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Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

Malcolm Gladwell

4.02 · Rating details · 175,151 ratings · 16,257 reviews

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers---and why they often go wrong. How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? ...more

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Paperback, 379 pages

Published September 10th 2019 by Hachette USA

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Jun 02, 2019 Mimi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: life-learnings, i-own, non-fiction, have-a-copy, diversity-inclusion-belonging

As I sat at the airport, head deep in a book, I suddenly heard, "Hi!" What? To my left stood a handsome man. "I just thought I should say hi since I see you're reading Talking to Strangers."

I too thought Malcolm Gladwell's new book was going to teach me how to literally talk with people I don't know, but as always he turns all my assumptions on their head with this book. If that's what the book was about, that stranger and I might be on a date by now.

If I can convince you of one thing in this ...more

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Feb 23, 2021 Cindy rated it did not like it · review of another edition

When I started this book, I was convinced that I would at least give it 4 stars. Malcolm Gladwell is a great narrator, and the audiobook is very well produced, including music, voice actors, and excerpts from real interviews and videotapes. He explores interesting topics ranging from myopia, default to truth, and the way we misread others’ facial expressions. However, I have huge issues with his limiting takes on rape and police brutality. He takes several big-name cases (Sandra Bland, Brock Tur When I started this book, I was convinced that I would at least give it 4 stars. Malcolm Gladwell is a great narrator, and the audiobook is very well produced, including music, voice actors, and excerpts from real interviews and videotapes. He explores interesting topics ranging from myopia, default to truth, and the way we misread others’ facial expressions. However, I have huge issues with his limiting takes on rape and police brutality. He takes several big-name cases (Sandra Bland, Brock Turner, Jerry Sandusky, etc.) and dilutes them into issues of miscommunication while ignoring large factors like racism, sexism, and power.

To frame abusers and their victims as strangers who had misconceptions of each other oversimplifies the tragedies and assumes all parties operated from the same playing field with no ill motives. If the issue was that police do not know how to properly de-escalate situations, we would have universal cases of civilians of all races being murdered, rather than have these deaths be statistically higher for black people. How is it that Gladwell can elaborate on the police officer being afraid for his life when accosting Sandra Bland due to misreading her social cues, but not go into WHY these "misreadings" happen more frequently with black civilians? Ignoring these racial motivations seems purposely obtuse and takes away the nuances he COULD have made with his arguments, while veering dangerously close into justifying these crimes.

The author would be a lot more credible with his points if he had been more selective with his case studies rather than choosing the most controversial for shock value and contention. Saying “Brock Turner had to make sense of a stranger’s desires and motivations” and calling it “a hard task”, while spending an entire chapter on drinking culture, is a slap in the face to sexual assault victims. I’m sure there is validity in discussing the different ways people define and understand consent, as well as the effects of how drinking muddles communication, but this is the worst case to pick because Turner never cared to “make sense” of his victim’s desires or motivations in the first place. If Gladwell had done actual research into this, he would have known that this case was never about consent or drinking - it was about power. To attribute rape as a result of muddy communications and from being intoxicated is absolutely false, because people who don’t understand social cues are not rapists, nor are alcoholics.

It is one thing to takes prolific stories and force them to comply to blanket generalizations, but it is absolutely irresponsible to apply pseudo science upon systemic issues that actively harm women and people of color. These arguments are dangerous, lack nuance, and are an insult to victims. I would not recommend this book to anybody. ...more

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Oct 26, 2019 Allie rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology, nonfiction, hell-no

TW: detailed descriptions of rape and pedophilia

If it were possible to give a book negative stars, this would be a -10 for me.

Malcolm Gladwell is incredibly influential. From books to podcasts to TED talks, he seems to be everywhere and his story-based approach reaches a large number of people who don't question his credentials as a journalist (with no scientific training) who writes about science. I enjoyed Blink and Outliers despite the often dodgy claims Gladwell makes based on studies that a ...more

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Sep 01, 2019 Emily May rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019, nonfiction

I was trying to work through my thoughts on this book when Goodreads did an interview with Malcolm Gladwell and this one thing he said just made everything clear for me:

“I've never been a writer who's looked to persuade his readers; I'm more interested in capturing their interest and curiosity.”

