Talking to Strangers is a Malcolm Gladwell Outlier
If you’ve ever heard of the 10,000 hour rule — the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of intense practice to achieve mastery of a complex skill — then, you’ve likely heard of Malcolm Gladwell who coined the rule. In fact, many readers have likely heard the rule but not of Gladwell himself; his ideas are simply that celebrated and widespread. The reason for Gladwell’s success is not a mystery. His gripping storytelling techniques and ability to translate intricate experiments into digestible pop-science for a lay audience have led to five New York Times bestsellers, a hit podcast The Revisionist History, and a spot on the TIME 100 Most Influential People list (“About Malcolm”). However, Gladwell’s career would hardly be human had it not suffered a single misstep. In 2019, Gladwell published Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know. Upon the first few pages, I was immediately engaged by Gladwell’s comforting “let me take you by the hand prose” as critic Andrew Ferguson put it. The basic premise of the book follows that conflict and misunderstanding arise in the communication between strangers because the way we naturally make sense of others is deeply flawed. Flawed, in that we 1) default-to-truth and 2) assume others’ external traits are representative of how they internally feel when often they are not. Gladwell unpacks this thesis by referencing historical examples of stranger interaction; modern-day, hot-button headlines; and even the 90s sitcom Friends. However, in this rare case, Gladwell’s knack for simplification harms his argument rather than supports it. As a result, I found myself uncomfortable as Gladwell glossed over the element of power dynamics in the Sandra Bland case, the accountability of Brock Turner in the Stanford sexual assault case, or even the role of colonialism in Hernan Cortés’ conquest of Tenochtitlan. Page after page, I found myself begging Gladwell to address the obvious component of each story. But, he scarcely did. Though captivating, Gladwell’s argument regarding human interaction overlooks critical elements in the evidence he provides, leading to a less-than-convincing read.
My confusion with Talking to Strangers begins with a far-fetched assumption that is made throughout the book: the definition of a stranger. Gladwell unusually never defines what being a “stranger” to another party entails. Take, for example, the infamous 2015 interaction between Sandra Bland and police officer Brian Encinia; this interaction bookends the text. On a trip to get groceries, Texas A&M college student Sandra Bland was pulled over for failure to signal a lane change. Stressed, Bland lights a cigarette, and Encinia tells her to put it out. After resisting, the situation escalates and Encinia even threatens to “light her up” if she doesn’t exit the car. Bland was then arrested and found dead in her cell three days later from suicide. As Gladwell explains, the story made national headlines due to the suspicion of racial-profiling playing a role in Encinia’s decision to pull over Bland as well as use excessive force. In this case, the two parties are strangers because they’ve never met one another and they do not share any sort of social characteristic (age, occupation, gender, ethnicity). Gladwell posits that their interaction went awry because Encinia’s police-taught reaction was to be suspicious of Bland’s frustration and angst. Although Bland was in fact harmless, her demeanor was supposedly misinterpreted by Encinia. However, Gladwell’s analysis fails to consider an overt factor at play in this interaction: a power dynamic. Sandra Bland is a civilian being pulled over by an officer of the law. According to Texas Transportation Code 542.501, which governs citizens of Texas such as Bland, a person may not wilfully fail or refuse to comply with a lawful order or direction of a police officer. In other words, Sandra must obey Encinia legally (FindLaw). Of course she’s nervous! When one thinks of an interaction with a stranger, they do not assume one in which the potential downside is imprisonment. They think of talking to a barista, or mailman. Bland and Encinia are no doubt strangers to one another. However, never in the book does Gladwell distinguish between the nature of their strangerhood and other examples in the book. Let it be explored how a power dynamic, as this example illuminates, may shake up Gladwell’s thesis.
After unraveling the Encinia + Bland interaction, Gladwell unconvincingly draws parallel to a historical example from 1519. Here, not only is the “stranger” dynamic between the two parties far different than citizen and officer of the law, but another overt factor in their miscommunication is again overlooked. Gladwell then unpacks the Spanish commander Hernán Cortés’ conversation with the Aztec Emperor, Montezuma. According to Gladwell, because both parties came from significantly different cultures and spoke different languages, their ability to make sense of one another faltered. They spoke through a translator and this is why the supposed miscommunication occurred. As Gladwell puts it, “The way the Spanish interpreted Montezuma’s remarks, the Aztec king was making an astonishing concession: he believed Cortés to be a god… And he was, as a result, surrendering to Cortés” (Gladwell, 15). What followed was the decimation of the city of Tenochtitlan as well as the death of twenty million Aztecs at the hands of Cortés’ army. But, what does Gladwell propose caused this tragic conquest? A failure to “understand each other through multiple layers of translators.” (Gladwell, 15). Had it really been this simple, and this had been a failure to translate properly an entire documentary could have been made to explore the most tragic misinterpretation in history. Indeed, it goes without saying that Hernán Cortés came to Mexico intending to conquer Montezuma and his people. This was not a failure to communicate. Three years prior to Cortés’ arrival in Tenochtitlan, he had taken part in another conquest of Veracruz — only 250 miles away from Tenochtitlan (Prescott). Simply put, Cortés was a conquistador! To distill this massacre down to a failed translation is not only an utter oversimplification, but a dishonor to a tragic historical event. Lastly, Gladwell’s presentation of the conversation between the two leaders certainly makes for a gripping story, however, he fails to state that the historical account of this conversation is not strongly supported. According to historian Camilla Townsend, who researches myths regarding the conquest of Mexico, Cortes never wrote that he was taken for a God. This interpretation was only found in secondary sources. If Gladwell’s entire argument is based on the words that left Montezuma’s mouth, he better be certain that those words are accurate. Or, at the very least, acknowledge the uncertainty that surrounds them.
