Gladwell says that University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett "basically gave me my view of the world."
"The Person and the Situation" is the book that most affected him. He read it in one sitting in the summer of 1996.
In his new foreword for the book, Gladwell gave a hint as to why it's so special:
"It offers a way of re-ordering ordinary experience. It argues that when we perceive the actions and intentions of others, we tend to make mistakes. We see things that aren't there and we make predictions that we ought not to make: we privilege the 'person' and we discount the influence of the 'situation.' It speaks, in short, to the very broadest questions of human perception."
Gladwell says that if you read that book, then you'll see the template of the genre that his books belong to.