Because, truthfully, I don't know that Gladwell did fully convince me of his way of thinking with this book. I don't know that I actually agree that he can draw a link between the police officer “misu ...more

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Sep 17, 2019 BlackOxford rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian, sociology

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 rang 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... ...more

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Sep 16, 2019 Megan rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, secrecy, 2019, alcohol, male-author, race, lies, abuse, listened-to-audio-book, crime

UPDATE 9/23/19
I have now changed this to one star. The more I read about this and other pseudo psych crap he pushes...no no no. The enjoyment of some parts of the book does not outweigh the total garbage of parts of it. Two examples are linked below, with a particularly shocking tidbit from one:

https://deadspin.com/malcolm-gladwell...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...

The most important part of the first link:
Gladwell: You know I have that chapter on Jerry Sandusky in my book, and it’s all ...more

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Mar 27, 2021 Sofia rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Absolutely no one at all, ever

Shelves: idek-anymore-guys, nonfiction, problematic, le-sigh, i-am-disgusted, how-was-this-published, better-off-as-kindling

Who gave Malcolm Gladwell the authority to invalidate the trauma of thousands of people? I can't believe trees sacrificed their lives so this piece of garbage could be printed 😃

This might just be the most problematic book I've ever read, and I don't say that lightly. It was so disgustingly, blatantly wrong in all ways that I was tempted to throw my phone across the room.

In this book, Malcolm Gladwell introduces the idea that many tragedies across the globe were caused by miscommunication between ...more

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Apr 03, 2020 Paromjit rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, netgalley

Malcolm Gladwell is viewed as a hugely influential writer and I was eagerly anticipating reading this, my first taste of his work, a body of his thinking on how we, the people, are extraordinarily gullible when it comes to strangers, all too easily taken in by them in our general eagerness to trust rather than be more cautious. He gives a raft of well known examples from history, such as Neville Chamberlain being all to willing to take Hitler at face value, and more recent contemporary examples, ...more

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Sep 21, 2019 Jennifer rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I DNF'd this book after reading too many cringey statements from Gladwell. He wants to categorize a whole range of evils -- from the victimization of unarmed black people (Sandra Bland) to women being raped at colleges parties (Brock Turner) -- as mere "communication" issues between people.

Sure, there might be some element of miscommunication, but it completely misses the point that there are much larger problems and bigger things going on beyond that.

I get that he's trying to cram these situa I DNF'd this book after reading too many cringey statements from Gladwell. He wants to categorize a whole range of evils -- from the victimization of unarmed black people (Sandra Bland) to women being raped at colleges parties (Brock Turner) -- as mere "communication" issues between people.

Sure, there might be some element of miscommunication, but it completely misses the point that there are much larger problems and bigger things going on beyond that.

I get that he's trying to cram these situations into his premise in order to write this book, but the result is completely tone-deaf and helps to justify crimes and ignorance. Instead of encouraging people to be educated on things the don't understand like consent or why prejudice against black people can lead to excessive force against them, Gladwell chalks it up to "communication" barriers.

To be clear, Gladwell doesn't try to say that Bland was at fault for her death, but rather that the officer didn't properly de-escalate. However, he also takes time to explain why race had nothing to do with the situation. For example, he ignores the mountain of evidence that shows that black people are routinely pulled over more frequently. Instead, Gladwell explicitly states that the officer's decision was not race-motivated. However, he reaches this conclusion based on nothing. His sole support for that statement is the statistic that shows this officer often wrote tickets -- to the tune of 1,557 just that year -- but it's a meaningless number that doesn't prove anything if we don't know if those tickets were evenly or fairly distributed.

There's also the question of whether this book states anything new. The idea that black people are treated exactly the same as everyone else and racism is a myth or that women who drink are partially to blame for being raped are two extremely old arguments. There's nothing new or interesting about it. It's old, tired and not worth anyone's time.

There's also questionable logical leaps that Gladwell makes to put forth his antiquated arguments. Mystifyingly, a survey showing that people have different ideas on what constitutes "consent" leads him to the conclusion that there "are no rules" when it comes to consent. Umm what? So if I took a survey that showed that most people don't know where the Ukraine is located, does that mean the Ukraine has no location or does it mean that people are ignorant? Gladwell's tortured logic for the sake of justifying rape is mind-boggling.

