In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the onetime associate of Sigmund Freud who died more than 60 years ago. If you think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Those are his coinages, too. Persona, archetype, synchronicity: Jung, Jung, Jung.
As many, many, many critics have pointed out, Malcolm Gladwell has built a brilliant career—staff writer at the New Yorker, multiple New York Times bestsellers, an ambitious (if embattled) podcast network, a highly lucrative sideline in speaking engagements—out of boiling down the research of social scientists into digestible rules of thumb that usually run counter to conventional wisdom.