Analysis Of Seven Seconds In The Bronx By Malcom Gladwell

Perception is just one of the ways in which humans can attempt to understand all that we claim to know. Put simply, perception is defined as our entire understanding of things, including our opinions. The way we perceive our surroundings is swayed by several factors, including past experiences, common sense realism, bias, and even the context in which an event is to occur. Malcom Gladwell’s chapter concerning the Bronx shooting from his book Blink illustrates the idea that many factors - along with a common paradigm between the officers - can influence ones perception of reality.
In Seven Seconds in the Bronx, Gladwell describes the event of the shooting of an innocent immigrant, Amadou Diallo, as a result of inaccurate perception by the responsible …show more content…
Since it was already expected that Diallo was some form of criminal, the officers took this as just something further to support their assumptions. As he reached the door, the officers described him “’digging’ into his pocket”. Though the officers did not have any real idea as to why he could be searching in his pockets, from past experiences with other criminals, they assumed it was for a gun. Diallo was frightened, becoming progressively agitated, and this made the officers nervous as well. One of the officers Sean Carroll said, “And as he pulled the object, all I could see was a top – it looked like the side of a black gun. My prior experience and training, my prior arrests, dictated to me that this person was pulling a gun”. Carroll believed this case with Diallo would be much the same to so many of his past experiences. He experienced confirmation bias in that he noticed something black and instantly viewed it as a gun, simply to confirm his previous assumptions. As the situation became frantic and shots began to fire, one of the officers said that Diallo was crouched, “his knees were bent” and “his back was straight up”. Diallo’s hand was straight out, and the officer had seen an object; the immediate assumption was that it was a gun. The officers felt that Diallo had become a threat, and that they would be the next targets. Without any added …show more content…
A paradigm shift is the alteration of this thought. Altering such a distinct thought is an incredibly difficult task, so paradigm shifts are few and far between. For example, it was thought for numerous years the Earth was flat. It took much research and evidence to modify the popular opinion and make the population accept that the Earth was indeed a sphere. To this day, there are still a number of people who have not accepted this paradigm shift. Though a portion of paradigms are innocent, they can be risky. In the case of the Bronx shooting, the common paradigm between the officers was that Amadou Diallo “looked” guilty, thus he was just like every other criminal. This was all they needed. Rather than stop and think about the situation, the officers simply saw every element in Diallo that supported this paradigm. This common thought is what caused the officers’ altered perception of reality, and is what caused them to murder Diallo without any real