Skip this awful, intellectually vapid book. ...more

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Sep 01, 2019 Betsy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

9/2/2019--I'm knocking this down to two stars. Gladwell's really bad takes on things like race and sexual assault just don't deserve an okay rating.

Wow, does this book ever suffer from a severe case of foot-in-mouth disease!

I almost didn’t make it past the introduction. In my pre-publication copy, Gladwell writes, “The Sandra Bland case came in the middle of a strange interlude in American public life” and then goes on to discuss a series of cases of police violence against black people that ha ...more

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Sep 20, 2019 Leftbanker rated it did not like it · review of another edition

If this had just been stories about spies and the meeting between Hernán Cortés and Montezuma or whatever, I would have rated it five stars. There’s no question that Malcolm Gladwell is a good storyteller, I just wish that he would leave it at that and stop trying to shoe-horn a bunch of tall tales into some sort of coherent statement about the state of the world. I’m not a scientist, but I think that I know science when I see it. I ain’t seeing it here.

“The death of Sandra Bland is what happens ...more

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Sep 21, 2019 Stephie rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology, audio-books

Well. I think I’ve gotta jump off the Malcolm Gladwell bandwagon. This book really irritated me.

First of all, with his previous books, the main argument has been very clear. But ‘Talking with Strangers’ is directionless and, at times, confusing. I didn’t even know what he meant by “strangers” as his definition seemed to keep changing. And I found myself wondering what his point was on more than one occasion.

Furthermore, Gladwell has an annoying habit of presenting his opinions or his “research Well. I think I’ve gotta jump off the Malcolm Gladwell bandwagon. This book really irritated me.

First of all, with his previous books, the main argument has been very clear. But ‘Talking with Strangers’ is directionless and, at times, confusing. I didn’t even know what he meant by “strangers” as his definition seemed to keep changing. And I found myself wondering what his point was on more than one occasion.

Furthermore, Gladwell has an annoying habit of presenting his opinions or his “research” (it’s debatable how much of it is actually *his* research) as facts. He is very good at picking and choosing data and statistics and framing them to make whatever point he wants, while ignoring all the other evidence that might disprove his statements. Makes for a good bestseller, I guess. But funny for a book that talks largely about truth and the ‘default-to-truth’ theory. I guess we should just assume that he’s telling us the truth? Maybe the book is a psychological experiment in itself to see how many people buy this bullshit?

He makes some bizarre arguments. He excuses the defenders of paedophiles because of this ‘default-to-truth’ ethos. He seemingly empathises with them, because despite all evidence to the contrary it’s still (according to him) perfectly understandable that we would ignore said evidence because we like to assume that people are telling the truth.

According to Gladwell’s claim in the Brock Turner chapter, that rape was a case of “miscommunication” compounded by alcohol consumption. It verges on victim blaming. Hmmm.

And for the icing on the cake, he attributes the death of Sandra Bland, a young black American woman, again to a “miscommunication between strangers” instead of acknowledging the rather obvious systemic racism that lead to her death.

It just doesn’t sit right with me. I feel that placing the blame on “miscommunication” ignores other very important factors like racism, sexism, corruption and so on. It’s an oversimplification, in my opinion.

Also, I listened to this on Audible, and Gladwell says “Artic” instead of “Arctic”. Wtf. ...more

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Nov 12, 2019 carol. marked it as don-t-count · review of another edition

Shelves: do-not-be-misled

Not for me, unless I feel like doing a rant-review. Which I'm not ruling out.

Allie's insightful review on excusing those who excused pedophiles: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Leftbanker's thoughtful comments on the Sandra Bland case: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Guardian's review on the obviousness of Gladwell's talking points and race-blind approach: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Atlantic's review on the lack of thesis: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...

