See this at: gladwell.typepad.com| Added on 01/26/07

I was in Texas and Oklahoma last week. In the course of the trip, I was in a number of situations where I had to make conversation with people I didn’t know. Looking back on those conversations, I realize that when I was talking to white, male... See more

I was in Texas and Oklahoma last week. In the course of the trip, I was in a number of situations where I had to make conversation with people I didn’t know. Looking back on those conversations, I realize that when I was talking to white, male businessmen and needed to come up something to say, I generally chose the subject of college football. For lack of a better word, let’s call this “conversational discrimination.” I don’t assume that every stranger I meet wants to talk about college football. But I drew an inference about my conversational partner, based on his membership in the “white-male-businessmen of Texas and Oklahoma group” and used that inference to direct my behavior. As Judge Posner reminded us, in his review of Blink, in situations where one doesn’t know a lot about an individual, it may “sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average.” As it turns out, my assumption... See less