THE POWER OF ONE ATTITUDE
A little over fifty years ago a Johns Hopkins professor gave a group of graduate students this assignment: Go to the slums. Take 200 boys, between the ages of 12 and 16, and investigate their background and environment. Then predict their chances for the future. The students, after consulting social statistics, talking to the boys, and compiling much data, concluded that 90 percent of the boys would spend some time in jail. Twenty- five years later another group of graduate students was given the job of testing the prediction. They went back to the slum area. Some of the boys — now men — were still there, a few had died, some had moved away, but they got in touch with 180 of the original 200. They found that only four of the group had ever been sent to jail. Why was it that these men, who had lived in a breeding place of crime, had such a surprisingly…
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