Malcolm Gladwell Tuesday Write

       Malcolm Gladwell's research gives us insight to some of the things that we don't often think twice about. While he himself is not making these discoveries (chunky tomato sauce, Norden Bomb Sight, and Goliath's pituitary tumor, etc.) he goes further and analyzes how these discoveries affect us. We never knew that we enjoyed chunky tomato sauce until we were actually introduced to it. Before chunky tomato sauce was a thing, everyone either liked watery sauce or didn't like sauce on their pasta. When Howard Moskowitz  ran a sampling test to see which tomato sauce everyone liked, he saw that everyone liked 1 of 3 sauces, plain, spicy and chunky. That means that about 1/3 of the american population did not know that they actually liked chunky tomato sauce. For the video on Gladwell's tomato sauce research, click here. What can be taken away from Gladwell's talks is to go into deeper detail about things that we often take as normal or don't think that much about. Why is it that people have an automatic bias towards a certain people? Why is it that some people are considerably more successful than others?

Malcolm Gladwell Speaks at Penn State University about the effects of football on the brain.

      An interesting phenomenon that I often see is when one spends a lot of time with another person or group of similar people, that person will begin to pick up the mannerisms of those around him/her. For example, if you spend a lot of time with someone who has a nervous twitch of playing with their hair, over time, when you get nervous you may begin playing with your hair, or making contact with your hair when normally you wouldn't. It interests me because it's one of the social interaction phenomena that i never really understood. My theory is that this kind of interaction dates back to the age of clans and small villages. Back then, you had to be in a clan or a group of people in order to survive, because it was often very difficult to sustain yourself when you had to worry about shelter and clean food and water. Being in a group of people granted a certain level of safety, a fair amount of food, water and shelter. Often to get into a clan, one would have to behave in a similar way to that group in order to be accepted. This would tell the others in the group that the person isn't foreign and therefore not dangerous. This kind of behavior could have been ingrained into our minds over generation upon generation, and even today, it becomes apparent as social interaction occurs over time.

Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book: Outliers