19: Talking to Strangers

A book by Malcolm Gladwell

In the seventh episode of the sixth season of Tina Fey’s acclaimed sitcom 30 Rock, the superbly named Hazel Wassername is a trifle miffed. Played by Kristen Schaal, Hazel is a page on the fictional show within the show, TGS with Tracy Jordan. She has come to New York seeking fame and fortune but instead has largely been treated like crap by the higher-ups.

“Everyone here is awful,” she complains to her fellow page, Kenneth (Ellen) Parcell, “I need to be inspired.” She continues: “I came here to start a glamorous new life. 'Cause today anyone can be famous; I mean, look at Foxy Knoxy, what did she ever do besides not kill anybody?”

It’s a good joke. That’s no surprise; 30 Rock is a hilarious show. More pertinently, though, it asks an intriguing question: What did Foxy Knoxy do to become (in)famous? Answer: She was a bit weird. A bit quirky. And she didn’t act how she was supposed to after the brutal murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. (As if there’s some normal way to act after an incident like that.)

These are the conclusions of Malcom Gladwell in his ludicrously compelling 2019 book Talking to Strangers, an examination of why humans are so catastrophically bad at dealing with people we do not know. Through an assessment of various case studies which highlight the major consequences of this near-universal shortcoming, Gladwell paints an alarming picture of a world in which even highly trained criminal judges might as well just be guessing when it comes to granting or not granting bail.

He explains why it was that Hitler was appeased; why Bernie Madoff was able to defraud so many, so effectively, for so long; why it’s possible to watch Friends with the sound off and still understand every beat; and why Sylvia Plath might not have committed suicide had town gas been phased out of Britain a little earlier. The book is framed by the tragic story of Sandra Bland, a young African-American woman who took her own life in 2015 after being arrested following a routine (and completely unnecessary) traffic stop in Texas. Gladwell briefly touches on the horrific case of Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics team doctor who spent years abusing his young clients. (Gladwell points his readers in the direction of the excellent, if harrowing, Believed podcast, which discusses the Nassar case in depth.)

Gladwell’s case studies are about perception. How we as humans, almost pathologically, cannot identify that someone is lying unless they are acting like they are lying. How we are so often predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt. We want to trust people, so we believe them, even when the lies are staring right at us. And vice versa. We think we know how to read people, but we don’t.

In the case of Amanda Knox, there was a collective failure to separate out any of the actual facts from the general perception that she just looked guilty. Knox spent almost four years in prison for a murder she did not commit because she was a bit of an oddball at 20 years old. She had the temerity to be seen laughing in the days following Kercher’s death and the explanation was that she was a heartless murderer, not just partaking in a bit of gallows humour. She went out and bought some red underwear the day after the murder, for many a sure sign she was a sex-crazed maniac, never mind the fact her apartment was now a crime scene and she could not access her clothes. When she did the splits while waiting to be questioned by the police, it couldn’t possibly be because she was a young woman who had been slumped for hours in an uncomfortable chair and wanted to stretch, it must be a calculated insult to her victim.

A quick glance at my Goodreads app reveals I started Talking to Strangers on May 16, 2020, and finished it on May 17, 2020. It consumed me for a weekend. Gladwell is a brilliant storyteller, and every tale told in this book is a humdinger. Many are familiar, but seen through the Gladwell lens, they are fresh and startling. The 56-year-old has his critics. He’s too simplistic, too accessible, too successful! The conclusions he reaches are simplistic. All of these criticisms, I’m sure, could be aimed at Talking to Strangers if you were an expert in the relevant field. But I’m not. And neither, I suspect, are you. And Gladwell isn’t writing these books for the professionals. He’s writing for those fascinated by the stories and thrilled by the way his retelling of them casts a new light on our preconceptions. For that audience, Talking to Strangers is close to perfect.