Outliers, The Story of Success

4.

That study is strange, isn't itIt's one thing to conclude that groups of people living in circumstances pretty similar to their ancestors' act a lot like their ancestors. But those southerners in the hallway study weren't living in circumstances similar to their British ancestors. They didn't even necessarily have British ancestors. They just happened to have grown up in the South. None of them were herdsmen. Nor were their parents herdsmen. They were living in the late twentieth century, not the late nineteenth century. They were students at the University of Michigan, in one of the northernmost states in America, which meant they were sufficiently cosmopolitan to travel hundreds of miles from the south to go to college. And none of that mattered. They still acted like they were living in nineteenth-century Harlan, Kentucky.

“Your median student in those studies comes from a family making over a hundred thousand dollars, and that's in nineteen ninety dollars,” Cohen says. “The southerners we see this effect with aren't kids who come from the hills of Appalachia. They are more likely to be the sons of upper-middle management Coca-Cola executives in Atlanta. And that's the big question. Why should we get this effect with themWhy should one get it hundreds of years laterWhy are these suburban-Atlanta kids acting out the ethos of the frontier?”*

* 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 Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the econom ic and social and dem o graphic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.“”

So far in Outliers we've seen that success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what 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.“ * How are these kinds of attitudes passed down from generation to generationThrough 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 forfire,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-it for be, narrer for narrow, winder for window, widder for widow, and young-uns for young one." Recognize thatIt'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.

the circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world. The question for the second part of Outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can play the same role. Can we learn something about why people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriouslyI think we can.