Intelligence 37 (2009) 323–324

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Intelligence

Book review

Goodnews,badnews,andfallacy:AreviewofOutlier: Thestoryof success,MalcomGladwell, Little Brown, New York (2008)

Malcom Gladwell's Outliers discusses the psychological andsocial characteristics that produce personal success. Gladwell,along with the readers of this journal, think intelligence is oneof these characteristics. However he has a different view of therole of intelligence than we do. Gladwell is a credible critic, hehas a good track record for discussing social science topics. LikeSteven J. Gould'sMismeasure of Man, Outliers could do more toshape popular conceptions of intelligence than any tenvolumesof this journal.We should considerwhat Gladwell believes, andthe style of his argument.

Gladwell generalizes from vignettes. Most of the peopleGladwell describes are successful but not famous. Anexception is Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates III, so I will useGladwell's ‘Gates Story’ to illustrate the style of argument.

Gates was a college dropout…fromHarvard. His father andmother were well-to-do civic leaders in Seattle. Gatesattended an outstanding preparatory school that providedhim with a computer terminal at a time when such supportwas unusual. Gates and his friend Paul Allen worked harddeveloping this opportunity. They gained sub rosa access toUniversity of Washington computing laboratories (includingone I directed, although I did not meet him). He also camealong at the right time. The micro-computer revolution beganjust as Gates went to Harvard. Someone was going to providethe operating system and business software for thosemachines. Gates succeeded because he had the work ethicand the connections needed to position himself at the righttime. Gladwell sees this as an example of some intelligence,good connections, fortunate timing, and awillingness towork.

Two of Gladwell's less famous cases are a successfullawyer and a successful businessman, both from the NewYork's immigrant Jewish community of the early 20thcentury. Generalizing again, Gladwell concludes that theJewish immigrants, from European small-business back-grounds, had developed the skills and work attitudes neededin the changing business and legal worlds of the 1930s and1940s. Gladwell contrasts this to the Irish and Italiancommunities who, he says, came from peasant backgroundsand did not possess the needed skills and attitudes. Gladwellalso takes swipes at the “old style” Anglo-derived firms that,in his opinion, did not possess the intellectual nimbleness toreact to the changing business climate.

doi:10.1016/j.intell.2009.03.003

I wonder what the biographers of the 1930s financierJoseph Kennedy and the banker A.P. Giannini, or for thatmatter, Bill Gates' biographers, think about this reasoning.

Gladwell ckauns that intelligence is important, up to an IQof 120, but not beyond that point. What you really need issocial support, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the willingnessto put in the 10,000 hrs of practice that are characteristic ofexpert performance. You also have to be in the right place atthe right time. Lucky is good.

From the perspective of an intelligence researcher, Gladwellgot something right, got something wrong, and raised inter-esting questions that we should think about. How and why hereached his conclusions is as interesting as the conclusions are.

Gladwell is right about situational support. There isexcellent psychological research showing that people oftenattribute success and failure to the person when situationalconstraints are dictating results. I suspect that intelligenceresearchers tend to undervalue situational determinants,because we fixate on a personal trait, intelligence. We oughtto spend some time investigating situations where intelli-gence measures fail to predict success. Are the failures due tosituational and cultural factors, to non-cognitive traits, or toaspects of cognition that the tests fail to capture? Saying“Well, prediction is probabilistic” is a cop-out.

Gladwell stresses the importance of culture in readying aperson to seize opportunities. He offers examples rangingfrom Chinese rice culture to a culture of (macho) honor in theAmerican South. I did not find his arguments convincing, but Iwas convinced that we need to think more about how cultureinfluences cognition.

Gladwell is dead wrong about IQ not predicting successbeyond the 120 level. He does not skate on thin ice, he fallsthrough. He bases his claim largely on the famous Termanstudies, which he describes as an exercise in picking peoplewho had favorable economic backgrounds, and which he (ashave others) derides for not having had a ‘true genius,’ justbright people.

I suspect that Gladwell read about the Terman studies(and especially sociologists' criticism of them), rather thanreading the studies themselves. The culminating work onTerman's participants, written as they approached the end oftheir lives, makes it quite clear that, as a group, theyexperienced success far more than would be expected solelyon the basis of their socioeconomic background (Holohan &Sears, 1995). Terman found that his participants with IQs over150 had greater success in life than the rest of the giftedgroup. More recently, the same thing has been shown in

324 Book review

studies of mathematically precocious youth. (Lubinski et al.,2006), and of the post-college careers of graduates from eliteinstitutions (Bowen & Bok, 1998, Table 5.1).

Gladwell got it wrong about high IQ, but so have others.The same error was made by over seventy very senioruniversity administrators and prominent scientific leaders, ina letter to SCIENCE about the lack of women in science andengineering (Muller et al., 2005).

Gladwell sees intelligence as something that developsautonomously from the environment, and regards a test scoreas synonymous with intelligence as a concept. Most, butprobably not all, intelligence researchers believe that intelli-gence is developed biological potential. A test is a partiallyvalid indicator of cognitive potential at the time of the testing.This view is explicit in the writing of people such as (inalphabetical order) Ackerman, Ceci, Hunt (I hope!), Plominand Sternberg, among others.

The problem is that some intelligence researchers act as ifthey agreed with Boring (1923) that intelligence is what thetests test, and they over-interpret test scores. Terman entitledhis series of reports The genetic study of genius, without anyevidence whatsoever for genetics. Terman was not the last tomake such an unsupported claim. (Names withheld to protectthe guilty, for I want to make a general point, not attack aspecific villain.) Oversimplifications lead to counter argu-ments such as Gladwell's. We have a communicationproblem.

Gladwell argues by generalizing from stories. The plural of‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’ Arguments based on anecdotes ignore

counterexamples, and invite the error of arguing that aconsequent implies an antecedent. Gladwell tries to demon-strate that, given success, a person's background is likely tohave certain characteristics. Ergo, the characteristics causedthe success. This is fallacious reasoning. The real question is“Given certain social backgrounds, what is the probability ofsuccess?” However…

Gladwell could not sell books unless the public acceptedthe fallacy as legitimate reasoning. We have some educatingto do.

References

Boring, E. G. (1923, June 6). Intelligence as the tests test it. New Republic, 35,35−37.

Bowen, W. G., & Bok, D. (1998). The shape of the river: Long-term consequencesof considering race in college and university admissions. Princeton NJ:Princeton U. Press.

Holohan, C. K., & Sears, R. R. (1995). The gifted group in later maturity.Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press.

Lubinski, D., Benbow, C. P., Webb, R. M., & Bleske-Rechek, A. (2006). Trackingexceptional human capital over two decades. Psychological Science, 17(3), 194−199.

Muller, C.B., et al. (72 additional signatures), (2005). Gender differences andperformance in science. Science, 307 (Feb. 18), 1043.

Earl HuntDepartment of Psychology, University of Washington,

Seattle, WA 98195, United StatesE-mail address: ehunt@u.washington.edu.

28 February 2009