Gladwell Regales Crowd With Gripping Disaster

Author Malcolm Gladwell captivated a sold-out crowd in First Parish Church last night for over an hour with the story of a single plane crash.

He opened by asking how many listeners would be flying in the next month. When most hands went up, he said, “Then this is scary. But the most important thing...about this plane crash is that it’s scary not because it’s unusual. It’s scary because it’s typical.”

The crash is “typical” because it conformed to a larger theme in Gladwell’s new book “Outliers.” In the book, Gladwell argues that this crash of a flight from Colombia to New York, which resulted in 73 deaths, was caused, at least in part, by how cultural differences affect the way people act—even the way some fly planes.

Colombians have a “high index of power distance,” according to Gladwell, which is a term from cross-cultural psychology describing the hesitancy of underlings to question superiors. This cultural phenomenon caused the Colombian co-pilot to speak timidly to the air traffic control booth’s gruff New Yorker.

Even as the plane was running out of gas and was in grave danger of crashing, the Colombian co-pilot did not assert the need for the plane to land.

When asked, according to the flight log, “Is that okay with you and your fuel,” the co-pilot merely responded, “I guess so. Thank you very much.”

Gladwell closed the story, and his talk, with a description of the miscommunication that lasted to the very end of the flight, as the plane plummeted to the ground.

“There are two minutes of static,” Gladwell said slowly and dramatically. “And the last thing you hear on the flight log is air traffic control asking, ‘052, do you have enough fuel to land the plane?’”

The plane had crashed as a result of this miscommunication, and, for Gladwell, the reason was clear.

“There was a social breakdown...It was a symptom of a culture’s inability to allow subordinates to question their superiors,” he said. “This plane crash cannot be understood just on the basis of the individual, it has to be understood as part of a much larger cultural context.”

In “Outliers,” Gladwell reiterates this point, using anecdotes to argue that culture can effect catastrophes and create superstars—in the book, Gladwell notes that Bill Gates happened to be born in the age of the computer, and to have access to some of the earliest machines.

When asked what role individual choice plays, Gladwell responded, “To my annoyance, some reviewers of my book have accused me of being a cultural determinist. In fact, I’m the opposite. The culture that we come from is only deterministic if we choose to ignore it.”

Gladwell claims his book is a celebration of those instances where people understood their cultural character and overcame it. Korea, like Colombia, has a high power distance index and its pilots used to have an above-average number of plane crashes. Having recognized that, Korea Air is now one of the world’s safest airlines, Gladwell said.

As a line formed to buy a signed copy of Gladwell’s book, some listeners talked about how much they appreciated the author’s perspective.

Audience member Riches Anne Constable, who shares Gladwell’s Jamaican heritage, noted that his point about Jamaicans’ tendency to defer to superiors had manifested itself in her own life.

“I often find myself giving deference,” she said.