I always look forward to reading Malcolm Gladwell's books, because I never fail to learn new things. When I saw that his latest book was entitled "Talking To Strangers," I assumed that it might include research into the most effective ways to reach out to strangers in social settings. I quickly learned that the scope of his work here is much broader than that. He addresses the many ways in which we fail to read signals from strangers about who they are and what they are thinking and feeling.
As he always does, the author draws from a broad spectrum of real world settings to discuss the principles of communication and miscommunication that are the norm in today's world. A through thread in this book is the case of Sandra Bland. This African American woman from Chicago was in Prairie View, Texas interviewing for a job at the local university. As she was driving away from the campus, she was pulled over by officer Brian Encinia, ostensibly for changing lanes without using her turn signal. The encounter, which should have been innocuous, escalated to the point where she was arrested for failure to comply with the officer's orders. Three days later, she hanged herself in her jail cell. Throughout the book, Gladwell returns to this incident to point out the many levels at which Officer Encinia failed to read correctly the signals that Ms. Bland was sending as she sat in her car, boiling with rage at having been stopped for "Driving While Black"!
Gladwell makes the point, in the the case of Sandra Bland and many others, that we often fail to perceive others correctly because of a mismatch between the signals that the suspect was sending and the interpretation that the officer attributed to those signals. The author eloquently summarizes the dilemma we face in meeting and understanding strangers:
"This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren't living in villages any more. Police officers have to stop people they do not know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties explicitly to meet strangers: that's part of the thrill of romantic discovery. Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, And we can't. What should we do? (p. 342)
Along the way, Gladwell uses a wide variety of case studies: CIA failures to discover a highly placed double agent, enhanced interrogation techniques, police training, date rape at a frat party, Neville Chamberlain's naivete in dealing with Hitler, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, Sylvia Plath's suicide, and a murder in Italy - each case highlights the many ways in which we think we know people, but really do not. As he often does, he draws from research in multiple fields: cognitive psychology, sociology, criminology, diplomacy, and economics. The resulting book causes us to rethink how we evaluate the strangers that we meet.
Enjoy!
Al
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