Outliers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  Oh, and by the way, in graduate school he tried to kill his tutor. This was the résumé of the man who was trying out for what might be said to be—without exaggeration—one of the most important jobs of the twentieth century. And what happened? The same thing that happened twenty years earlier at Cambridge: he got the rest of the world to see things his way.

  Here are Bird and Sherwin again: “Oppenheimer understood that Groves guarded the entrance to the Manhattan Project, and he therefore turned on all his charm and brilliance. It was an irresistible performance.” Groves was smitten. “‘He’s a genius,’ Groves later told a reporter. ‘A real genius.’” Groves was an engineer by training with a graduate degree from MIT, and Oppenheimer’s great insight was to appeal to that side of Groves. Bird and Sherwin go on: “Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour [of potential candidates] who grasped that building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems....[Groves] found himself nodding in agreement when Oppenheimer pitched the notion of a central laboratory devoted to this purpose, where, as he later testified, ‘we could begin to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering and ordnance problems that had so far received no consideration.’”

  Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that’s not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It’s because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

  “They required that everyone take introductory calculus,” Langan said of his brief stay at Montana State. “And I happened to get a guy who taught it in a very dry, very trivial way. I didn’t understand why he was teaching it this way. So I asked him questions. I actually had to chase him down to his office. I asked him, ‘Why are you teaching this way? Why do you consider this practice to be relevant to calculus?’ And this guy, this tall, lanky guy, always had sweat stains under his arms, he turned and looked at me and said, ‘You know, there is something you should probably get straight. Some people just don’t have the intellectual firepower to be mathematicians.’”

  There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what the prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact—and this is the most heartbreaking part of all—he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.

  3.

  The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence.” To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence, or—as in the lucky case of someone like Robert Oppenheimer—you can have lots of both.

  So where does something like practical intelligence come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It’s something, at least in part, that’s in your genes. Chris Langan started talking at six months. He taught himself to read at three years of age. He was born smart. IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.* But social savvy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.

  Perhaps the best explanation we have of this process comes from the sociologist Annette Lareau, who a few years ago conducted a fascinating study of a group of third graders. She picked both blacks and whites and children from both wealthy homes and poor homes, zeroing in, ultimately, on twelve families. Lareau and her team visited each family at least twenty times, for hours at a stretch. She and her assistants told their subjects to treat them like “the family dog,” and they followed them to church and to soccer games and to doctor’s appointments, with a tape recorder in one hand and a notebook in the other.

  You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way.

  The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

  That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes:

  What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.”

  The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority. If their children were doing poorly at school, the wealthier parents challenged their teachers. They intervened on behalf of their kids. One child Lareau follows just misses qualifying for a gifted program. Her mother arranges for her to be retested privately, petitions the school, and gets her daughter admitted. The poor parents, by contrast, are intimidated by authority. They react passively and stay in the background. Lareau writes of one low-income parent:

  At a parent-teacher conference, for example, Ms. McAllister (who is a high school graduate) seems subdued. The gregarious and outgoing nature she displays at home is hidden in this setting. She sits hunched over in the chair and she keeps her jacket zipped up. She is very quiet. When the teacher reports that Harold has not been turning in his homework, Ms. McAllister clearly is flabbergasted, but all she says is, “He did it at home.” She does not follow up with the teacher or attempt to intervene on Harold’s behalf. In her view, it is up to the teachers to manage her son’s education. That is their job, not hers.

  Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style “concerted cultivation.” It’
s an attempt to actively “foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills.” Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth.” They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own.

  Lareau stresses that one style isn’t morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of “entitlement.”

  That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: “They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention....It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences.” They knew the rules. “Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.”

  By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint.” They didn’t know how to get their way, or how to “customize”—using Lareau’s wonderful term—whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes.

  In one telling scene, Lareau describes a visit to the doctor by Alex Williams, a nine-year-old boy, and his mother, Christina. The Williamses are wealthy professionals.

  “Alex, you should be thinking of questions you might want to ask the doctor,” Christina says in the car on the way to the doctor’s office. “You can ask him anything you want. Don’t be shy. You can ask anything.”

  Alex thinks for a minute, then says, “I have some bumps under my arms from my deodorant.” Christina: “Really? You mean from your new deodorant?” Alex: “Yes.” Christina: “Well, you should ask the doctor.”

  Alex’s mother, Lareau writes, “is teaching that he has the right to speak up”—that even though he’s going to be in a room with an older person and authority figure, it’s perfectly all right for him to assert himself. They meet the doctor, a genial man in his early forties. He tells Alex that he is in the ninety-fifth percentile in height. Alex then interrupts:

  ALEX: I’m in the what?

  DOCTOR: It means that you’re taller than more than ninety-five out of a hundred young men when they’re, uh, ten years old.

  ALEX: I’m not ten.

