I’m aware that saving face is a thing in Korean culture. But when the cause of the plane crash is a North Korean bomb or a Soviet missile it seems disingenuous to lump that flight into your list about how Koreans save face as they crash their plane. Kind of like you can’t find many examples and have a publisher deadline looming. At least one Korean speaker takes issue with how Gladwell interprets relatively benign cockpit communication. It also doesn’t explain why other cultures that also have saving face as a ‘cultural thing’ don’t have similar problems. When you get down to it plenty of airliners flown by pilots of every nationality have crashed due to miscommunications and pilots being overworked. Its one of the few core reasons airliners crash anymore.

The ferry incident is terrible, but that’s also hardly unique to Korea. Many of the lifeboats on the Titanic launched less than half full because passengers were assured it was safe by crew and thought they’d be better remaining on the ship waiting for rescue.

Gladwell might get more benefit of the doubt if he doesn’t also have a bizarre chapter on how Asians are better at math because rice is hard to grow. He switches very quickly from talking about how rice farming is important to southern China, which he can’t get statistics for, to just that “Asians in general are good at math”. The only study he references (Trends in International Mathematics and Science) lists Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan having higher math scores, none of which are super dependent on rice farming. Thailand and Indonesia are massively dependent on rice farming and performed very poorly on the math study, but Gladwell doesn’t mention that. “Rich countries have better education systems” isn’t a very interesting chapter.