Understanding strangers

A version of this was in Outlook

We live in what’s often described as the digital age. When technology is supposed to be transforming lives and bringing people together. And perhaps it does. Yet, we still tend to see the stranger as the ‘other’, the bogeyman we must fear. So why is it that humans, despite the ‘advances’ we have made and the technology we have at our fingertips, are so bad at understanding other humans, especially those we do not know.

This is the question that Malcolm Gladwell tackles in his new book, Talking to Strangers:  What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know. In its search for answers, the book — Gladwell’s sixth and first in six years — engages with some deeply disturbing issues such as race and its ties to police misconduct; gender and campus rape; and the sexual assault of children. 

Central to the narrative, and perhaps what triggered the idea for the book, is the tragic story of Sandra Bland. In July 2015, the 28-year-old African-American woman was found hanging in her jail cell after she was detained following a traffic offence. As Gladwell writes: “Talking to Strangers is an attempt to understand what really happened by the side of the highway that day in rural Texas.”

A staff writer at The New Yorker, Gladwell is the author of bestsellers such as The Tipping Point and Outliers and co-founder of the company that produces the Revisionist History podcasts.

His articles and books typically meld pop science, psychology, arresting insights drawn from academic research in the social sciences and anecdotes with elegant writing to arrive at intriguing hypotheses. And whether it is his writing or his public speaking engagements, Gladwell is most often giving a performance. And this book is no different, with writing that is mostly understated but lucid and a bazaar of anecdotes — from Sandra Bland’s death to the encounter between Aztec ruler Montezuma II and Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes, from Sylvia Plath’s suicide to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and the Friends television series. And there are some extremely Tweetable lines such as, “Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.”

In 1938, with the threat of war looming over Europe, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did what few world leaders had done; he went to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler. Across three meetings, he looked the German leader in the eye and spoke to him for hours. And when Hitler said that the only part of Europe he wanted was the Sudetenland, Chamberlain believed him. As he later wrote to his sister: “… I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”

However, others like Winston Churchill, who had never met Hitler, firmly believed that he was a “duplicitous thug.” And as subsequent events demonstrated, the people who’d never met Hitler or spent time with him were the ones who got it right.

So why is it that people who are reasonably intelligent and worldly-wise end up being deceived and unable to understand people they do not know?

One possible explanation, Gladwell believes, is our tendency to “default to truth”; our assumption that the people we deal with are honest. There’s also the “illusion of transparency”, the idea that the way people appear and behave is a reflection of what they feel on the inside; that conduct and appearance offer us a window into the stranger’s soul. And on top of these, Gladwell suggests that we do not ‘get’ strangers because of the absence of “coupling”, the idea that behaviour can be linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.

Therefore, what should we do to read strangers correctly? This is an especially relevant question at a time when the world over, trust in leaders and public institutions is under tremendous strain and the ‘other’ is blamed for the world’s ills.     

Disappointingly, Gladwell offers no real solutions. All he recommends is, “We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers… What is required of us is restraint and humility… There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention.” But he doesn’t quite spell out how we could do this.

Also, Gladwell’s anecdotes and the research that underpins his theories are drawn almost exclusively from the west. While some of these ideas are, possibly, universal and could be applied across cultures, it seems the book is essentially about ‘talking to strangers in the US’.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Talking to Strangers isn’t thought provoking. Some of the insights thrown up by the research Gladwell draws on are fascinating, as are some of the entries in the notes section and the pointers they offer people interested in the social sciences. But if you’re expecting a revelation, don’t quite hold your breath.