Outliers (32 page)

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Cohen has done other experiments looking again for evidence of “southernness,” and each time he finds the same thing. “Once, we bothered students with persistent annoyances,” he said. “They come into the lab and they are supposed to draw pictures from their childhood. They are doing this with the confederate, and he’s being a jerk. He does all these things to persistently annoy the subject. He’ll wad up his drawing and throw it at the wastebasket and hit the subject. He’ll steal the subject’s crayons and not give them back. He keeps on calling the subject ‘Slick,’ and he says, ‘I’m going to put your name on your drawing,’ and writes ‘Slick.’ What you find is that northerners tend to give off displays of anger, up to a certain point, at which point they level off. Southerners are much less likely to be angry early on. But at some point they catch up to the northerners and shoot past them. They are more likely to explode, much more volatile, much more explosive.”
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How are these kinds of attitudes passed down from generation to generation? Through social heritance. Think of the way accents persist over time. David Hackett Fischer points out that the original settlers of Appalachia said: “whar for where, thar for there, hard for hired, critter for creature, sartin for certain, a-goin for going, hit for it, he-it for hit, far for fire, deef for deaf, pizen for poison, nekkid for naked, eetch for itch, boosh for bush, wrassle for wrestle, chaw for chew, poosh for push, shet for shut, ba-it for bat, be-for be, narrer for narrow, winder for window, widder for widow, and young-uns for young one.” Recognize that? It’s the same way many rural people in the Appalachians speak today. Whatever mechanism passes on speech patterns probably passes on behavioral and emotional patterns as well.
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Korean Air was called Korean Airlines before it changed its name after the Guam accident. And the Barents Sea incident was actually preceded by two other crashes, in 1971 and 1976.
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This is true not just of plane crashes. It’s true of virtually all industrial accidents. One of the most famous accidents in history, for example, was the near meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979. Three Mile Island so traumatized the American public that it sent the US nuclear power industry into a tailspin from which it has never fully recovered. But what actually happened at that nuclear reactor began as something far from dramatic. As the sociologist charles Perrow shows in his classic
Normal Accidents,
there was a relatively routine blockage in what is called the plant’s “polisher” — a kind of giant water filter. 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. Like all nuclear reactors, Three Mile Island had a backup cooling system for precisely this situation. But on that particular day, for reasons that no one really understands, the valves for the backup system weren’t open. Someone had closed them, and an indicator in the control room showing they were closed was blocked by a repair tag hanging from a switch above it. That left the reactor dependent on another backup system, a special sort of relief valve. But, as luck would have it, the relief valve wasn’t working properly that day either. It stuck open when it was supposed to close, and, to make matters even worse, a gauge in the control room that should have told the operators that the relief valve wasn’t working was itself not working. By the time Three Mile Island’s engineers realized what was happening, the reactor had come dangerously close to a meltdown.No single big thing went wrong at Three Mile Island. Rather, five completely unrelated events occurred in sequence, each of which, had it happened in isolation, would have caused no more than a hiccup in the plant’s ordinary operation.
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We know this because the flight attendant survived the crash and testified at the inquest.
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Hofstede, similarly, references a study done a few years ago that compared German and French manufacturing plants that were in the same industry and were roughly the same size. The French plants had, on average, 26 percent of their employees in management and specialist positions; the Germans, 16 percent. The French, furthermore, paid their top management substantially more than the Germans did. What we are seeing in that comparison, Hofstede argued, is a difference in cultural attitudes toward hierarchy. The French have a power distance index twice that of the Germans. They require and support hierarchy in a way the Germans simply don’t.
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Here are the top five pilot PDIs by country. If you compare this list to the ranking of plane crashes by country, they match up very closely.1. Brazil2. South Korea3. Morocco4. Mexico5. PhilippinesThe five lowest pilot PDIs by country are:15. United States16. Ireland17. South Africa18. Australia19. New Zealand
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On international comparison tests, students from Japan , South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all score roughly the same in math, around the ninety-eighth percentile. The United States, France, England, Germany, and the other Western industrialized nations cluster at somewhere between the twenty-six and thirty-sixth percentile. That’s a big difference.
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Lynn’s claim that Asians have higher IQs has been refuted, convincingly, by a number of other experts, who showed that he based his argument on IQ samples drawn disproportionately from urban, upper-income homes. James Flynn, perhaps the world’s leading expert on IQ, has subsequently made a fascinating counterclaim. Asians’ IQs, he says, have historically been slightly
lower
than whites’ IQs, meaning that their dominance in math has been in spite of their IQ, not because of it. Flynn’s argument was outlined in his book
Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ
(1991).
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Two small points. Mainland China isn’t on this list because China doesn’t yet take part in the TIMSS study. But the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong rank so highly suggests that the mainland would probably also do really well. Second, and perhaps more important, what happens in the north of China, which isn’t a wet-rice agriculture society but historically a wheat-growing culture, much like Western Europe? Are they good at math too? The short answer is that we don’t know. The psychologist James Flynn points out, though, that the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants to the West — the people who have done so well in math here — are from South China. The Chinese students graduating at the top of their class at MIT are the descendants, chiefly, of people from the Pearl River Delta. He also points out that the lowest-achieving Chinese Americans are the so-called Sze Yap people, who come from the edges of the Delta, “where soil was less fertile and agriculture less intense.”
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There is actually a significant scientific literature measuring Asian “persistence.” In a typical study, Priscilla Blinco gave large groups of Japanese and American first graders a very difficult puzzle and measured how long they worked at it before they gave up. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes, roughly 40 percent longer.
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KIPP stands for “Knowledge Is Power Program.”
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