When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because sheโs truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of โsmartโ?
Malcolm GladwellPeople who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.
Malcolm GladwellIn order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
Malcolm GladwellThe kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.
Malcolm Gladwell