Mind maps
Based on The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The whole book
Chapter Five
The Power of Context (part two)
I had two reasons to choose this section. First it emphasises a link between humans and apes. I saw a documentary recently on a BBC channel about apes. They will die out soon. Humans exterminate their forests so they have nowhere to live and also kill many of them. Through poverty and civil wars African people ate lots of them. They became 'bush food' so they hunt them. Of course not the massive gorillas but the baby ones or smaller monkeys. I found it very upsetting because they are so similar to humans. Not just their appearance but their behaviour. Apart from the unnecessary aggression and their ability to live in accordance with nature.
I also found very interesting human's social channel capacity. Lots of businesses don't pay attention to organize their company and they become bankrupt. Relationships in our environment are very important. You can't lead a business successfully if there are tensions between your colleagues. It will come apart.
Bibliography
Chapter five
The Power of Context (part two)
Page 176.
Miller, G A 1956,”The Magical Number Seven”, Psychological Review, vol.63, no.2.
Gladwell using the psychologist’s quote from this essay to explain our natural channel capacity:
“There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous system, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,”
Buys, C J, Larsen, K L 1979, “Human Sympathy Groups”, Psychology Reports, vol.45, pp. 547-553.
A quote from the same page by the memory researcher to explain why our telephone numbers have seven digits:
“Bell wanted a number to be as long as possibly so they could have as large a capacity as possible, but not so long that people couldn’t remember it,”
Page 177.
Washburn S L, Moore R 1973, Ape into man
The biologist explains why our sympathy group (the most important people in our life) is about 12.
“Most of human evolution took place before the advent of agriculture when man lived in small groups, on a face-to-face basis. As a result human biology has evolved as an adaptive mechanism to conditions that have largely ceased to exist. Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively short intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.”
Dunbar R I M 1992, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates,” Journal of human evolution, vol.20, pp. 469-493.
The British anthropologist discovered the link between the size of primates neocortex and the size of the groups they live in.
Page 187.
Wegner D 1991, “Transactive Memory in Close Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol.61, no.6, pp. 923-929.
The psychologist set up a memory test with 59 couples to prove that we create a joint memory system with our other halves or with members of our family.