Only three sentences after noting the number of Aztecs that perished, Gladwell transitions from the example, “Today we are… thrown into contact all the time with people whose… backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is… Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other…” (Gladwell, 16). No, it isn’t! In the modern world, the interaction between strangers is, for the most part, inconsequential. Moreover, the nature by which two people are strangers unequivocally determines the lens through which that interaction should be analyzed. Is one party trying to gain something? Is there asymmetric information? Is there a power dynamic? The nuances that may define two parties’ strangerhood are infinite, yet none are acknowledged in the book. For Gladwell to bucket the Montezuma + Cortes interaction with the Bland + Encinia interaction with the audience’s everyday interactions under the catch-all “Talking to Strangers” is a level of unfounded parallelism that not even the distinguished Malcolm Gladwell should get away with.
Gladwell continues with the infamous case of former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. In 2016, Turner was found guilty of sexually assaulting the unconscious Chanel Miller (then known as Jane Doe) after the two had been heavily drinking at a campus fraternity party. Gladwell hones in on the neurological effects that alcohol has on the brain and why, intoxicated, we struggle to understand strangers. As he puts it, alcohol exacerbates the mismatch between external representation and true, internal self. Then strangers, with only an external representation of the other party and intoxicated themselves, misinterpret this portrayal. He also cites research which shows that college students have varying beliefs as to what entails consent, varying from retrieving a condom to never saying “no”. Together, Gladwell argues that with vague consent definitions and amplified by the cognitively debilitating effects of alcohol, an immature young man is “primed to do something stupid” in the chaos of a fraternity party (Gladwell). Intentionally or not, the discussion of the case attributes too much responsibility to the role of alcohol and overlooks the accountability of perpetrators of sexual assault. He writes “People v. Brock Turner is a case about alcohol. The entire case turned on the degree of Emily Doe’s drunkenness” (Gladwell, 141). Just as Cortes’ conquest was not a miscommunication, this case was not about Miller’s “drunkenness”. Instead, I hoped for Gladwell’s discussion to mention the college campus and fraternity culture that may empower young men to relentlessly pursue women, a point he tee’d up by describing the alcohol, hormones, and immaturity found at parties. I admit, the general idea of this chapter is sound; the psychological effects of alcohol on human interaction is a fascinating field of study. Many would likely agree that how they act impaired is not representative of their true self. They are not transparent, as Gladwell would say. I just wished that Gladwell had not chosen such a sensitive example where another overt, unmentioned factor plays a role.
Throughout the book, Gladwell introduces several of the techniques we utilize to make sense of strangers and why they often fail. Transparency, the idea that other’s external traits are fully representative of themself, is why Turner and Encinia’s interactions went awry. “Default-to-truth” is why Montezuma mistakenly trusted Cortes. Rather self-explanatory, the latter states that on average we are more likely to assume others are telling us the truth for social efficiency. It’s why we don’t ask the Starbucks barista to double-check the price of our grande latte. We assume they are telling the truth because we have no reason to believe otherwise. While Gladwell considers default-to-truth to be a remarkably insightful point (a phrase he uses over 20 times), it’s simply not adding enough new perspective to be given the airtime it does in the already lengthy book. However, given this much real estate, I expected Gladwell to pose nuanced, valuable solutions to dealing with this widespread social inefficiency. If defaulting to truth can have disastrous implications, how should we be making sense of strangers? The only fragment of a response Gladwell poses is that we should approach strangers “with caution and humility” (183). In reality, however, people’s ability to deploy caution and humility vary drastically. According to Roy J. Lewicki, scholar in the study of trust development and trust repair, one’s ability to trust hinges on their personality, the norms established by their society, and past experiences. All of these factors contribute to one’s psychological schema — a mental structure for organizing known knowledge and a framework to perceive the new. Despite the fact that schemas influence our ability to trust and vary heavily by culture and even individual, Gladwell’s analysis provides nothing in the way of these qualifications. Instead, he boldly claims that had his lessons of caution and humility been taken to heart many of the miscommunications explored in the book could have been avoided. Playing it safe, his recommendation hovers on the surface and lacks novel perspective.
Needless to say, I felt underwhelmed with that proposed solution. Rather than thoroughly answering this question that he sets up to bat, Gladwell sends the reader on unconnected excursions where two parties simply misunderstand each other with varying degrees of consequence. Altogether, I’m uncertain if “default-to-truth” or the concept of transparency will join the ranks of The Tipping Point in the Malcolm Gladwell lexicon. If you’re interested in a gripping story, however, this book provides just that. I often felt as captivated as a trance-inducing Netflix docudrama may instill, appealing to my innate desire for entertainment, not science. Just don’t try to look too intently into what exactly connects each of the >15 stories. You may be searching for a while.
