When you are on board an aircraft, "This is the captain speaking" may well sound more reassuring than a message from the first officer. Yet crashes happen far more often when the captain, rather than the co-pilot, is flying the aircraft. This is counter-intuitive, since captains almost always have more flying experience than co-pilots.rnThe reason, says New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell in an alarming chapter of Outliers, is cultural. When the captain is flying, the first officer tends to defer, even when he or she suspects danger, while the captain does not hesitate in seizing the controls from the co-pilot.rnSo what is going on? A chapter called "The ethnic theory of planerncrashes" looks at the widely varying safety records of national carriers. Borrowing from a 1994 Boeing report, Gladwell invokes psychologist Geert Hofstede's "power distance index", a concept designed to express the strength of hierarchies in workplaces. The five countries with the strongest hierarchies are Brazil, South Korea, Morocco, Mexico and the Philippines; the least hierarchical are the US, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
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