TOW #8 | IRB - Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

As Malcolm Gladwell continues to connect stories of success with the common theme of “talent plus preparation,” he presents to the curious American public how much a combination of opportunity and origin can influence successes and failures that occur throughout the world. He utilizes statistics in one specific analysis, “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes,” to portray how one’s upbringing in a specific geographic location can influence their capability to fly a plane.

Gladwell brings up one statistic--a list of countries that were ranked in terms of “uncertainty avoidance”--to portray how a country’s tolerance of ambiguity stems from their culture. Countries that were at the top of the uncertainty avoidance list, like Greece and Guatemala, have the commonality of conservative cultures, in which their people were taught to stick by the rules and not stray away from any set of rules, regardless of the circumstances. Other countries that were at the bottom of the list, like Denmark and Singapore, have cultures that are free to conform to situations and are not constricted by a specific set of rules. The people from the countries of the bottom of the list, as a result, were able to conform better to emergency situations (e.g. the fuel running low, the plane at risk of crashing), for they had no rules that they were trapped by, unlike the countries at the top of the list. Another similar statistic Gladwell adds presents a list of countries ranked in terms of the Power-Distance Index, or PDI. South Korea, a culture that emphasizes superiority of bosses and elders, ranked second in this list, proving that Koreans’ inability to equally distribute authority and “power” resulted in the high number of plane crashes that occurred in the early 2000s. These statistics thus helped Gladwell in his attempt to show the correlation between the culture of a specific geographic location and a person’s ability to fly a plane.

Although one's culture or specific geographic location can seem so far away from one's ability to fly a plane, Gladwell manages to reveal the relationship between the two through the use of statistics. He therefore portrays to his audience the intriguing nature of how one's origins can influence their job choice.