Book of the Week: "Talking To Strangers" by Malcolm Gladwell

When Malcolm Gladwell comes out with his first book in six years, it's a no-brainer that I'm going to pick it up and it did not disappoint. It is, in my opinion, his best piece of work since "Outliers." As he did presenting the concept of the 10,000-hour rule and why members of the Canadian junior hockey team were born in the early months of the year, Gladwell paints a great picture of why our interactions with people we don't know are the way they are.

He also takes a shot at at the TV show "Friends," which gives it another check for me. Sorry to all the "Friends" fans reading this, but seriously the show is so fluid it's tough to follow - Ross is doing this, Rachel is doing that. Or maybe it's just too phony and no acts like that in real life that bothers me. Who knows!

But that is exactly, what Gladwell says, is wrong about how we view strangers.

We expect people to be transparent in our interactions with them. If what we are seeing doesn't line up with what is happening, then an alarm goes off in our head that says "something's odd about this person" when in reality, nothing may be. The person may just be mismatched. The show "Friends" everybody is perfectly matched, but that is not reality.

Bernie Madoff comes across as this likable, charismatic guy, which is what made people want to invest with him, but the reality, he was a sociopath, who was stealing people's money. On the flip side, Amanda Knox, the college student studying abroad accused murder and spent four years in an Italian prison, was just the opposite. Her outward demeanor, presenting herself as uncaring and callous during the investigation, made her a prime suspect.

["13 Reasons Why" season three SPOILER ALERT!!!]

Knox's situation is not all that much different than what made Clay Jensen, in season three of "13 Reasons Why," the person of interest in Bryce Walker's murder. Clay wasn't a bad kid and certainly not capable of committing murder, but the fact Clay was so mismatched made the sheriff believe he had the right guy.

Our whole concept of transparency is wrong. As a society, we also tend to "default to the truth." We give people our trust first instead of questioning them. This works well - most of the time. We trusted Bernie Madoff because of what he presented. We thought Knox was the murderer because she acted odd. Penn State president, Graham Spanier, defended Jerry Sandusky for so long because he believed in the man Sandusky was. But this is where it leads us off the beaten path.

It took a paranoid, but smart man like Harry Markopolos to figure out Madoff was pulling the bag over our eyes. It took 11 years before Sandusky's actions finally saw the light and the administration was turning a blind eye. But really the administration wasn't - they genuinely believed Paterno and Sandusky.

While you may think it is vital that we should be like Markopolos and question everything, we also need to be a little bit like Spanier. For our society to function well, we need a little bit of both.

Gladwell concludes the book with the same case study he started: Sandra Bland. If only Officer Encinia defaulted to the truth and acted like Graham Spanier, Bland would still be alive today.




It is definitely a must read book, so if you haven't picked up a copy here's the Amazon link: Talking To Strangers.

But if you are really immune to reading and prefer to listen, audio version is also on YouTube: Talking to Strangers.