Gladwell's Essay

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Gladwell's essay

In "The Power of Context," Malcolm Gladwell interprets how positions leverage demeanour of human beings. In term paper "Second Proms and Second Primaries," Lani Guinier talks about some of determinants of reduced voter turnout amidst very dark community in Phillips County, Arkansas. Finally Eric Schlosser, in term paper deserving "Global Realization," boasts the extending interpretation of McDonalds' increasing international reach. Gladwell would interpret origin of reduced voter turnout in Arkansas and fatness in United States with broken windows theory. (Pressley 50)

The broken windows idea can be clarified utilising this demonstration, "If the window is broken and left unrepaired, persons strolling by will resolve that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken..."(Gladwell, 289) This entails that if there is the difficulty that is left unanswered it will extend to disperse until it has initiated the sense of anarchy inside scenario. Gladwell would then trial and explain these difficulties by repairing position in wants of repairing problem. (Altman 12)

The truth, underneath all rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, hefty vehicles as protected: they found solace in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In the thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, for instance, driver of the Cadillac Escalade— G.M. counterpart to Lincoln Navigator—has the sixteen-per-cent chance of the life-threatening head injury, the twenty-per-cent chance of the life-threatening chest injury, and the thirty-five-per-cent chance of the leg injury. (Pressley 50)

The same numbers in the Ford Windstar minivan—the vehicle engineered from ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto the pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent. )But this yearn for security wasn't the reasonable calculation. It was the feeling. Over past decade, the number of major automakers in America have relied on services of the French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond rational—what he calls "cortex"—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses. And what Rapaille resolved from countless, intensive meetings with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about security they were conceiving about certain thing that reached into their deepest unconscious. "The No. 1feeling is that everything suraarounding you should be aaround and supple, and should give," Rapaille told me. "There should be air sacks everywhere. Then there's this idea that you need to be up high. (Altman 12)

That's the contradiction, because people who buy these S.U.V.s know at cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of the rollover. But at reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel protected because you are higher and override and gaze down. That you can look down is psychologically the very powerful notion. And what was key ...
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