Gladwell says anger fueled his latest book
Malcolm Gladwell says he usually starts writing a new book on a hopeful note, fueled with optimism that if he keeps pulling on the thread of a provocative idea — about, for instance, success (“Outliers”), decisionmaking (“Blink”), popcultural virality (“The Tipping Point”) or underdogs (“David and Goliath”) — the bestselling author might discover a new way of seeing a familiar social phenomenon that illuminates something surprising and demonstrably advantageous about human behavior.
But a few days before releasing “Talking to Strangers,” Gladwell’s first book in six years, the householdname author and podcaster admits that his new inquiry into why we so often misread one another’s minds and motive “is the first book I’ve ever written that began in anger.”
The wave of police violence against civilians that began with Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, left Gladwell shaken, he said during a phone interview. He has long been fascinated with the vexing subject of policing in a free society, and he started to think that “not only were these incidents heartbreaking, but that they reflected more broadly on the general difficulty we have in society with strangers.”
So in “Talking to Strangers,” which he admits is his darkest work to date, Gladwell uses examples pulled from recent, vexing news figures — ranging from child abusers Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar to acquitted killer Amanda Knox, investment fraud Bernie Madoff and Sandra Bland, who died in a Texas jail cell — to probe the ways we “default to truth” and assume transparency in one another, and yet time
and again we are deceived.
He writes that while we need to accept that “transparency is a myth,” by using greater caution and humility we might do a better job deciphering our complex, opaque selves to one another. Gladwell, who lives in New York, talked to The Chronicle ahead of his upcoming Bay Area book events.
Q: It seems like there’s a central irony at the heart of this book. You write that we’re wired to be trusting of others, and that if we all became hypervigilant, society wouldn’t function. We wouldn’t date, or let our children leave the house or use banks or the internet. So, is our bias toward truth actually protective?
A: Yes, I think it is. It’s (psychologist) Tim Levine’s most important point, that the tradeoff we make when we default to truth is a good one. The cost is that we are occasionally and even spectacularly deceived, but the benefit is we live in a functioning civil society and it functions in part because we take for granted that the person we’re talking to is being honest. You and I can’t even have a real conversation if I subject everything that comes out of your mouth to scrutiny. A presumption of transparency makes life livable.
Q: You make the point that even the people we expect to be better at telling liars from truthtellers, like judges, police and therapists, are in reality no better at it than anyone else. So, if misreading one another is human nature, did writing this book present you with a conundrum in the sense that you’re highlighting a problem without a solution?
A: Yeah, this is an antiselfhelp book. I don’t tie everything up in a neat bow at the end. I do say we need to be cautious and humble, and we certainly need to be more thoughtful in how we design something as important as the way we police our society. There are structural things we could do to account for this weakness of ours, but there’s no fix and that shouldn’t be disappointing. The great thing is most of the time things work pretty well.
Q: You interview a lot of strangers yourself, for your books and your podcast “Revisionist History.” Do you find you size people up any differently now, based on what you’ve learned?
A: It’s a fascinating position as a journalist because one of the great conceits of journalism, particularly of profile writing, is the idea that you can do X amount of research, talk to some limited number of people and then take the measure of your subject. I have always had doubts about that, and now I really have doubts about it. Journalists are way too quick to draw conclusions about people’s motivations.
Q: How did the wave of highprofile cases of police killings that began in 2014 influence your decision to write this book?
A: Those two years of police shootings really did have an effect on me, and I found the reaction to them problematic. I read a remarkable book (“When Police Kill”), an analysis of civilian deaths by police officers by (UC Berkeley) criminologist Franklin Zimring. His best estimate is that more than a thousand civilians die every year at the hands of police in this country. On a per capita basis, that’s way, way out of line with other Western democracies. It’s a systemic problem. Yes, it matters what the attitude of the individual police officer is, but this is happening in a broader context as a result of a philosophy of policing.
That got me thinking that there’s something in these incidents that reflects more broadly on this general difficulty we have in society with strangers. If I have a problematic confrontation with a stranger, there are no consequences. But if a police officer does, there are real consequences. So maybe what they’re experiencing is the thin end of the wedge of this problem that we’re all complicit in.
Q: Does “Talking to Strangers” repudiate anything you wrote in your 2005 book “Blink,” in terms of how acute our intuitive powers can be, that we can extrapolate accurately based on a first impression?
A: Well, “Blink” begins with experts using their intuition brilliantly, but the second half is about nonexperts using their intuition really badly, right? The climax of the book is a police shooting where the police make a series of snap judgments that are catastrophically wrong. And the coda is about how hiring committees for orchestras were incapable of correctly judging the musical ability of women until we put up a screen. So, to me, “Talking to Strangers” builds from part two of “Blink.” The subtitle of “Blink” is “the power of thinking without thinking,” meaning not power in the sense of virtue, but power in the sense of how consequential it is in good and bad ways.
Q: Do you have a thick skin when it comes to criticism of your work? When people use the adjective “Gladwellian,” they can either mean it as high praise, or as a shorthand way of disparaging your methods of popularizing social science.
A: I guess I do have a thick skin, although I actually don’t feel like I’m attacked too often. The experience of living my life is the opposite. Lots of people tell me how interesting my books are, even when they disagree with me. Here’s a typical experience for me: I was in a coffee shop in Houston, and a very proper, wealthy Houston woman pulls up in her Range Rover, comes inside and when she sees me she says, “I love your podcast.” And then she says, “And I disagree with virtually everything you say.”
Malcolm Gladwell: Author appearances. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sep. 19. City Arts & Lectures. In conversation with Al Letson. Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St., SF. www.ci tyarts.net. 7 p.m. Saturday, Sep. 21. $40. San Mateo Performing Arts Center. 600 N. Delaware St., San Mateo. thi.ucsc.edu. 1 p.m. Sunday, Sep. 22. $40. Dominican University. Angelico Hall, 20 Olive Ave., San Rafael. Book passage.com/Gladwell