The Power Of Context By Malcolm Gladwell

Accredited journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, delves into the hidden truth behind the subconscious mind and explores the psychological process of intuitive thinking, both good and bad, in the novel Blink. Gladwell’s purpose is to exploit how the unconscious works and to expose the connection between your intuition and the real world which helps educate the reader on how to develop advanced decision making skills. He adopts an informative and passionate tone in order to establish credibility with his older audience and emphasize his dedication toward his works. Through the use of rhetorical questions and repetition, Gladwell demonstrates that a thin-slice of information can be used to deduce deeper comprehension.

How many hours of someone’s life are necessary to perfect a skill? 300? 5000? Perhaps try 10,000 hours. In this chapter from Outliers, “The 10,000-Hour Rule”, Malcolm Gladwell argues that talent isn’t innate, but takes 10,000 hours to perfect a skill based on opportunity, talent, and practice. Throughout the chapter “The 10,000-Hour Rule”, Malcolm Gladwell effectively relies on logos--evidence from well-known figures and charts that show age similarities--to support his theory that it takes a particular window of time to offer someone the opportunity to practice for 10,000 hours to succeed at a skill. However, Gladwell ineffectively relies on repetition of evidence and failure to

This paper analyzes and responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s The New Yorker article, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” concluding that though Gladwell provides a decent context for his argument, it is ultimately made less effective because of its comparisons and underlying assumptions. This paper shows how Gladwell’s comparison of contemporary social movements to those of a prior non-digital age works against his main argument by drawing an unfair parallel in which the two systems of comparison are far too different to draw any binary conclusions. The purpose of this paper is to consider how rhetoric, including the use of ethos and pathos, can influence how readers think about issues of social and political justice.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Power of Context,” includes a series of short anecdotes in which are all defined by environment and how society shapes mankind. While reading these short stories Gladwell put into the novel, the audience can conclude that the rules of society have the power to shape a person or community. When reading “The Power of Context,” the reader must be able to grasp the understanding of how environment can affect an individual. One would say nature is the setting in which a person is brought up, nurture is the care variable one has the power to influence how they behave or how the setting can define who they are. In this style of writing Gladwell uses, shifts in societies behaviors tell stories of how the setting can influence behaviors of the main characters.

Being of target of bias can affect socialization due to the negatives attitudes that it entails.

Criminal case is always tedious when it involves little or no information about the offender, like in the 9/11 terrorist attack which annihilated most of the workers in and damaged the New York Trade Center building. However, in an attempt to identify the offenders, government officials and investigators try out different ways such as criminal profiling and others. Thus, in the New Yorker article, “Dangerous Minds” by Malcolm Gladwell; the author informs the deeper problems with FBI profiling and argues that it is ineffective. He questions the usefulness of criminal profiling, “But how useful is that profile, really?” and uses other criminal cases, group research analyses, and analogies to refute

In Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Small Change: The Revolution will not be Tweeted” There is an example of large-scale change which caused by the social media there was Twitter revolution at Moldova, Iran in 2009. People started to use Twitter as a tool for protest the government and it became a huge change. This could be possible because people could argue with more confident when they stand up against government through the Social Media. The Malcolm Gladwell’s response about this kind of social event was “Social media, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making I easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns” (Paragraph 7, Gladwell) Also he called

Some believe crime is committed due to poverty or desperation, others believe its committed in view of envy, and on the other hand, Gladwell believes crime is committed due to the surroundings of an individual. In ‘The Power of Context,’ Gladwell discusses the occurrence of crime in New York, stating that its major cause is the immediate environment one is in. Gladwell believes that the environment we’re in has a major effect on our behavior and eventually it makes us act according to it. Gladwell goes to great measures to prove his point, stating number of examples, including a number of major theories. However, is the environment really the only determinant of our actions? Gladwell tries to convince the audience that in the end it is the surroundings of an individual and the small things that matter. Trying to convince the audience and make them agree with him, Gladwell uses some big concepts and examples of crime in New York to prove to his audience that in the end, it actually is the small things or the ‘Tipping Points’ that make a completely normal human being commit a crime.

