Generalization In Malcolm Gladwell's Essay

Generalization is used as a weapon to justify hasty judgements or actions executed by society and its individuals. To generalize is to make something more widespread or common, according to the dictionary. A girl who is blond, part of the middle class, and white. That sentence alone creates a broad generalization about who I am as a person. When society needs to make a quick decision about something or someone we tend to veer towards generalizing or even stereotyping because it’s easier than trying to distinguish specific aspects of that decision.

Malcolm Gladwell, a writer for The New Yorker wrote the essay “Troublemakers”, published June 6th, 2016 on The New Yorker magazine’s website. In this essay we see his argument that over-generalizing

Malcolm Gladwell deviates from his argument about Pit Bulls and goes off on a tangent towards the police force. In this deviation Malcolm quotes the New York Police Commissioner new plan of profiling that went from “a list of forty- three suspicious traits” to “a list of six broad criteria.” Justifying his example argues the point you can use a broad generalization effectively as long as it stays away from race and turns more towards environmental characteristics. Environmental characteristics make a more efficient way to profile because it doesn’t give you exact criteria like someone’s race, instead it gives you a wide variety of options that enable you to create a more justified answer. Another argument made by Gladwell is “with the right kind of generalization” you can prevent a negative consequence from happening. This argues that no matter what kind of generalization you use there will be a consequence, but there might be a positive consequence as well like the prevention of more dog attacks from happening, or lowering New York’s crime rate. At the end of the essay he leaves the comment, “It’s always easier just to ban a breed”. It implies that as a society we shy away from proper generalization because of what could be implied as laziness. This claim drives his essay’s thesis because in all of his examples he gave reasons on what a better generalization can do to the problem in question yet, we chose to ignore the extra work needed to be put in correcting a major generalization such as trying to identify a Muslim terrorist. It is true, as a society, we use generalizations to create a shortcut when dealing with broad decisions especially when reacting to a moment of crisis. In all of Malcom’s examples the generalization was created because of a crisis happening at that moment. The true social issue is as a society we have created a way of thinking that had very