Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 6/10This is an exploration of the assumptions and goof ups we make when dealing with people we don’t know.
It’s a long but fascinating journey, stopping off at prewar appeasement, pedophilia, espionage, the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox and Bernie Madoff cases, suicide and Sylvia Plath, torture and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before coming to the conclusion.
“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy”
Key points
The parents of the patients of Larry Nassar (a doctor with the US women’s gymnastics team) did not believe their children when, afterwards, they complained of Nassar’s intrusive examinations. Nassar turned out to be a profile abuser. But he was inadvertently protected by parents because we often assume people – especially those in positions of power – are acting in accordance with our expectations i.e. honestly and diligently.
Bernie Madoff got away with his shocking Ponzi scheme for so long because no one could believe the truth. And when a few sounded alarm bells, the authorities chose to dismiss their concerns because they seemed too incredible. I like this story a lot because the hero who dug deep and unearthed the scandal (Harry Markopoulos) was also a CFA charter holder!
Gladwell says that many of us have an inflated opinion of our ability to assess people. The fact is that research suggests that we are not as objective as we think we are, and are therefore prone to misinterpret comments, intonations, facial expressions, and gestures. Also, we are often blind to the fact that people who come from a different background to ours may communicate in unfamiliar ways.
So, we have several problems to deal with when talking to strangers.
THE DEFAULT TO TRUTH PROBLEM
We do not behave like sober-minded scientists, slowing gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite.
We start by believing. We default to truth. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.
Of course, there are excellent evolutionary and social reasons why we’re inclined more towards trust than suspicion. Because if it was suspicion that formed the basis of all interaction between strangers, we would never have learned to cooperate on such a vast and complex scale.
THE TRANSPARENCY PROBLEM
Transparency is a myth.
How people feel inside often does NOT perfectly match how they appear on the outside, which means we are misjudging other's intentions.
When we are confronted with a stranger, we have to substitute a stereotype for direct experience. Because it’s easier and faster and acts like a thumb rule.
But while that works sometimes, often that stereotyping can go very wrong.
However, while this strategy for dealing with strangers is deeply flawed, it is also socially necessary.
“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.”
THE MISMATCH PROBLEM
We are bad lie-detectors in those situations when the person we're judging is mismatched.
A mismatch is where someone's level of truthfulness does NOT correspond with the way they look. You may think someone is honest based on how they look and act but in actuality they are lying, and you can't tell the difference.
It turns out that a large majority of us are pretty bad at spotting liars. Even supposed specialists in the field are not very good at it. A study of New York criminal judges found that they scored about as well as random selection when deciding who should and should not be granted bail.
THE COUPLING PHENOMENON
There's a category of error that has to do with our inability to appreciate the context in which the stranger operates. Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.
For instance, both crime and suicides are coupled - tied to very specific places and contexts. Outside of those places and contexts, the rate of both go down drastically.
Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go wrong with strangers? We of course blame the stranger.
SO, what does Gladwell say we should do?
We shouldn’t penalize each other for defaulting to truth because that would bring human interaction to a grinding halt. We should also accept the limits of our ability to decode strangers.
But there is hope and we should be clear about what we can do. There are clues to making sense of the stranger. But picking up these clues requires humility and thoughtfulness and a willingness to look beyond just the person and take time and place and context into account.
What I liked
Well-written, very fluent and conversational as one would expect from a top bestselling author
Decent advice on truly getting to know others
At a time when the world feels dangerously polarized, a book examining the varying ways we misinterpret or fail to communicate with one another feels essential and timely
The book has a raft of gripping tales that he uses to divvy up fascinating observations about how we engage with strangers.
What I didn’t like
Gladwell can justly be accused of oversimplification. Gladwell also acts as a great mystifier, imposing unnecessary complexity on the everyday stuff of life. This, not coincidentally, is the method of pop social science, on whose rickety findings Gladwell has built his reputation as a public intellectual.
This book has very few important things to say. It is a compendium of interesting crime cases and celebrated moments from history and popular culture, ranging from Hitler to Friends to 9/11 and a whole load of controversial court cases, with some examination of suicide as a diversion. There don't seem to be any startling insights.
There is no unifying thesis. Instead he leads us into culs-de-sac that even so smooth a talker as Malcolm Gladwell can’t charm his way out of.
Gladwell describes the success of spies from Castro’s Cuba that fooled even the most battle-tested CIA officers. But this isn’t much of a “puzzle”. The spectacular incompetence of Western intelligence agencies is old news by now, given their decades-long misreading of the Soviet economy, Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent WMD, shiploads of undetected moles and double agents etc.
The second puzzle-that’s-not-really-a-puzzle: “Why are people who know the stranger deceived when others who don’t know the stranger aren’t?” He cites the story of Chamberlain, the prewar British PM who believed that a few chats with Hitler might avert war with Nazi Germany. The only high-ranking statesman who was loudly skeptical was Winston Churchill. And Churchill had never met Hitler.
But the difference had nothing to do with who met whom. Churchill had a better grasp of European history, a more realistic understanding of tyrants, and a wider and more imaginative view of the human depravities.
Finally, after weaving a confusing tapestry of anecdotes, at the very end Gladwell spends a miserly 2 pages (!!) saying what we should do about all he just taught us. That is both abrupt and inadequate.
Overall, poor research and facile explanations all packaged together beautifully and seductively to deliver an altogether empty experience.
“The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted. The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers.”
Conclusion
Strangers are not easy. We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues.
We should be cautious when we decide who our friends are as opposed to who is likely to stab us in the back. Too often we are dead wrong.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.