I just finished Malcom Gladwell’s most recent book Talking to Strangers , which is another great read in keeping with many of his other books. The audiobook is a cutting edge approach to storytelling and would highly recommend that as the manner in which people take in this book. In an interview I heard Gladwell say that this is a unique book for him in that the audiobook sales have exceeded the hardcopy or kindle, which is significant. He attributes it to an increasingly oral culture and to the younger generations that know him through his revisionist history podcast.
Gladwell’s strength is in how he popularizes research for the masses. In this book he takes research on cognitive dissonance in reading people and calls it “defaulting to the truth.” We assume the best about others and it’s hard to assume the worst. This is a huge area of importance with child abuse and identifying predators or even moral failure/double life situations. People can’t process the additional information about someone that they have to make room for to be vigilant and aware, so they default to their preferred narrative. This is why congregations defend a pastor to the death even though he or she might be exposed for a double life. Defaulting to truth is an important dimension of human behavior of how we engage with strangers and even people we know well. We will default to a baseline. There’s a great case study involving cuban spies in here.
Gladwell unpacks theories of “transparency assumption” that lead people to assume that someone’s emotions or expressions is equal to what htey are feeling or their character. He illustrates this through research involving the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox case and the main case study of the book, Sandra Bland.
A central theme of the book is to illustrate that we’re actually quite untrustworthy when it comes to reading people and interpreting what is really going on. Research shows that there is an inherent risk to believing the best all the time about everyone, because you’ll miss the criminals and the threats. Research also shows that to reject that vulnerability through relentless rejction of the defaulting to truth assumption leads to a world that we cannot live in. We actually can create the threats we are afraid of. Gladwell’s conclusion is that we need to have humility to look beyond the surface, but continue to be willing to risk through vulnerability and empathy towards the stranger. The alternative is to hate the stranger because we trying so hard to protect ourselves.
Great storytelling and great research in this book and it’s woven together narratively in a beautiful way. If you like social science non-fiction books, this is a good one and it’s a great audiobook. He splices in the real audio from traffic stops, interviews, and other sources of real people speaking for themselves. It adds powerfully to the affective impact of the book.