  DOCTOR: Well, they graphed you at ten. You’re—nine years and ten months. They—they usually take the closest year to that graph.

  Look at how easily Alex interrupts the doctor—“I’m not ten.” That’s entitlement: his mother permits that casual incivility because she wants him to learn to assert himself with people in positions of authority.

  THE DOCTOR TURNS TO ALEX: Well, now the most important question. Do you have any questions you want to ask me before I do your physical?

  ALEX: Um...only one. I’ve been getting some bumps on my arms, right around here (indicates underarm).

  DOCTOR: Underneath?

  ALEX: Yeah.

  DOCTOR: Okay. I’ll have to take a look at those when I come in closer to do the checkup. And I’ll see what they are and what I can do. Do they hurt or itch?

  ALEX: No, they’re just there.

  DOCTOR: Okay, I’ll take a look at those bumps for you.

  This kind of interaction simply doesn’t happen with lower-class children, Lareau says. They would be quiet and submissive, with eyes turned away. Alex takes charge of the moment. “In remembering to raise the question he prepared in advance, he gains the doctor’s full attention and focuses it on an issue of his choosing,” Lareau writes.

  In so doing, he successfully shifts the balance of power away from the adults and toward himself. The transition goes smoothly. Alex is used to being treated with respect. He is seen as special and as a person worthy of adult attention and interest. These are key characteristics of the strategy of concerted cultivation. Alex is not showing off during his checkup. He is behaving much as he does with his parents—he reasons, negotiates, and jokes with equal ease.

  It is important to understand where the particular mastery of that moment comes from. It’s not genetic. Alex Williams didn’t inherit the skills to interact with authority figures from his parents and grandparents the way he inherited the color of his eyes. Nor is it racial: it’s not a practice specific to either black or white people. As it turns out, Alex Williams is black and Katie Brindle is white. It’s a cultural advantage. Alex has those skills because over the course of his young life, his mother and father—in the manner of educated families—have painstakingly taught them to him, nudging and prodding and encouraging and showing him the rules of the game, right down to that little rehearsal in the car on the way to the doctor’s office.

  When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he’s wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because—and perhaps this is even more critical—the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.

  4.

  This is the advantage that Oppenheimer had and that Chris Langan lacked. Oppenheimer was raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, the son of an artist and a successful garment manufacturer. His childhood was the embodiment of concerted cultivation. On weekends, the Oppenheimers would go driving in the countryside in a chauffeur-driven Packard. Summers he would be taken to Europe to see his grandfather. He attended the Ethical Culture School on Central Park West, perhaps the most progressive school in the nation, where, his biographers write, students were “infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world.” When his math teacher realized he was bored, she sent him off to do independent work.

  As a child, Oppenheimer was passionate about rock collecting. At the age of twelve, he began corresponding with local geologists about rock formations he had seen in Central Park, and he so impressed them that they invited him to give a lecture before the New York Mineralogical Club. As Sherwin and Bird write, Oppenheimer’s parents responded to their son’s hobby in an almost textbook example of concerted cultivation:

  Dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults, Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a twelve-year-old. Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as J. Robert Oppenheimer. The startled audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium: a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so that the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern. Shy and awkward, Robert nevertheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty round of applause.

  Is it any wonder Oppenheimer handled the challenges of his life so brilliantly? If you are someone whose father has made his way up in the business world, then you’ve seen, firsthand, what it means to negotiate your way out of a tight spot. If you’re someone who was sent to the Ethical Culture School, then you aren’t going to be intimidated by a row of Cambridge dons arrayed in judgment against you. If you studied physics at Harvard, then you know how to talk to an army general who did engineering just down the road at MIT.

  Chris Langan, by contrast, had only the bleakness of Bozeman, and a home domina
ted by an angry, drunken stepfather. “[Jack] Langan did this to all of us,” said Mark. “We all have a true resentment of authority.” That was the lesson Langan learned from his childhood: distrust authority and be independent. He never had a parent teach him on the way to the doctor how to speak up for himself, or how to reason and negotiate with those in positions of authority. He didn’t learn entitlement. He learned constraint. It may seem like a small thing, but it was a crippling handicap in navigating the world beyond Bozeman.

  “I couldn’t get any financial aid either,” Mark went on. “We just had zero knowledge, less than zero knowledge, of the process. How to apply. The forms. Checkbooks. It was not our environment.”

  “If Christopher had been born into a wealthy family, if he was the son of a doctor who was well connected in some major market, I guarantee you he would have been one of those guys you read about, knocking back PhDs at seventeen,” his brother Jeff says. “It’s the culture you find yourself in that determines that. The issue with Chris is that he was always too bored to actually sit there and listen to his teachers. If someone had recognized his intelligence and if he was from a family where there was some kind of value on education, they would have made sure he wasn’t bored.”