STRANGER DANGER
Author Malcolm Gladwell wonders why we assume people are telling us the truth
Talking to Strangers:
What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown
Malcolm Gladwell has written several bestselling books since The Tipping Point in 2000, and by now his method is well known.
He begins by translating a body of psychological research into breezy prose, then draws connections to contemporary and historical events that demonstrate the psychological principles in action. Depending on the reader, these connections are either entertaining and insightful or wild and tendentious, even misleading. Talking to Strangers, Gladwell’s exploration of deception and misunderstanding in human communication, is sure to find both types of reader.
Gladwell is impressive in his range of historical conundrums. Why, he asks, was British prime minister Neville Chamberlain completely bamboozled by Adolf Hitler when, in 1938, the rising German leader assured Chamberlain of his benign intentions in Europe? Why did so many intelligent investors trust their fortunes to scheming financier Bernie Madoff? How do missed signals about desire and intimacy turn into date rape? Why are highly trained intelligence officers often oblivious to spies in their ranks? And, most compelling to Gladwell, why does community policing so often go awry, leading to tragedy?
These and many others add up to what Gladwell labels the Stranger Problem.
We are constantly interacting with people we don’t know well, if at all, and Gladwell believes our psychological clumsiness in these situations leads to all misunderstanding and heartache.
He devotes three chapters to the work of Tim Levine, an expert on deception, to illuminate our ineptitude when encountering strangers. For example, one of the psychological concepts to emerge from Levine’s deception studies is “default to truth.”
Given the choice to believe a stranger or not, humans tend overwhelmingly to believe, to trust, to give the benefit of the doubt. This is counterintuitive. It doesn’t make any sense, from an evolutionary point of view, that the human mind would be biased toward such a generosity of spirit. Suspicion and mistrust would seem to be much more adaptive in a dangerous world. Yet Levine’s results, Gladwell says, are unassailable: Everyone from FBI agents to lawyers to intelligence workers opts to believe rather than to question strangers’ claims.
This powerful cognitive bias is reinforced by other psychological tendencies that make it even harder to get a good read on strangers’ intentions. Most notably, he argues, humans expect strangers to be transparent, to reveal their thoughts and emotions in their demeanour, body language and actions. But they don’t — not reliably. People who are nervous and sweaty and otherwise guilty-looking are just as likely to be telling the truth as they are to be lying. And the cool and collected may simply be good at the confidence game.
This “mismatch” is the source of many misunderstandings. Consider Madoff, who had a style that was trustworthy and reassuring, even while he was stealing millions of dollars from investors. His tone and manner were a psychological mismatch with the greedy and felonious mind at work below the surface.
If Gladwell is right, if we are by nature too naively unquestioning, if that’s the core of the Stranger Problem, what’s the solution? How do we muster a bit more skepticism and keep from being conned? How do we get a proper read on others’ intentions in our myriad daily encounters with strangers?
There are no hard lessons here, but the conclusion seems humane. Not by compensating with cynicism and fear, Gladwell says; that only leads to a society of paranoid cynics.
Being overly trustful may have unhappy consequences at times, the author concludes, but abandoning trust as a defence against predation and deception is worse.
The Washington Post