The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes

In chapter seven of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses something which I never thought about, or even considered a possibility in plane crashes. In "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes", Gladwell suggests and further explains through statistics and transcripts that one's cultural legacy can effect communication and errors that arise from lack of understanding between others. He discusses mitigated speech, where a person leaves out certain words in a statement when they are adressing someone of superiority, so as not to insult someone, or to "sugarcoat" something.  We learn about Avianca flight o52 and how the Pilot and CoPilot's use of mitigated speech, and how their cultural legacy affected their communication, lead to the unfortunate crash of the plane; and this was not the only case in which this happened. He says that " who we are cannot be separated from where we're from- and when we ignore that fact, planes crash"; in this quote he is saying that one's cultural legacy helps define them and that misunderstandings between those of other cultural legacies can lead to conflicts.

I learned that cultural legacies are difficult barriers to break, that one's customs can be entirely different from another's, but undertanding them is key in communication.