You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in th… - Malcolm Gladwell

When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in muscular changes so fleeting that they can only be captured with electronic sensors. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they’ll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy. We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.

Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.

Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.