparison to black athletes because of

Stereotypes can be defined as schemas applied to a group of people sharing common physical, biological or racial characteristics. Focusing on education, African American students had consistently been negatively stereotyped about their intellectual abilities. Research indicates that racial stereotypes negatively affect African American students’ academic performance. This correlation, though, is clearest among salient African American students, implying that psychological factors may result from these discriminations.

In Chapter One of Outliers, Gladwell focuses on the way in which people who are born early in the year have advantages in certain areas over those born later. He discusses the fact that professional hockey players are disproportionately born early in the year. He says this is because they are the oldest children in their youth hockey leagues and most of the players are born in the first part of the year. They will be bigger, stronger, and better-coordinated than those born later in the year. As a result, they will get more attention, more coaching, more reinforcement, and more self-confidence.

Outliers, written by Malcolm Gladwell, is about how a person becomes successful and analyzes the factors that cause the success. According to the author, success is the combination of talent, deliberate practice, family environment, opportunity, and practical intelligence. These factors are complementary and influence each other. However, among the many factors of success, the only thing that can be controlled is the deliberate practice. Therefore, in my view, success is due more to deliberate practice.

Who: In chapter 1 of Outliers, the chapter introduces many names. But, the first name mentioned are two Canadian junior hockey teams which are the Medicine Hat Tigers and the Vancouver Giants. As Gladwell goes more into the chapter he brings up a Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley, a sociologist Robert Merton, and Gordon Wasden who is a father of one of the Medicine Hat Tigers players.

Many theories have been suggested to try to explain the low performance of Hispanic and African American students compared to their white peers. Stereotype threat theory proposes that the possibility of being judged in terms of a negative stereotype in a particular domain negatively affects one’s performance. African American students are even more vulnerable to this social-psychological threat that occurs when students anticipate the possibility of fulfilling a negative stereotype. Some of the effects of stereotype threat include anxiety, low academic standards and low test scores. (Steele,

When he gets offered a job at the University of Washington he develops a special interest in stereotype threat when he sees the minority students underperforming despite have equal or higher SAT scores upon entering the college. This is when he really develops his interest in stereotype threat and with fellow colleagues develops a group of experiments to explore more about this topic. In the first three chapters of this book Steele sets the stage for the coming experiments, and delves into the process of showing us how stereotype threat negatively affects our lives.

In the book, “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, a book in which he talks about success and factors that influence it. In chapter 5, Malcolm Gladwell discusses how people who state that they’ve had many disadvantages on their road to success and that say that they’ “self-made”, often still have advantages on their road to success. In this chapter, he specifically talks about Joe Flom, which is the co-owner of what is now one of the most prestigious law firms around the world. However, there are numerous people just like Joe Flom and they've had similar experiences and also claim to be “self made”. In this essay, we will delve into some of the factors that had influenced Joe Flom’s success.

These stereotypes affect a student’s self image. An example would be if a kid is in a sport and is good but then goes and joins band, choir, or an academic club then the other team mates might not be as friendly in a game or in person. For stereotypes impacting academics, I have heard of someone who had to drop a honors class that he really wanted to be in because he needed to practice more so he could get better at the sport because the others thought he was just a band geek and he wanted to prove them wrong. He will spend most of his time practicing for the sport or for band and not doing his academic school

By using the box and whisker plot below, four outliers were calculated for points in the data set. Outliers were larger than 81 points, and smaller than 33 points.

Chapter eight of Outliers is about what it takes to be successful. Based on the examples given in the chapter Gladwell is trying to convince the readers that persistence, hard work, dedication and having the mindset of achievement is what leads to success in life. In China, rice was cultivated thousands of years ago. Which spread to East Asia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. This was a tedious job with no days off, but they had to do it in order to survive. They ate rice as meals, sold rice, and traded rice for other necessities. To push themselves to keep going and never give up, they would say things like “No food without blood and sweat,” and “No one can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family

“Stereotypes are a mental picture in your head or an opinion you might have about a person or group of people based on the actions and behaviors of others that look similar. Stereotypical images are reinforced through the media, every single time we pick up our cell-phone, or turn on the TV. Harmful stereotypical images can actually cause a person belonging to that group to feel threatened. The person is aware of the negative stereotype about their social group, and then this person experiences extreme anxiety that they might confirm the stereotype, which distracts that person from their performance. Because they are thinking about their race, gender, or sexual orientation, instead of focusing their performance whether this be an exam, a sporting

The first effect of stereotyping is a phenomenon known as “stereotype threat” that occurs in a situation where a person is in fear of unintentionally confirming a negative stereotype. Several studies have been conducted to discover the effects of stereotype threats. For example, I discovered that Toni Schmader, an assistant professor of the UA psychology department, and Michael Johns, a UA graduate (ethos), conducted studies that showed, “college women score lower on tests of mathematical ability, and Hispanic students might score lower on tests of intelligence, not because they have less ability, but because reminders of negative stereotypes temporarily decrease their ‘working memory capacity’ (UA News Services, “Exploring the Negative Consequences of Stereotyping”, UANews.Arizona.edu).” This demonstrates that the students did not do worse on the test due to their lack of skills, but rather due to negative stereotypes. In a similar study by professors Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, African American and White college students took the same intelligence test under two conditions. In the stereotype threat condition the students were told the test would evaluate their intelligence, and in the