Exploring lies, poor communication

Malcolm Gladwell has written several best-selling 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 insightful or 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? 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? And, most compelling to Gladwell, why does community policing so often go awry, leading to tragedy?

These fascinating puzzles, and many others, add up to what Gladwell labels the Stranger Problem. We are constantly interacting with people whom we don’t know well, if at all, and Gladwell believes that our psychological clumsiness in these situations leads to all sorts of misunderstanding.

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 give the benefit of the doubt. This is counterintuitive. It doesn’t make any sense 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.

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, humans expect strangers to reveal their thoughts and emotions in their demeanor, body language and actions. But they don’t — not reliably.

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? There are no hard lessons here, but the conclusion seems humane. Not by compensating with 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 defense against predation and deception is worse.