Tag Archives: Malcolm Gladwell

“Heat of the Moment”

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Erica Rivas, Wild Tales
Érica Rivas in Wild Tales

Malcolm Gladwell—always thought-provoking—recently reviewed the new book Unforgiving Places in The New Yorker (9 June), which examines strategies to prevent violent crime. The book’s author, Jens Ludwig, directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Ludwig’s approach divides the phenomenon of gun violence into two main types, each of which has different motivations and modes of prevention. He believes the reason many preventive strategies fail (or fail to explain changes in homicide rates), is that what works for one type of violence doesn’t work for the other.

In general, people vacillate between two major modes of thinking. One is fast, automatic, and intuitive. It’s why Tony shot Maria’s brother Bernardo in West Side Story. Road rage is another example. This quick, unthinking response is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1 thinking.” By contrast, “System 2 thinking” involves deliberation and careful planning in order to gain something—“cash or phone or watch or drug turf.” Often, revenge. And, again in West Side Story, it’s why Chino shoots Tony. The violence associated with System 2 thinking is a means to an end.

Unforgiving Places points out our criminal-justice system has been designed to counter planned and deliberate System 2 crimes, when the real problem is those spontaneous, reactive ones, the homicides that occur in a moment of irrationality. According to FBI data, they account for more than three-fourths of murders committed over the past twenty years. The Chicago Police Department estimates that argumentsare at the root of between 70 and 80 percent of homicides in that city. (Say, between husband and wife, employer and employee, or in the picture from the short Argentinian film “Till Death Do Us Part,” above, even bride and groom.)

Looking back over the crime book reviews I’ve written in the last few months, I find that when gun violence occurred in these stories, it is often of the more deliberate type, because the workings of the perpetrator’s mind are important to the story, the crime’s motivation, and its ultimate solution. But sometimes, both types occur: a spontaneous, “heat of the moment” crime leads to a chain of deliberate cover-up assassinations; or, conversely, tracking down the perpetrators of a well-planned crime leads to a deadly, reactive confrontation. But the two types of violence are definitely bifurcated in the way Ludwig describes, and the distinction between them makes perfect literary sense. Scott Turow’s recent novel, Presumed Guilty, is a good example of a crime thought to be a System 2 crime that turned out to be something very different.

***David and Goliath

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david-and-goliath, statue, sculpture

photo: Darrel Birkett, creative commons license

By Malcolm Gladwell – The subtitle of this book, Gladwell’s fifth, is “Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.” It’s much better that he titled the book as he did, rather than “an exploration of the inverted U-shaped curve.” Gladwell uses his well-developed skill at mixing anecdote and social science research to create a fascinating series of case studies of how, out on the far edges of that curve, powerful institutions and individuals (Goliaths) with seemingly everything going for them can be undermined or bested by seemingly weaker ones (Davids).

Gladwell maintains that people consistently misjudge these kinds of conflicts, because we don’t recognize the weaknesses of Goliaths and underestimate the possibility that Davids can do the unexpected. By the end of the book, his cases demonstrate not just how those with supposed advantages can fail, but also how they can, paradoxically, end up causing these very failures.

As in his previous books—The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers—Gladwell marshals fascinating case histories to build and extend his argument bit by bit. Often these examples illustrate the wrong-headedness of conventional wisdom. An early example is the entrenched belief that smaller class sizes improve education, while a growing body of literature suggests that the number of pupils makes no difference in the mid-range (the large number of cases under the U) and that very small classes (one tail of the U) can actually be counter-productive: They are too easily dominated by one or two students and do not present sufficient variety of viewpoints.

The book’s middle section talks about people who have overcome difficulties—dyslexia, racial prejudice—and how the experience of those difficulties actually have facilitated their success. (David Boies, the ultra-successful attorney with dyslexia, had to learn to listen very very carefully and remember very very well because reading was so difficult.)

It’s hard to know what generalized conclusions can be derived from this section. Complicating the situation are an array of individual, parental, social, and other mitigating factors, which Gladwell doesn’t address. So while overcoming severe difficulties is remotely possible (many successful entrepreneurs—perhaps a third—turn out to be dyslexic, for example), his argument seems more interesting than instructive. The exception proving the rule.

Finally, Gladwell discusses the limits of power and how people who have wanted to impose order, such as hardliners among the British in Northern Ireland or supporters of three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws, actually devised policies that produced the opposite effect than that they desired. Gladwell makes a broader point here, well worth considering in light of current events: “The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.”

Gladwell is all about extending his arguments to new territory and, in that vein, reading this section, I couldn’t help thinking about the forthcoming presidential election. Will preemptory allegations about the “rigging” of the vote undermine the election’s legitimacy and, therefore, any new administration’s ability to govern?

Reading Malcolm Gladwell is like brain yoga, an opportunity to stretch your thinking. Whether he’s perfectly “right” in some of his theorizing or whether he too carefully cherrypicks his examples to prove his case, more thinking has to be a good thing in these times.