Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern… - Malcolm Gladwell

Paul Revere's ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensational, of course. But it is safe to say that word of mouth is-even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns-still the most important form of human communication

"What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a "unified" trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation."

the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point,