Best ...more

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Dec 31, 2019 Elyse Walters rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Audiobook.. narrated by Malcolm Gladwell

Being honest here.... a lot of this book went right over my head. There is so much I don’t know - it’s pathetic & embarrassing.
Also reading this ( listening) during the last few days of the year was challenging my lazy brain.
I knew it would have been helpful to look up information - (visit my buddy, Google), but I was often soaking in our warm pool, or outside walking.
I was a lazy reader/listener with this book....
but thankfully I own it... thanks to my ...more

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Aug 26, 2019 Gretchen Rubin added it · review of another edition

I always feel lucky when I get to read a book before its official publication date. A fascinating, accessible examination of the miscommunications that can arise when we talk to strangers. We're going to interview Malcolm Gladwell for the Happier podcast, can't wait for that. ...more

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Oct 04, 2019 Traci at The Stacks rated it did not like it · review of another edition

REREAD REVIEW: this book was even worse the second time through. This kind of victim blaming bile is a huge part of what upholds white supremacy and toxic masculinity. Everything below holds, but I’m somehow more enraged this time. The persuasive skills displayed in crafting Gladwells arguments are sickening and in bad faith.

This book has some MAJOR issues and was pretty enraging and frustrating. The biggest technical issue is that there is no definition of “stranger” which allows Gladwell to mo ...more

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Jan 29, 2020 Carole rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell appears to be a contentious book: the readers and reviewers have either hated it or loved it, nothing in between. I selected the audiobook version because the author usually reads his books, as he did in this one. The audiobook had an added bonus of providing the reader with actual or reproduced interviews and transcripts of the cases he used as examples. Gladwell extensively used well-known cases that show that, when dealing with people we do not know, w ...more

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Sep 19, 2019 Andy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Gladwell is an excellent storyteller, but I think that sometimes he's dangerously wrong.
When the president of Penn State hears about a former employee coming back to the college at night to "horse around" with a naked 11-year-old boy, well the most likely explanation is not benign. Gladwell keeps saying people default to the "truth" and to the "most likely" explanation. But in examples like this people are defaulting to denial. And that's not okay for those whose job is to be suspicious and res Gladwell is an excellent storyteller, but I think that sometimes he's dangerously wrong.
When the president of Penn State hears about a former employee coming back to the college at night to "horse around" with a naked 11-year-old boy, well the most likely explanation is not benign. Gladwell keeps saying people default to the "truth" and to the "most likely" explanation. But in examples like this people are defaulting to denial. And that's not okay for those whose job is to be suspicious and responsible.

Gladwell seems surprised that people are gullible and that social trust is important for social animals to thrive. He talks about the Milgram experiments, and gets lost in the weeds about how they were bad theater, underemphasizing the main point, i.e. that 65% of people were sheep who obeyed authority figures telling them to do insane evil things. The implication for what he's talking about is that decisions are made by a few people who create the conditions that then affect everyone else. And so what really matters is what the shepherds and sheepdogs are doing to protect the sheep from the wolves and other perils. Those protectors are supposed to sniff out wolves in sheep's clothing--that's their job. So yeah, it's literally ancient wisdom that we can't have everybody crying wolf all the time, but we do need someone to look out for wolves.

I don't get journalists who don't get that some people have the role in society of being skeptical. If Gladwell's facts are correct about the Sandra Bland case, then the big issue there is the corruption of the scientific evidence on effective policing (basically the 80/20 rule: concentrate police scrutiny where the crimes are). Doing traffic stops everywhere all the time is just BS, regardless of racism issues. Wouldn't it be nice if someone had the job of calling BS on bad public policy?

Michael Lewis's podcast series "Against the Rules" is so far all about the decline of the "referee" in America, and I think his insights are more apposite for this discussion about trust and social cohesion than Gladwell's. You can't play a game without referees. Referees can't just defer to the players/cheaters on whether or not they've broken the rules. The undermining of arbiters is what destroys societies. ...more

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Aug 30, 2019 Kelly added it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2019, non-fiction

What I love about Gladwell's books is the thing that I think many people find frustrating: I don't agree with everything he says. But what brings me back is that he finds interesting threads and premises and manages to weave them together in such a way that it makes me think about my own beliefs a little different.

This book begins with the Sandra Bland case. Why did she die? Why did this situation even occur? It then goes into looking at a series of incidents of the CIA overlooking spies from C ...more

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Sep 14, 2019 Mehrsa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

What to say about Gladwell? I read everything he writes and I listen to his podcasts. Even as I cringe when he oversells his simplistic theories and misinterprets academic data to fit into cute stories. There are a lot of great stories in this book and some new takes on old ones, but at the end of the day the lens through which he demands we see these stories (i.e. our "default to truth" in talking to strangers) doesn't work. Sandra Bland's exchange with the officer did not result in her death b ...more

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Jul 05, 2019 Celeste rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: giveaways

This is certainly a provocative book, enough so that despite my anger and frustration I finished reading it in the hope it would conclude with a complex and thoughtful analysis of why our differences and history result in so much misunderstanding when strangers interact with each other.

