Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Never Trust a Blood Relative

Talking to Strangers is an elaboration of a simple (trivial?) idea: It’s very difficult to tell when people are lying. According to Timothy Levine, the academic psychologist on whom Gladwell relies for his basic argument, the presumption that people tell the truth is almost universal, a few Holy Fools (and, I suppose, Judge Judy) excepted. Levine calls this his Truth Default Theory. Gladwell applies it entertainingly, if rather repetitively, to cases of duplicity ranging from double agents in government agencies to international financial fraud.

The interesting part of Gladwell’s thesis is that we can’t be trained out of our predisposition to believe what ‘credible’ people, that is, folk who exhibit facial traits and body language which conform to cultural conventions, have to say. Police, judges, regulatory officials, even counter-espionage experts have equally poor records for detecting falsehood compared to the rest of us (it also works the other way round: truth-telling appears as lying if accompanied by ‘mis-matched’ behavioural signals). We are genetically programmed to be dupes (I suspect sex as the evolutionary motive!). And there is no reliable technology that does any better.

The implication for me is that the more anyone is familiar with expected conventional behavioural responses, and can perform these as needed, the more credible they will be. Not a terribly innovative conclusion admittedly, but it does suggest that Gladwell has the wrong end of the authenticity-stick. We may have to worry about strangers being honest; but the real danger is the mendacity of those closest to us, those who know what we find credible, namely intimate family members, not strangers.

There’s another issue as well. It’s clear that most 0f us lie to ourselves from time to time, that is, we conveniently and selectively recall events which confirm our self-rationalising narratives. We cannot observe our own physical behaviour to determine the extent of mismatch. Nor would it make any difference if we could since we may actually believe our own press, as it were. I know academics and business people who act this way as a matter of routine. It’s part of their strategy for success. They speak and write with total conviction about things they really know nothing about. One of these may be the president of the United States. Who knows, perhaps even Gladwell is amongst these experts at self-delusion and is simply scamming the rest of us with complete sincerity.

Or am I merely projecting a sort of cynicism about Gladwell’s slick rapportage? Possibly. But he does seem to have a somewhat murky past as a defender of several dodgy industries like tobacco and pharmaceuticals (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...). Presumably he was quite handy at spinning credible publicity out of otherwise damaging facts. “Transparency,” Gladwell says, “is a myth—an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels.” One wonders to what degree his book might be an instance of the phenomenon he is describing.

Oh, and as an aside, the attribution of the death of a black student in the custody of a Texas jail to an ‘escalating miscommunication between strangers’ verges on the obscene. His use of this example to book-end his narrative and his references to it as a recurring theme suggest some serious judgmental deficiencies. I don’t feel myself defaulting to truth, or Gladwell’s purported truth, in the least.

Postscript 18Sept19: it appears that Gladwell’s bubble is bursting: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...

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