How much emphasis is placed on social class, and what role does it play in helping you understand human motivation and aspiration?

Social class, race, and gender are all addressed in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Gladwell makes the claim that we tend to make snap judgments in a few seconds based on "thin slices" of information. Rather than taking time to learn about people and evaluate them based on a wide range of metrics, we tend to categorize them almost immediately, based on appearance, membership in particular groups (age, race, class), or subliminal cues such as body...

Social class, race, and gender are all addressed in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Gladwell makes the claim that we tend to make snap judgments in a few seconds based on "thin slices" of information. Rather than taking time to learn about people and evaluate them based on a wide range of metrics, we tend to categorize them almost immediately, based on appearance, membership in particular groups (age, race, class), or subliminal cues such as body language. For Gladwell, this process tends to reinforce stereotypes. For example, a real estate agent might see someone dressed in a way typical of a certain economic class and use that information to curate a selection of properties to show that person. Gladwell argues that much of this behavior is not so much conscious discrimination as a hardwired need to make quick and efficient decisions, but he also suggests that we can consciously work to counteract such biases.

Our own stereotyped thinking can also lead us to use information clustered around such thin slices to limit our aspirations. We might make the judgment that our families are "professional" and thus we should not consider careers in skilled trades such as plumbing or carpentry, even if we really prefer working with our hands to sitting in an office, or we might apply to a local community college rather than an Ivy League school despite stellar grades, because we associate certain universities with certain class markers.