Sadly my expectations were not realized. The real life examples that he used were not truly examined in depth and the lack of complexity often left me frustrated. I may just be unable to feel any sympathy for a c ...more

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Dec 15, 2019 Trevor rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology

I haven’t been all that impressed by the last few books Gladwell has written and wasn’t even going to read this one at all – but then a friend at work said it related to some of the things I’ve been working on at the moment, and so I got hold of it – and I’m glad I did. In some ways this book could be summed up by saying that we are programmed to trust and believe people and that rather than needing to suspend disbelief, people often have to work very hard to lose our trust. For instance, Americ I haven’t been all that impressed by the last few books Gladwell has written and wasn’t even going to read this one at all – but then a friend at work said it related to some of the things I’ve been working on at the moment, and so I got hold of it – and I’m glad I did. In some ways this book could be summed up by saying that we are programmed to trust and believe people and that rather than needing to suspend disbelief, people often have to work very hard to lose our trust. For instance, American spies seem to have a remarkable soft-spot for Cuban spies – with US spies seemingly incapable of ever detecting Cuban ones. I never know what to make of the CIA (and all the other various three-letter-agencies). I’ve read The Legacy of Ashes and the Blowback series, and I didn’t particularly come away from reading those with a particularly high estimations of the abilities of US spies. That said, perhaps they are in fact infinitely more clever than they seem – well, they would have to be, wouldn’t they? And so these books saying they are all gormless is part of some elaborate double blind exercise to put us off our guard.

Part of this details the torture techniques so gleefully adopted by the US in its war on terror, and so I had flashbacks to reading The Shock Doctrine. I find the whole idea of torture unspeakable. The US has much to answer for, but since it is the sole superpower, I guess we can’t expect it to answer for any of its crimes against humanity any time soon. Once again it was pretty clear that none of the information obtained under torture was in the least bit reliable – and not just because you might lie to get the torture to end, but also because memory is fragile and after torture the victim might even believe (really believe) they were George Washington if you electrocuted them enough.

Part of the problem I had with this book is that ‘strangers’ isn’t ever quite defined – and so the strangers often ended up being people quite like you and me. Although it discusses some of the black lives matter incidents, that is, where strangers were decidedly not treated with an excess of trust, what is somewhat ignored is the problem of the strangers who are like the children in Yemen – think back to the last time you read about that war for a moment. Hard to remember, isn’t it? Yet, it has been on the brink of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises for the last couple of years – and western governments are not only aiding the atrocities being carried out there, but also supplying arms and advice that is making matters a million times worse. Here are the real strangers. Like the strangers we send drones to blow to pieces. It all becomes like a hyper-real video game, the death of these strangers barely rates a shrug from us. There is, of course, money to be made in killing these desperately poor people, and this in a world where you could probably buy three or four dozen of them as effective slaves for less than the price of the drone we use to killed two or three of them.

But strangers at a distance are not the concern of this book. The strangers considered here are also not quite the strangers Simmel talks of – those who do not quite belong amongst us, but who arrive, and have not yet left. This would have made an interesting book too – particularly given the ‘Build The Wall’ hysteria in the US that elected a madman to its highest office and the ‘Stop the Boats’ chants in Australia that has won a couple of elections, or the ‘Turks are coming’ that decided Brexit. These strangers, the kind that might end up separated from their children in cages at the border, or who commit suicide on an island north of Australian somewhere (at least they didn’t drown) are also mostly left faceless and are certainly not people we treat with an excess of trust.

All the same, this book is interesting and it is worth knowing how we behave with strangers who are more like us. The best bits of this book were the bits where he adds in the complications of life. Far too often we assume that stories of the rape of children, for example, are simple and that if someone has been doing this for a long time, and they haven’t been immediately caught, there had to have been an elaborate coverup. But it is not just that we delay believing people could possibly do such things beyond the point where this becomes at all reasonable (something I think that is almost certainly true) but also that we also doubt our own sanity when confronted with ‘evidence’ that seems to imply sport’s coaches or Cardinals could possibly do such things – even when that evidence comes from our own eyes.

