By Michael McGirr
Society
Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know
Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane, $35
Malcolm Gladwell can make a big idea out of little observations by threading them together, often with fishing line that needs to be stronger than it looks. Take his first book, The Tipping Point (2000). It starts with the sudden return to fashion of Hush Puppies after long years in the daggy bin. Why? Bit by bit, Gladwell starts to explain something like a wave theory of culture: economic priorities, crime trends, health fads and Hush Puppies are all subject to cycles of prominence. The crucial moment is the so-called tipping point at which the tide turns from ebb to flow. From small observations, Gladwell creates a theory of social epidemics.
Sylvia Plath and her suicide give Malcolm Gladwell food for thought.Credit:
This approach has been the stock in trade of Gladwell’s career and it has sold a truckload of books. He is a master of ideas as entertainment. His craft is all about the fine detail that others overlook. For years he has written essays for The New Yorker in which peripheral vision allows him to see to the centre of things.
An example is The Ketchup Conundrum, a history of what elsewhere is known as tomato sauce. Gladwell finds statistics about the impact of the invention of squeeze bottles. They were a bonanza for the ketchup business because they allowed little kids, and not their parents, to determine how much sauce was sufficient. Suddenly, we have a window on the high science of consumer exploitation.
Gladwell’s new book, Talking to Strangers, has a familiar energy. This time he is troubled by our proclivity to trust people on the basis of our visceral reaction. For example, he provides statistics to compare the performance of judges with that of a computer when it comes to determining who should be eligible for parole. The judges have the stranger in the room with them; the computer doesn’t. Judges turn out to be far worse at deciding who the recidivists will be.
The same applies to any of us trying to identify a liar. We rely on body language, which is far harder to translate than we assume. Or we ‘‘default to trust’’, the human tendency to take people at face value, which has helped con artists for generations.
Malcolm GladwellCredit:
In some ways, Talking to Strangers seems to contradict the premise of Gladwell’s earlier book, Blink (2005). Blink is subtitled ‘‘the power of thinking without thinking’’ and provides a host of anecdotes and hard research to support the theory of ‘‘thin slicing’’, namely taking a few seconds from any interaction to tell its entire story. Gladwell writes: ‘‘the clues we need to make sense of someone or some social situation are right there on the faces of those in front of us.’’
If you listen to a brief part of an exchange between a doctor and a patient, both strangers to you, it is possible to tell immediately which doctors will be sued for malpractice. It has nothing to do with their medical skill and everything to do with the personal impression they create.
Perhaps Talking to Strangers is intended to be a mirror image of Blink; it certainly seems to present a very different idea of how to interact with the world from which Gladwell harvests his stories. Gladwell can make a superb meal of hors d’oeuvres. He offers a delicacy from here and a snack from there and, before you know it, the reader is replete.
Those familiar with his previous book, David and Goliath, will recognise the eclectic structure of Talking to Strangers, one that is well suited to Gladwell’s discursive purposes. A range of interesting anecdotes and observations may never quite add up to a conclusive argument. But they are engaging enough to get you thinking and, often enough, enjoy the way in which he questions conventional wisdom. Before you can start to raise objections, however, the next plate of tasty little morsels has arrived.
Malcolm Gladwell says Amanda Knox was convicted on the basis of image rather than substance.Credit:
Talking to Strangers uses material from countless sources. It investigates the deceptive use of facial expressions in American sitcom Friends, before moving on to the unfortunate miscarriage of justice in the case of Amanda Knox, who was convicted of involvement in murder on the basis of image not substance. It slips from the prevalence of double agents in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, artfully deceiving the CIA, to the mess Neville Chamberlain made of his personal connections with Adolf Hitler. It is hard to resist Gladwell’s conclusion that Chamberlain would have had more insight if he had never met Hitler.
He then looks at the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda official who was behind 9/11 and who was captured in 2003. Gladwell is granted access to the innermost secrets of this interrogation process and arrives at the powerful conclusion that the more dehumanising an inquiry becomes the less objective value its findings are likely to have.
This is followed by the troubling story of Sylvia Plath, the poet who took her own life in London in 1962, having put her children safely to bed and left a note for her estranged husband, Ted Hughes.
What brings all these disparate but fascinating tales together? It is hard to know if Gladwell has created a pretext to share stories that have, for good reason, claimed his attention or if, on the other hand, he has some genuine existential questions that his stories illuminate. It could be a bit of both but feels more like the former. It is hard to leave this book without the suspicion that the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.
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Gladwell wants us to think about the ways we interact with strangers, a form of activity so broad that no theory or theories are likely to cover every possibility. He starts and ends this book with the story of Sandra Bland who was pulled over by a police officer in Texas in 2015. A couple of days later she died in custody. Bland’s interaction with the 30-year-old white officer, Brian Encinia, was lamentable, to say the least, and initiated a string of appalling and unnecessary consequences. Gladwell remarks, ‘‘If we were willing to engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers – she would not have ended up in a Texas jail cell.’’
Can contact between a white officer in uniform and a black stranger on her way to the store really raise questions about chatting to a stranger on the bus? Maybe it can, but Gladwell tends, in this book, to take a dark path to enlightenment: ‘‘The thing we want to learn from a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumble under our feet … we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth … The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humanity.’’
If we need Hitler, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and an assortment of spies, sex offenders and mistaken judges to help us reach this homely wisdom, then so be it. Humans aren’t as smart as we think. We habitually misunderstand strangers. Gladwell warns us against assuming that a stranger is either a friend or an enemy; indeed, there is good reason to be content that most people are strangers and leave them as such.
The story of Sylvia Plath introduces some of the most interesting insights of Talking to Strangers. Plath thought and wrote a great deal about suicide.
It was something like an obsession for her and, as a result, many people thought it was inevitable. But Gladwell points out that the cause of her death, by carbon monoxide poisoning, was the result of inhaling the old-fashioned ‘‘town gas’’ from her oven. This was an extremely common cause of suicide at the time. A decade later, when natural gas replaced ‘‘town gas’’, ovens were no longer lethal and the suicide rate dropped. From here, Gladwell explains the idea of ‘‘coupling’’. Many suicides are linked to a specific means. Take away the means, and many people do not look for an alternative.
In a way, every stranger is coupled to a place or context. Understand the stranger’s context and they are no longer nearly so strange. That advice is surely worth taking to heart.
Michael McGirr is the dean of faith at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne and author of Books That Saved My Life (Text).