Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

I’ve been listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History for a few years now, but never read any of his works before. Full disclosure, I’m still paying off student loans so I checked out my local library to see which of his works were available to borrow. Of course there was a months long waiting list for all of them. Shocker. How long of a wait? Well, it’s Sunday June 14, 2020 in the USA as I write this post. We are in phase one of reopening during the coronavirus which has kept most of the world in quarantine with the exception of essential workers and those who cannot afford to stay home. I placed my hold for Talking to Strangers several months before we ever heard about the coronavirus in Wuhan if not up to a full year ago. To put it simply, I’ve been waiting a damn long time. So when I received notice that the loan was ready through the Libby app on my Kindle Fire I excepted it without hesitation.

Having listened to Revisionist History I knew the book would start and end with a single event. The traffic stop and subsequent arrest of Sandra Bland in Texas. Kind of a literary ouroboros if you will. Starting and ending at the same point. Why does Gladwell pick this event, well as one of his guests on the podcasts mentions he has a knack for understanding events in a different if not altogether thought provoking way. The arrest of Sandra Bland was the result of many failures. Many people would jump to any of the following conclusions: poor policing practices, racism, her reaction to the officer (western patriarchal society fetishizes the idea of blaming the victim), bad luck, et cetera et cetera. Gladwell asserts that the root of the failure lies in our inability to effectively talk to strangers.

Gladwell ties in many anecdotes throughout the text. Each serves as evidence for one of the three reasons he identifies as linked to our failure to communicate effectively with strangers: default to truth, myth of transparency, and coupling (not in the romantic sense). As Malcolm puts it, “we have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.” As human beings when we encounter people and talk to them we tend to believe what they tell us, whether it is about themselves/others/ or other things. Even though this is our natural default, we can snap out of it, so to speak, but only if certain conditions are met. Gladwell writes: “we fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive…we start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.” Basically, in order to stop believing someone there has to exist a mountain of evidence in the form of cumulative doubts brought on by their words or actions. The second issue is the transparency myth.

The transparency myth is the idea that people do not always outwardly show what they inwardly feel. We are not always transparent about our emotions through our actions and/or reactions. Also, the facial expression of emotions is not universal; this was confirmed by research conducted by Jarillo and Crivelli on Spaniard children and inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands. Of course, the western society in which we live reinforces the idea that the opposite is true. Our favorite shows usually have actors that express outwardly their innermost emotions, at least that was definitely the case with the show Friends–which Gladwell had experts confirm by coding facial movements from two scenes. The takeaway with the transparency myth is that people are occasionally mismatched. People do not always look how they feel on the inside. The issue with people whose emotions mismatch their behaviors is it leads to undetected ponzischemers like Bernie Madoff as well as the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox among other things I won’t get into due to their sensitive nature. The last phenomenon that makes it difficult to make sense of the people we don’t know is coupling.

“Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.” To illustrate his point Gladwell, the unconventional thinker that he is, draws on the topic of suicide. A person can suffer depression and entertain ideas of self-harm, but those who complete suicide only complete it because their preferred method exists and thus serves as the condition necessary to shift them from entertaining their self-destructive thoughts into turning them into a reality. Gladwell referenced the poet Sylvia Plath who, having previously attempted suicide, was only able to complete it because her gas oven emitted carbon monoxide which could kill her after enough exposure to it. Plath’s poet friend (Anne Sexton), who also suffered from a mental health illness and engaged in suicidal behavior, was only able to complete suicide with the carbon monoxide her car emitted in the garage. Gladwell argues that if the gas levels in the oven that killed Plath and the monoxide fumes that killed her friend were no longer an option due to changes in technology the women would have lived a bit longer.

Gladwell pretty much leaves us with this food for thought: “The first set of mistakes we make with strangers–the default to truth and the illusion of transparency–has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.” When we fail to determine the truthfulness of individuals until there’s a mountain of evidence that they’ve lied to us, when we delude ourselves into thinking we know how people feel inside because of how they look on the outside in addition to how they speak and behave, when we fail to recognize the context in which individuals move about the world. We make mistakes. In the case of Sandra Bland that’s an unlawful arrest which led to her, in my opinion alleged, suicide.

Quotes from the reading:

1. On the illusion of asymmetric insight by Emily Pronin in her own words, “the conviction that we know others better than they know us–and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)–leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.” I believe the reason why this quote stood out to me was that I connected it to the concept of doubling down on being wrong. I linked asymmetric insight with the reality that when it comes to discussing racism/white supremacy in America between white people and non-white people, specifically black, there always seems to be an argument that people who experience racism are imagining/misinterpreting situations. The black experience is typically questioned if not altogether dismissed.
2. “Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.” In case you missed it, the United States of America was framed by the ideology of white supremacy that systematized oppression to non-white peoples, and as a result of this original sin that elected officials/beneficiaries of the white supremacist structure either sweep under the rug or refuse to address we continue to observe a disregard to the humanity of minority groups.
3. “If we were more thoughtful as a society–if we were willing to engage in some soul searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers–she [Sandra Bland] would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.”