HARD TO TRUST
MALCOLM GLADWELL PROMOTES HIMSELF MORE THAN THE TRUTH
Gladwell, through his stories, teaches us to not berate ourselves if we don’t always trust someone
—G. Krishnan
Why do we believe some people but not others? How do spies go undetected for years? Can we believe the 9/11 suspects who concoct tales when deprived of sleep? Malcolm Gladwell delivers yet another racy book in which he raises all these questions and analyses how we interact with strangers—although he never quite tells you who a stranger is.
Like most of this author’s works, Talking to Strangers is a collection of pop-psych interpretations of headlines over the years. He populates it with stories about a student accused of killing her roommate in Italy, the tragic consequence of aggressive policing, Hitler’s charisma and Fidel Castro’s brilliant infiltration of the US government.
Gladwell says he interviewed numerous people and pored over research papers for three years to produce Talking to Strangers. What he has done is cherry-pick data to produce a questionable analysis of an old thesis— that in modern society, we defer to the truth, or that we believe that people are usually telling the truth. Except that we don’t always. That’s why we believe doctors but not used-car salesmen. A smiling person could be lying. A shiftyeyed person with a stammer could be telling the truth.
A college athlete rapes an unconscious woman, which Gladwell blames not on a character flaw but on alcoholinduced myopia. Yet, thousands of college males in the world get plastered every weekend without raping women. An African-American woman trying to pick up her life gets stopped by a white police officer for a minor traffic offence, is arrested at gunpoint and commits suicide while in custody. Gladwell doesn’t consider it racial profiling, and instead wonders how intimidated the officer must have been by the motorist arguing about her rights.
The tireless self-promoter relies on a tried-and-tested formula of random anecdotes. In Tipping Point, we learn that a critical mass is required for things to go viral; in Blink that we don’t always make rational decisions; and in Outliers that being a genius takes 10,000 hours of hard work. In Talking..., we learn that we shouldn’t berate ourselves if we don’t always trust someone and that we cannot always decipher what a stranger is thinking. Thanks to the ‘Guru for the Brain Dead’, as one reviewer called him, we have fancy names for what we already know of our behaviour. ■