{"id":5867,"date":"2014-06-17T06:21:44","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T13:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/http:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/?p=5867"},"modified":"2014-06-17T06:21:44","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T13:21:44","slug":"makes-malcolm-gladwell-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/makes-malcolm-gladwell-expert\/","title":{"rendered":"So What Makes Malcolm Gladwell Such an Expert?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Capture\"<\/a>I have to admit that I used to be a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I read his frequent articles in The New Yorker and several of his early books. I was initially seduced by his apparent breadth of knowledge, cerebral dexterity, and inviting writing style. But the more of his work I read, the more skeptical I became and the more intellectually manipulated I felt. Once I switched hats from enthralled follower to the social scientist that I am, the bloom fell off the rose, as it were, as my feelings shifted from admiration to resentment at having fallen for his smoke-and-mirrors act.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the first person to be critical of Malcolm Gladwell. In fact, if you type \u201chate Malcolm Gladwell\u201d in your search engine, you get around 255,000 results. There were rather scathing critiques of him in The Nation<\/a><\/em> in 2009 and in Slate<\/a><\/em> in 2013. David Epstein<\/a>, the author of The Sports Gene<\/em>, shot full of holes Gladwell\u2019s now famous \u201c10 years, 10,000 hours to become an expert\u201d theory (here\u2019s another great rebuttal<\/a>), though Gladwell attempted to deflect Epstein\u2019s argument<\/a> by saying that Epstein simply misunderstood what Gladwell was saying.<\/p>\n

Gladwell certainly has attained fame and fortune from his writings. In fact, he has created an entire genre of non-fiction (usually involving one-word titles); \u201cThat book is downright Gladwellian!\u201d How to describe this genre? Think of it as a recipe:<\/p>\n

    \n
      \n
    1. Start with an appealing social scientific theory that hasn\u2019t found its way out of the ivory tower of academia (e.g., his \u201c10 years\u201d thesis comes from Dr. Anders Ericsson\u2019s work on deliberate practice and what it takes to become an expert);<\/li>\n
    2. Add a novel and often-times contrarian take on some piece of conventional wisdom (e.g., success is due to innate talent);<\/li>\n
    3. Sprinkle in scientific language to give his writing gravitas;<\/li>\n
    4. Cherry pick, generalize, and misconstrue research findings to support his notions and give them an air of scientific credibility; and<\/li>\n
    5. Mix with compelling and poignant anecdotes that tug on our inspirational and aspirational heart strings and further bolster his thesis.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n

      Like others<\/a> who have criticized Gladwell, you could easily attribute my post to jealousy of his success while I toil away in the muddy trenches of book authorship and public speaking. I\u2019m not going to argue against this charge. What\u2019s the point? My defensiveness will simply confirm to some my obvious envy.<\/p>\n

      But to offset those attacks, I want to give credit where credit is due. Gladwell is obviously an intelligent fellow and a talented (or is it well-practiced?) journalist. I admire his ability to tell a story and engage his reading audience. He also seems to be a genuinely nice person. Plus, you\u2019ve got to love his hair (a key part of his brand, to be sure). I don\u2019t begrudge him his journalistic successes. However, I do have a beef with how he portrays himself that earns him prodigious speaking fees and extraordinarily large advances for his subsequent books.<\/p>\n

      Which leads me to my criticism of him and my question about him: So what makes Malcolm Gladwell such an expert? I don\u2019t understand why he is paid what I\u2019m sure are very large sums to share \u201chis\u201d ideas (I use quotes because his ideas are rarely his own) with large and adoring audiences, often from the corporate world (referred to as the Dilbert Circuit<\/a>) that sees an essential application of every one of his ideas for increased satisfaction, productivity, and profitability. Presumably, Gladwell is hired to give these speeches and share his knowledge, insights, and wisdom with his audience because he is considered an expert on the topic. Here\u2019s the problem though: he\u2019s not an expert. And herein lies his hypocrisy (and more).<\/p>\n

      Gladwell has argued, famously by now and as I have already described, that to become an expert, one must engage in deliberate practice for at least 10 years and 10,000 hours. Yet, apparently, that rule doesn\u2019t apply to him; he believes himself an expert after just a few months of perusing the theory and research of others in preparation for his next bestseller. Steve \u00a0Pinker, the noted cognitive scientist and Harvard professor (and himself a bestselling author), calls this the \u201cIgon Value Problem<\/a>: when a writer\u2019s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.\u201d (Apparently, after interviewing a mathematician, Gladwell wrote about an igon value rather than, correctly, an eigenvalue). Why doesn\u2019t Gladwell live by his own dictates? What\u2019s good for the good, as they say, is obviously not good for the gander.<\/p>\n

      After considerable evidence<\/a> demonstrating that the ten-years theory doesn\u2019t hold up in physical activities such as sports or music, Gladwell changed his tune a bit<\/a> stating that, \u201cIn cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery.\u201d And you can\u2019t just read a bunch of research and interview some experts and become an actual expert yourself. This statement should further indict Gladwell for his double standard.<\/p>\n

      Gladwell has professed that he doesn\u2019t present himself as an expert, but rather as a storyteller<\/a>: \u201c\u201cI am a story-teller, and I look to academic research \u2026 for ways of augmenting story-telling.\u201d Yet, there is little doubt that people view him as an expert. As the cognitive psychologist Christopher Chabris<\/a> has noted, based on an informal Internet search, the masses see Gladwell as more influential than Steven Pinker (and, presumably, other legitimate authorities). In other words, Gladwell\u2019s followers (of his books, articles, and speeches), which number in the many millions, believe him to be more of an expert than genuine experts like Pinker. Gladwell has been elevated to the status of preeminent expert, a position, based on his own arguments, he definitively does not deserve.<\/p>\n

      If Gladwell wants to sell himself as a teller of tales, a synthesizer of others\u2019 ideas, or as someone who brings the undiscovered treasures of the social sciences to laypeople, more power to him. But he drapes himself in the garb of an expert, portraying himself as a \u201cthought leader,\u201d someone who possesses not just information, but also deep knowledge, insight, wisdom about the world. The truth is, though, is that he is not. The travesty is that millions of people believe what he says as fact.\u00a0This despite the reality that, upon close scrutiny, many of his statements of \u201cfact\u201d fall apart under the weight of the actual evidence. As such, Malcolm Gladwell is not only guilty of hypocrisy, but also perhaps of deceit and fraud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I have to admit that I used to be a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I read his frequent articles in The New Yorker and several of his early books. I was initially seduced by his apparent breadth of knowledge, cerebral dexterity, and inviting writing style. But the more of his work I read, the more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1520],"tags":[792,793,794,795,796,797,724,798,799,800,801,802],"class_list":["post-5867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","tag-blink","tag-christopher-chabris","tag-daniel-pinker","tag-david-and-goliath","tag-malcolm-gladwell","tag-neuropsychology","tag-neuroscience","tag-outliers","tag-research","tag-science","tag-social-science","tag-the-tipping-point"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}