A dear friend of mine posted on Facebook recently an elaborate telephone scam she was nearly the victim of that was designed to get her to transfer money out of her account and into someone else’s. What was remarkable about this was how professional the whole thing was and how patient the scammers were. We are pre-programmed to trust people, and that isn’t a bad thing. As Gladwell makes clear with a couple of counter-examples in this book, where people end up distrusting everyone, and how their lives quickly become unliveable. As Socrates said, it is better to suffer an injury than to cause one – obviously, he meant that in terms of our souls – and I think this proves just as true today.

What is particularly interesting about this book is the notion that most of what happens in the world is ‘contextual’. There is a long discussion of campus rape cases and the problems that excessive drinking can cause, not merely since people end up diminished memories of what happened, even if not diminished responsibility for what happened. But this is then compared with other cultures were excessive drinking does not lead to rape or violence.

Similarly, the case of Silvia Plath is discussed and whether she would have committed suicide in some other way if town gas had been replaced with natural gas sooner. We often think suicide is something that you would only do after some serious consideration, that it is the ultimate in elaborate and decisive decision making – but often the opposite can be the case. Rather than being elaborately planned, often people who attempt suicide and who fortuitously live after the attempt say that what actually happened was that the opportunity presented itself and they aren’t all that sure why, but they took that opportunity. We humans are deeply strange, much more so than we generally give ourselves credit for. Like so much else in life, we often act first and provide a reasonable sounding motive later.

The bit of this that is probably worth the cover price of the book is the discussion of the word puzzle thing close to the start. People are given some words with some of the letters replaced with blanks and they have to fill those blanks to make actual words. The finished words might end up being ‘cheat, scare, trap’ stuff like that. But then the shrink giving the task asks, ‘so, what do you reckon that list of words says about you? It doesn’t seem terribly flattering.’ To which you are likely to reply, ‘well, I think it says nothing about me, it’s just the literary equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle.’ So far, all well and good. Except, when you show people photos of other people and then tell them how these others filled in the blanks – and the words they came up with – they have no trouble at all at being able to identify the psychological issues these people clearly suffer from given the words they generated. This is, of course, a long standing finding and is just one instance of an all-too-human set of conclusions we find ourselves jumping to – even after having just explained why the same thing couldn’t possibly apply to our-good-selves. We can’t help ourselves in finding that people like us are infinitely complex and must be understood from within that complexity – while people who are not like us are simple and behave in accordance to the stereotypes we hold of them.

This is interesting book, although, clearly with the provisos I’ve mentioned about what a stranger might look like.
...more

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Dec 21, 2020 Eliza rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, 4-stars, owned, nonfiction, kindle, reviewed

After listening to this audiobook, I'm starting to get the hype behind audiobooks! Gladwell narrated his book perfectly; the added soundbites from the historical figures mentioned was a fantastic addition, too. ...more

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Aug 23, 2020 Kimber rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Gladwell writes this like he has A.D.D. He's all over the place, an historian trying to be entertaining? Perhaps, but I prefer a more cohesive approach. Much of the book is based on the theory that most people default to seeing the best in others and are unable to see the bad. And in other cases, they think someone is guilty simply because their personality is off in some way. This theory fits in best with the Amanda Knox case (clearly innocent) but he tries to fit it in with the cases of Jerry Gladwell writes this like he has A.D.D. He's all over the place, an historian trying to be entertaining? Perhaps, but I prefer a more cohesive approach. Much of the book is based on the theory that most people default to seeing the best in others and are unable to see the bad. And in other cases, they think someone is guilty simply because their personality is off in some way. This theory fits in best with the Amanda Knox case (clearly innocent) but he tries to fit it in with the cases of Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar, criminal pedophiles who went years before they were stopped. Because the people around these cases defaulted to seeing the good in others? What about the fact that nobody wanted to do anything about it? These allegations went to the top of the chain, university presidents who did nothing and Gladwell questions the reader, "would you have done any different? "

Well, some of us do. The simple reason nothing was done is because those people chose not to stick their necks out to stop abuse from happening. This isn't "giving someone the benefit of the doubt "(Gladwell) They lacked the courage to do what is right. "Defaulting to see the good in others" may be correct, to an extent, but it's overblown here.

The Sandra Bland case was worth reading in itself. This was clearly a tragedy. But there was more to it than "talking to strangers." The officer never once admitted it had anything to do with Sandra being a black woman and he tried to say they were in a high crime area which wasn't true.

I appreciated how he shed some light on the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. And the best take away from the book is the conclusion (based on the studies) that you never can tell what someone is feeling based on their facial expression.

The most interesting part of the book was in how we tend to see the good in people who are criminals and see guilt in people who are innocent simply because we rely on certain social cues & body language to see integrity in a person or deception,truth or lies. Hence, the nervous girl who everyone thought was lying. And Bernie Madoff: a wolf in sheep's clothing.

People size up others hastily & then are shocked when the truth comes out & in hindsight the red flags come back to them. I just wish Gladwell had more control over his narrative & it didn't feel so disjointed to me. He ends on a weak note, hasn't drawn conclusions (not really) & it all kind of falls flat for me. ...more

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May 07, 2020 Liz rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-clubs

I never would have picked up this book if it hadn’t been a book club selection.
So, Gladwell starts off by saying we are horribly bad at sussing out liars from our face to face interactions. Of course, my initial thought was that explains why Trump loves Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Gladwell’s basic premise is that humans have a default setting to believe others and in order to believe someone is lying there has to be a lot of unexplainable circumstances. So, while it’s easy to think you’d never fall ...more

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Dec 09, 2019 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology

This is a wonderful book about major issues when talking to people. I thought, initially, that the book would be about everyday conversations during everyday interactions. Not at all. The book is really about the assumptions that we make about other people, and how those assumptions can be drastically wrong. It is about belief systems, and how we react when we encounter evidence that is contrary to those beliefs. Malcolm Gladwell took me into worlds that I had never even considered.

The main poin This is a wonderful book about major issues when talking to people. I thought, initially, that the book would be about everyday conversations during everyday interactions. Not at all. The book is really about the assumptions that we make about other people, and how those assumptions can be drastically wrong. It is about belief systems, and how we react when we encounter evidence that is contrary to those beliefs. Malcolm Gladwell took me into worlds that I had never even considered.

The main point in the book is that "You believe in something not because you have no doubts, but because you don't have enough doubts." There is an excellent story about Ana Montes, an agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency. She received glowing performance reviews over the years, despite the fact that she was a Cuban spy. Fidel Castro personally gave he a medal as an award for her activities. But despite the fact that her boyfriend worked for the Pentagon, and her brother and sister both worked for the FBI. She was interviewed in detail, and there were a few hints that she was a spy. Yet, nobody suspected that she was a spy, and when she was arrested, her coworkers were in disbelief. It's not that nobody had doubts--nobody had enough doubts.

Judges try to estimate the probability of defendants' recidivism. They want to look at the defendants' faces, and hear their attitudes. The problem is, judges do not do as good a job at predicting recidivism as computers, which only take into account cold, hard facts, and obviously don't take appearance and demeanor into account.

A concept known as coupling is very interesting. The suicide rate in an English town decreased dramatically when the town switched from coal gas to natural gas. The switch made it almost impossible to commit suicide using the gas that was supplied to homes. People did not want to use less convenient modes of suicide. Similar reductions in suicide rates have been found in other environments. It is inferred that if handguns were outlawed in the U.S., there would be 10,000 fewer suicides per year.

The only thing I don't like about this book, is that the topics seem to be scatter-shot. The topics covered are not only about talking to strangers. They cover a wide range of topics, and do not seem to have an overall theme. For example, the topic of coupling doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with talking to strangers. Why was this topic (and others) included in the book? Only because it is an interesting psychological phenomenon.

...more

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Nov 22, 2019 Robin Bonne rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Clearly the author has never been sexually assaulted.
If you find reading graphic descriptions of rape and pedophelia upsetting, this isn’t a book you’ll enjoy.

