Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

 

I spent a good part of last week reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know (Little, Brown and Company, 2019).  His work draws heavily on facts and data to come to his astute conclusions about human behavior.  The book is insightful and engaging.  He explores coincidences, and he mines the connections that coalesce into sociological events and their consequences.  “Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining the social dysfunction in the United States,” he writes.  That is an accurate assessment in light of recent events.

Throughout the book, Gladwell follows a line of inquiry that can be best summed up:  why do human beings behave the way they do, especially in their interaction and communication?  He examines lying, specifically, “Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”  He looks at specific cases, delving into spies and dictators who create their reality and believe their own lies.  Fidel Castro and Cuban agents played the U.S. diplomatic and espionage communities.  The former Soviet Union did as well.  But, we also played them in return.  Agents became double agents; spies in the upper echelon of the CIA were tasked with finding the identity of a highly placed mole in their midst, which in many cases turned out to be the lead investigator.  A spy in search of a spy who was, in fact, that spy.

Hitler pulled the wool over the eyes of diplomats all over Europe.  He fooled many British aristocrats who advocated for appeasement, much to the detriment and near collapse of their country.  The Brits assumed they had a personal relationship with Hitler, and that he would honor that relationship by not invading the rest of Europe.  Of course, he did precisely the opposite.  All the information these diplomats and spies gathered on Hitler did not tip them off to his intent; instead, they turned a blind eye to his encroachment into other countries until it was almost too late to save themselves.  He concludes with a powerful statement:  “We have…CIA officers who cannot make sense of their spies, judges who cannot make sense of their defendants, and prime ministers who cannot make sense of their adversaries.”

In this study of how we read people, Gladwell says, one of our problems is default to truth.  Despite blatant or subtle evidence, we assume the person we are dealing with is honest and trustworthy.  That is never a safe assumption.  Instead of applying scientific principles to our study of other human beings—gathering evidence and evaluating behaviors until we reach a conclusion—we “start by believing.  And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”  To discard objectivity is ludicrous and dangerous.  Trust no one should be our motto until they have earned our trust.

Gladwell examines a multitude of cases to support his conclusions.  He begins with Sandra Bland, a young Black woman whose arrest for a minor traffic infraction in Texas explodes into a murder.  He follows up with the Jerry Sandusky molestation case, an analysis of the plot of an episode of the NBC sitcom, Friends, the Amanda Knox trial, the Stanford rape case, and the interrogation and subsequent breaking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the most senior Al Qaeda members who masterminded the September 11^th attacks and planned several more attacks around the world.  Then, in the conclusion, he circles back to Sandra Bland to thoroughly analyze the transcription of how a failure to communicate and deescalate the situation led to murder.

The attempt to comprehend the Other misses the nuances, or in some cases, the outright message the person sends in words and behavior.  A person might say one thing, but behavior and speech reveal another intention.  Transparency is key.  Our facial expressions give us away and reveal our attempts at manipulation.  People often display mismatched behaviors—Amanda Knox displayed the characteristics of guilt when she was not.  Bernie Madoff exhibited confidence and steadiness with his clients while his pyramid scheme was collapsing all around him.  Mismatching is another way we fail to pick up on the message conveyed.  The last third of the book, Gladwell devotes to the brain and perception, and how our ability to pick up on specific cues can be altered by alcohol, drugs, and preconceived beliefs.

Talking To Strangers is an in-depth analysis of communication—verbal, physical, behavioral—and how we often miss the cues and tics that indicate a lie or deception.  We give ourselves away with our expressions, our language, and our movements.  Malcolm Gladwell offers strong evidence that nothing is as it seems, and coincidences and incongruences are not to be ignored.  They tell the story even when we insist we are telling the truth.