Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most popular authors in the world. His previous titles include: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath. Talking to Strangers is his first book in six years. The gap is mostly because he commands six-figure speaking fees and has gotten heavily involved in podcasting, particularly with Revisionist History.
Gladwell is a master storyteller. He’s able to weave social science and popular culture around a general theme better than anyone I’m aware of. This book is much like his early work but perhaps a bit darker. Like his earlier books, it weaves stories from a broad background into his main theme.
The books starts and ends with the story of Sandra Bland, the African-American woman who was yanked out of her car for smoking a cigarette while pulled over. Three days later she committed suicide in jail.
The first part of the book deals with a couple of historical topics. First was Castro’s Cuba and how every CIA spy in Cuba was actually a double agent, loyal to Cuba. Fidel Castro was able to outsmart the CIA. In East Germany the situation was just as bad.
The other historical example was Adolf Hitler during the run up to World War Two. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of England, had made a deal with Hitler before the war. It was only months before Hitler broke every promise. The only other Allied lead to meet Hitler before the war was the Canadian Prime Minister, who found Hitler delightful. How had Hitler managed to fool almost everyone?
It turns out humans are pretty good at detecting the truth. Probably because we “default to truth.” We’re trusting and our default is, people are telling the truth. And usually people do tell the truth. But a really good liar is very hard for us to spot. Even detectives, the police, TSA officers and judges are terrible at detecting lying. We think we can look at someone’s face, look them in the eye, and know whether they are telling the truth or not. It turns out, when tested, we can’t.
Another really good liar was Bernie Madoff. There was one guy who knew Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme and reported him, repeatedly, to the authorities. But when pointedly questioned, Bernie Madoff could fool anybody. And it turns out that lie detectors aren’t much better than people.
Other examples of “default to truth” are illustrated by Gladwell comparing and contrasting the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal at Penn State with the Larry Nassar scandal at Michigan State. In the case of Sandusky, the victims kept changing their stories and remained friends with Sandusky for years or even decades after their abuse. With Nassar, he was only brought down when child pornography was found on his computer. In both cases, the parents defaulted to the most likely explanation—everything was normal—not the worst, until the truth couldn’t be denied.
The other things we’re really bad at, beside being poor at identifying a really smooth liar, is identifying someone who is telling the truth but doesn’t act innocent. The example in the book is Seattle girl Amanda Knox. I didn’t know much about this case until reading this book. It turns out there was no evidence that Amanda Knox had participated in the murder of her roommate. But Knox was very nervous when questioned and was a very quirky girl. She had been a sheltered misfit most of her life. Her behavior was always odd, but especially when view by skeptical Italian law enforcement.
Besides the “default to truth” point made by Gladwell, there are two other main points in the book. The first of these is that some behaviors are “coupled.” For example, the common belief is that if someone is intent on committing suicide, they will find a way. This theory is called “displacement,” but this accepted wisdom is wrong. In fact, suicide is coupled with the means to commit suicide.
One of the examples in the book is the Golden Gate Bridge, the most common site to commit suicide in the world. Once anti-suicide nets were installed, there were a lot of people who tried to kill themselves but didn’t succeed. Most don’t attempt suicide by other means. There is another interesting example from England, where the change from a toxic gas in homes to a non-toxic gas showed a marked decrease in the suicide rate.
The final main point in the book is that crime is concentrated is a very few places in each city. If police patrol more in these areas, the conventional wisdom is that the criminals will just move somewhere else. While some of this happens, the conventional wisdom is wrong again. The specific example in the book is a crime map of Seattle, so we can all check for ourselves. The general approach of police is to do lots of random stops, mostly of innocent people, and then try to look for signals that people might be criminals. It is ineffective and mostly just angers those the police are supposed to protect. We end up with Sandra Blands.
We must all talk to strangers; we couldn’t go though life otherwise. We also must default to truth, otherwise we would probably never get out of bed. But the lesson of the book is that we need to accept the we’re really bad at deciphering strangers, especially good liars and bad truth-tellers, and we need to accept those limits.
No comments yet.