The death rate in the tiny Italian immigrant town of Roseto, Pennsylvania was 30 to 35 percent lower than the rest of the population across all major causes of death. Why, researchers wondered?
"They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on that particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures... [T]he Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world." - Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell also put it well that "the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are."
No comments:
Post a Comment