Publisher’s write-up:
‘The routine traffic stop that
ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of
the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other
people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a
stranger's motives?
Through a series of encounters
and misunderstandings - from history, psychology and infamous legal cases -
Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of
human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have
disastrous consequences.
No one challenges our shared
assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal
errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting
us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.’
Talking to Strangers: What Should
We Know About the People We Don’t Know is where the journalist Malcolm Gladwell
builds the case on how we inherently lack skills to judge strangers and makes
historical references, experiments and steps implemented by the police in US (and
it’s success or otherwise) and legal proceedings – some of them that garnered a
lot of media attention and others, not so much.
The book begins and ends with the
same case of Sandra Bland – a researcher from Illinois, where a conversation with
a police officer in rural Texas, with her committing suicide in custody later. It
then proceeds, like a thriller novel – dealing with politicians, spies and
espionage cases of the past. The author then goes on to explain our tendency to
‘default to the truth’, wherein, we have preconceived notions which we presume
is true and we constantly try to fit the stranger in front of us to this truth
(the author took the case of the Cuban spy in CIA – Ana Montes and the architect
of one of the largest Ponzi schemes – Bernie Madoff), often blinding us
on every other indicator that would have proven this truth. The other
issues that the author investigates in this book are the effects of alcohol and
suicides.
The book is very well presented and
considering I read it in the year 2020, almost every example in this book is
within the last 20 years or at least, within the last 80 years – making it very
relatable and many of these are stories we have followed in the media
ourselves. At every point, the author narrates the case, then explains the
concept that we have when it comes to judging strangers and what happened in
the case taken up by the author. It was very interesting when the author
brought out as to how many expressions we believe as universal are not quite so,
and with cultural differences, it could often lead to wrong conclusions, which
sometimes turns fatal. It was very informative how he had explained the ‘coupling
effect’ in suicide and many other decisions (that these do not occur independently).
The two issues that bothered me in
the book was repetition and the very title of the book. The author, especially
with it came to explaining ‘default to the truth’, was citing several examples
to build the same case; much as it was an important concept in the book as a
whole, the book would not have been any less rich if the author had skipped a
few of these repetitions. Coming to the title, it gives the impression of a
self-help book, whereas it is far from it. The author merely builds the case about
our limitations in assessing strangers and is intending us to be informed of
these limitations so that we do not make these errors. A similar book I could
think of that I read, The Power of Habit (click here for review), was
also taking real life examples and building a case but later on, had a chapter
on how to incorporate it into our personal lives to conclude the book. Hence, I
felt the title was misleading.
I have started reading Gladwell
with the most recent of his releases and this book has certainly enthused me
enough to try his earlier books. It is highly recommended if you are interested
in reading about perceiving strangers and how it could go right or wrong – with
real examples on where they got it wrong or right.
On that note, I give the book a rating
of seven on ten.
Rating – 7/10
Have a nice day,
Andy
Andy
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