Social tendency among monarchies exalt high amenities and luxurious lifestyle in favor of power. Traditionally in sovereign government, family lineage is prioritized in the succession of power, exemplifying aspects such as of heir, inheritance, and birthright. Evolved from past reigns, today’s generation of working class individuals pass down experience and networks to heritage in order to persevere wealth in the family. Ho vindicates the dependence of pedigree in education and employment saying, “For decades, general, ‘open’ recruiting was not standard practice for most businesses: Ivy League graduates relied on family wealth and networks, entered graduate school or approached, via the ‘old boys’ network’ for financial or industrial fast-track grooming” (182). Students with not only well established educational but also family background have better opportunity to succeed financially. Wall Street attract students with similar background as a tactic to fixate its recruitment as well as its income. Behaviorism justifies the popular demand of highly prodigious student recruitment because students in that position desire to continue being superior. This leads to ideology of elitism, where the mindset of self advancement overwhelms the individual to desire the highest position of power. Without pedigree, individuals often struggle to have an effective impact on the job

　　In the essay “Reading and Thought”, Dwight MacDonlad talked about the kind of poor reading people are attached to in modern society. MacDonald believed reading materials such as Times and New York Times are too overwhelming for the readers. Readers tend to skim through the reading materials because most of the reading do not have any connections with their daily lives. Moreover, MacDoanld claimed that the readings people do these days are not thoughtful. The readings are rather irrelevant toward the readers. It is because the journalists to produce dull pieces of readings which are meant to be skimmed through without having too much thoughts involved. As the journalists do not have much consideration of the materials they produced. To the journalists the readings they produce are just a series of news that should be read driftly and left behind with no thoughful idea needed to be informed. These effects caused modern society to have a poor reading habits because people do not reflect and give time to think about the readings they did. Readers casually accept the readings even though they do not have provide any resourceful information for the readers.

Expertise is something many people look at as coincidence. They see it as something that merely happens to someone. Malcolm Gladwell, however, studied how one attains this status. He proposed that it takes 10,000 hours of practice put into something to truly become an expert at it. Proficiency at a skill does not come automatically. It takes time and effort to really master anything.

Few people have the ability to look at someone and tell exactly what they are thinking, and whether or not they are lying. Author Malcolm Gladwell, uses the stories of famous psychologist Paul Ekman and others gifted with the ability to "read people well" to argue that people can be naturally born with this ability, gradually develop it, or learn it purposefully later on. In his essay, "The Naked Face", Gladwell suggests that there could be more to this skill than what meets the eye through complex appeals to logos, pathos, ethos.

The sociological Taboo (or imagination) is defined as a way of thinking that help us use external information and experience to form theories about the social pattern around us. We collect data and from that information, we make judgments and predictions. These require going beyond one’s point of view. People 's life and experiences are different. Therefore, it is important to take into consideration their reasoning and thoughts to be able to understand why they act the way they do. Hearing others stories and theories help us distant our self and creating a broader perspective. The saying “never criticizes someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes" is the best way to interpret sociological imagination. Its components include jobs, income, education, gender, race-ethnicity, and age.

Although there is trust between Wall Street and their “atomic family” Harvard and Princeton, Wall Street’s “extended family” such as Yale and the University of Pennsylvania do not receive the same level of trust and fairness. Since Wall Streeters tend to favor Harvard and Princeton when recruiting, they really only give Harvard and Princeton graduates the opportunity to succeed in investment banking. By doing so Wall Streeters treat their “extended families” from other schools unfairly. This is evident when Ho writes, “investment banking recruiters at Princeton and Harvard explicitly express how the do not care if undergraduates are trained in finance because a skilled background… [it’s] not really what they are looking for” (186); what they are looking for is the Harvard or Princeton degree they will graduate with. Whereas, there could be plenty of skillful undergraduates at other Ivy League schools such as Yale; but those

People are the products of their environment. The lifestyle children adapt to at a young age is what molds them as they grow up and mature. This is why children who typically are raised in a lavish lifestyle grow up to be proper, while those who live in poverty follow the path to failure. In the essays “The Power of Context,” “The Myth of the Ant Queen,” and “Biographies of Hegemony,” written respectfully by Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson, and Karen Ho, the theme of minute changes in one’s environment, continuing to affect one heavily in the long term is brought up numerous times. Gladwell asserts the concept by talking about the incident with Bernherd Goetz and the stigma attached to the shooting. Johnson reflects upon this point numerous times by using anecdotes involving the ants and other complex discussions of Turing’s shortcomings in the era he lived in. Karen Ho talks about the business side of Gladwell’s point by correlating it with the practices used by superpower Wall Street firms and their recruitment process. In this essay, I argue that cultural and communal changes are affected by both small and large-scale contexts; and that the power of context has a strong correlation to Wall Street and the different types of societies discussed by Johnson and Gladwell.