Outliers: Chapters 6–7

You subpoenaed documents and took depositions and pored over court records until you had put together a detailed and precise accounting of each stage in the deadly quarrel.

What happened in Harlan wouldn’t become clear until you looked at the violence from a much broader perspective.

Over the years, many potential explanations have been examined and debated, and the consensus appears to be that that region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of what sociologists call a “culture of honor.”

“Quarrels are necessarily public. They may occur in the coffee shop, the village square, or most frequently on a grazing boundary where a curse or a stone aimed at one of his straying sheep by another shepherd is an insult which inevitably requires a violent response.”

The borderers were more at home than others in this anarchic environment, which was well suited to their family system, their warrior ethic, their farming and herding economy, their attitudes toward land and wealth and their ideas of work and power.

The case before the jury involved an irascible gentleman who lived next door to a filling station.

When the jury was polled by the incredulous judge, Carter was the only juror who recorded his vote as guilty.

The report detailed bad morale, numerous procedural violations, and the alarming conclusion that training standards for the 747 “classic” were so poor that “there is some concern as to whether First Officers on the Classic fleet could land the aircraft if the Captain became totally incapacitated.”

The blockage caused moisture to leak into the plant’s air system, inadvertently tripping two valves and shutting down the flow of cold water into the plant’s steam generator.

On the aborted landing, the plane’s Ground Proximity Warning System went off no fewer than fifteen times, telling the captain that he was bringing in the plane too low.

Investigators later surmised that the Avianca pilots must have assumed that ATC was jumping them to the head of the queue, in front of the dozens of other planes circling Kennedy.

We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we’re being deferential to authority.

Today “Hofstede’s Dimensions” are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology.

The Korean language has no fewer than six different levels of conversational address, depending on the relationship between the addressee and the addresser: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain.

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge?