In trying to make sense of the world around us, we are constantly susceptible to try and fit our conceptions onto the situation in front of us. We do it, because it’s the only reasonable way forward. It’s almost impossible to take any next step if we stop to factor in every possibility, especially in our interactions with people. As a result, we might end up making judgments that either falsely implicate others or let red-flag behaviours get away. In daily life, neither might be terribly consequential because we are talking about the realm of the personal. And as long as our power over others’ lives is limited, at the end of the day it won’t make much difference.
But what when we are entrusted to take decisions or encounter behaviours that might materially impact people’s lives? Malcolm Gladwell encourages us to question our assumptions in his latest book ‘Talking to Strangers’. For those of us who are familiar with his writings the latest is an extension of some of his previous works like ‘Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink’. In ‘Tipping Point’, his first book, he explains how big change comes about, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. In ‘Blink’ he illustrates how we make snap judgments. In ‘Talking to Strangers’, he elucidates how even when we are supposed to know better, we can fumble.
As a result, there can be serious damage done. He points out cases of intelligence failures, financial frauds, pedophilia among others that happened even when people wanted to be careful of exactly these actions. It can take years if not decades to finally recognise our own blind-spots. In trying to understand why these situations arise, Gladwell introduces a concept he calls ‘default to truth’, which essentially means that we believe that people are in fact telling the truth. If the opposite were the case, we would constantly be suspecting people, often with wafer-thin proof (if that) of their wrongdoing and end up with a potentially dysfunctional life. It’s hardly the outcome any of us desire, but it’s exactly this behaviour that can encourage crime even in our midst.
This is a depressing revelation, as Gladwell shows in example after example. He talks about Cuban moles in the CIA during Castro’s regime, Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme that came to light only when the financial crisis hit in 2008, sex offender Nassar who was finally charged for crimes against a mindboggling number of women when he was their sports doctor among others.
Encouragingly though, towards the end of the book he does point to potential solutions to large-scale problems like suicides and gun crime through an idea called ‘Coupling’. This means, that the existence of these problems is associated with another factor, which could be the preferred method in the case of suicides or geography in the case of gun crime. Once the authorities can zero in on the ‘coupling’ factor, it’s relatively straightforward to eliminate it and dramatically reduce the extent of the problem.
There's clearly a lot of painstaking research that has gone into Gladwell’s latest endeavour. So much so, that the level of detail was difficult to retain interest in especially as a reader not based in the US, the geography it’s concentrated in. Yet, like his earlier works Talking to Strangers too offers much food for thought. Gladwell’s work has entered main-stream consciousness over the years due to his gift for coining catch-phrases that explain an increasingly chaotic world around us. And I say this with the highest respect as someone who has used the term ‘tipping point’ more than a few times.
But as someone who’s trained in analysis, and by that I mean relying on quantitative techniques before I can well and truly believe the results, I would love to see results from tests of the hypotheses that Gladwell puts forward. He gives a lot of examples, and sounds convincing. But to use his phrase, I’d much rather rely on evidence than ‘default to truth’.
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