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Summary Of Troublemakers By Malcolm Gladwell

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In the New Yorker article, “Troublemakers” by Malcolm Gladwell a claim is made about people who are quick to make bad generalizations, follow stereotypes and profile. Gladwell introduces the article with a horrific story of a vicious Pitbull attack on a two-and-a half year-old boy, resulting in a law being passed to ban all pitbulls. This issue is important because this ban on pitbulls means they are unnecessarily being punished for traits they may or may not have. Just like a person may be profiled and punished for a crime they may or may not have committed. According to Gladwell ,we all tend to make decisions based off of inaccurate stereotypes like “overweight middle-aged men to heart-attack risk” or “young men to bad driving”(3). …show more content…

He starts off by telling a heartbreaking story of a child who is gruesomely attacked by three unsupervised pitbulls. He emphasizes the struggle of trying to fight off the dogs and the fatalities of the incident. But how can you be so easily convinced when he leaves out who the owner of these dogs are, what provoked them, and why they were so untamed? His goal to evoke your emotion and to empathize with the boy and his family is successful by leaving out those specific details. The Pitbull’s are then compared to “Tasmanian devils”(1) which in reality are beloved creatures that are only harmful when provoked by a predator. Another faulty analogy Gladwell includes, “just as we wouldn’t let a great white shark in a swimming pool”(1), is meant to make you agree with the argument but it only confuses you further because sharks can only survive in salt water not a chlorine infused …show more content…

He dedicates an entire paragraph to prove that you cannot just generalize based off of one trait. His excessive use of semicolons, “arrived late at night; arrived early in the morning; arrived in the afternoon”(18), is meant to make a distinct point that a person can have many habits or traits and just because they have the one trait you find suspicious that doesn't mean they are a suspect. This is what is called a category and trait problem. Gladwell makes this relationship between a category and trait to emphasize how misleading they are. If we refer back to the story of the pit bull attack on two year old Jayden Clairoux, we remember that some details were left out. Gladwell includes these details at the end so that he can change the reader’s perspective. We learn that the three vicious pit bulls were actually neglected dogs to owner Shridev Cafe. Cafe was an aggressive man, “charged with domestic assault, and, in another incident, involving a street brawl, with aggravated assault”(28). Therefore, his dogs developed his behavior and violent

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