The author is dismissive of rape victims. He concludes that the people who protect predators and disbelief rape victims are “defaulting to truth.” There were several times he defends the people who protected pedophiles like Jerry Sandusky and Nassar. This section of the book was horribly disgusting. His “default truth” in this case means ...more

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Jul 13, 2019 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-psychology

I'm glad that those nice people at Goodreads chose me randomly to receive an old-school paper copy of this book, free of charge. It will be a novel feeling to actually have read a controversial book before it hits the shelves and generates the predictably shallow hot takes in the few moments before the world's attention moves onto something else.

Perhaps I'm engaging in a display of unwarranted optimism to think that a mere book can have an effect on the way people think, but this is what Talking I'm glad that those nice people at Goodreads chose me randomly to receive an old-school paper copy of this book, free of charge. It will be a novel feeling to actually have read a controversial book before it hits the shelves and generates the predictably shallow hot takes in the few moments before the world's attention moves onto something else.

Perhaps I'm engaging in a display of unwarranted optimism to think that a mere book can have an effect on the way people think, but this is what Talking to Strangers attempts to do, to its credit.

I lump this book in with two others I've read recently (see here and here) which champion or criticize attempts to find “third way” solutions to our problems. This pretty damn eccentric book actually only directly addresses its main issue in the initial and concluding five percent or so of the text. The rest is a long trip through apparently (at first) unrelated phenomena (including Cuba-US relations, Amanda Knox, and waterboarding) before returning to the main point.

Reading books about third ways is an exercise in optimism, because third way books imply that there are always new and interesting ways to look at old problems. (In addition, as the Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) recently said, “Reading Malcolm Gladwell always makes you feel smart.”) Since I suffer a chronic deficit of optimism, I am constantly mainlining any literature which seems to say that the world could be a better place, non-fiction or no.

The issue which gets the third way treatment here is the alarming number of police traffic stops in the US which end up with someone (usually the driver of the car) dead. This is a problem which is ripe for a third way analysis, because as it stands now it seems like you either must be in the tribe that says “Police are racists” or the tribe that says “Liberals are apologists for criminals”.

I admire Gladwell for defying the large number of people who are so vested in one of these orthodoxies that he will no doubt find, for years to come, his Twitter feed polluted with poorly-proofread denunciations of everything he has ever done or said.

Sometimes Gladwell demonstrates an obvious truth so clearly that you are almost ashamed to be surprised by it, like when he describes an psychology experiment which demonstrates that while most of us regard ourselves as creatures of unknowable complexity and depth of character, we also tend to engage in ridiculous reductions of the personalities of others into easy-to-dismiss stereotypes based on the flimsiest of evidence.

On the other hand, reading Gladwell means spending a lot of time saying to yourself, “Hey, wait a minute, what about [fill in thing you know a little something about here]?” For example, Gladwell has a long chapter about someone who managed to be a mole for Cuban intelligence in the US bureaucracy for many years. Having toiled in the vineyards of the sprawling federal bureaucracy myself, I felt that Gladwell missed some very important details about how people act there, and why. Without getting into too much spoiler-ish detail, I think Gladwell doesn't really understand the intensity with which fecal matters rains down on those who rock the boat here in the nation's capital, a factor that certainly influenced the events he narrates.

Overall, though, I was very happy to have been gifted this smart book and look forward to seeing if the world can, for once, defy my grouchy pessimism and actually allow a mere book to increase the amount of understanding in world and improve how we live. ...more

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Apr 27, 2020 Diane rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, sociology-psychology

This is another fascinating book by Malcolm Gladwell, who likes to group a variety of topics under one overarching theme. This writing strategy is a clever one, because it basically guarantees there will be at least one or two case studies you'll find interesting.

I read this book back in April, and even then I was drawn to Gladwell's discussion of police tactics, and how law enforcement disproportionately targets black people in America. Gladwell opens his book with the case of Sandra Bland, a b ...more

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Aug 08, 2019 David Wineberg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest foray into human folly is its seemingly innate trust in strangers. We assume strangers are transparent, and can take what they do and say at face value. Sometimes we are wrong, but assuming everyone is evil is far worse. Talking To Strangers focuses (mostly) on a number of very high profile criminal cases we are all likely to be familiar with. They include the Amanda Knox case, the Jerry Sandusky case, the Brock Turner case, the Sandra Bland case, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, ...more

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About Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers—The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musici ...more

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“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.” — 59 likes

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception - is worse.” — 43 likes

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