Prairie Hills Covenant Church

The New Yorker recently featured an article that explored the proliferation of school shootings. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, examined how group dynamics influence individual decisions. Gladwell looked at the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Forty years ago Granovetter published an essay that addressed the paradox of: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” He was curious why people make decisions that are out of alignment with their preferences, beliefs, and values. In short, Granovetter concluded that our individual decisions are significantly influenced by the decisions of others. In a very deep and meaningful way we make personal decisions in response to the community in which we go about life. We have all changed our mind about what to order at a restaurant as a result of what others at our table or neighboring tables had ordered. The same factors at work in that inconsequential decision are also at work in our important de