TALKING TO STRANGERS

‘Why are we so bad at guessing what strangers are really thinking?’

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book finds the Great Explainer turning his characteristic mix of anecdote, sciencey-sounding stuff and narrative pizzazz onto what he calls ‘the Stranger Problem’. Why are we so bad at guessing what strangers are really thinking?

‘Stranger Problem’ or no, most reviewers seem to have Gladwell’s own number by now. Writing in the

Guardian, Steven Poole described Gladwell’s job as ‘to be puzzled by banalities and then replace them, after a great pseudo-intellectual circumambulation, with banalities’. He found the book’s big idea – ‘truthdefault theory ... we tend to assume that other people are telling the truth, which is the basis of trust and social cooperation, so liars are hard to spot’ – a woeful oversimplification.

Andrew Ferguson in the Atlantic, describing Gladwell as ‘master of the let me take you by the hand prose style’, worried that the muddle in his latest book might be a sign that ‘nearly 20 years after The Tipping

Point, his best-selling debut, the Gladwell formula is at last exhausted’; a clear thesis ‘never emerges’ and ‘he leads us into culs-de-sac that even so smooth a talker as Malcolm Gladwell can’t charm his way out of’.

In the Spectator Michael Blastland was a bit kinder. ‘As ever with books of popular science, the evidence presented is all on one side,’ he agreed. But he’d recommend it ‘without hesitation’: ‘It is not a revelation, but a wonderful provocation which Gladwell delivers like no other.’