Talking to Strangers

Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell’s work on interactions among strangers includes several enthralling case histories, notably his retelling of the Amanda Knox murder case. Drawing on a range of other examples, including CIA interrogations and interactions with sex offenders, Gladwell illustrates astonishingly complex aspects of stranger-to-stranger dynamics. His heart-wrenching description of Sandra Bland’s encounter with a Texas police officer in 2015 delivers his message like a punch to the gut. Gladwell’s warning comes through loud and clear: Take nothing for granted when talking with strangers.

Most people, including experts, don’t read strangers well.

Gladwell describes how seriously the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) takes deception and its detection. Some agents study other CIA employees’ behavior to uncover traitors. Yet, he asserts in line with his main theme, the CIA fails time and again to detect people who are spying against it. During the Cold War, for example, the author reports that virtually every CIA agent in Cuba and in the Soviet Bloc was a double agent spying for the enemy.

Gladwell offers the example of judges who decide whether to grant or deny bail to those accused of crimes. Judges listen to lawyers, read case files and take the measure of accused people. The judges might as well flip a coin. Artificial intelligence-based algorithms can predict who will commit crimes while out on bail far better than judges.

You can’t draw reliable conclusions about people – especially strangers – by watching their expressions, observing their behaviors or trying to sense their emotions. The author writes that “we think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues.”

People default to believing each other; otherwise, society could not function.

Gladwell recounts how, in 1996, Cuban air force pilots shot down two small planes, killing four Americans. This led to a spy hunt within the US intelligence community. Despite mounting evidence against a particular female agent, the author notes that the agency made no arrests. Interrogators dismissed her suspicious behaviors, guilty demeanor and inconsistent answers. Her identity became known five years later only by chance. Gladwell expresses the precise measure of disbelief that is due to this curious saga.

Evolution, he discloses, has wired people to trust each other, something psychologists call the truth-default theory – meaning that people usually default to the truth. Liars don’t need special skills or intelligence to deceive; people simply believe them.

Gladwell excels at debunking common assumptions. He reports that humans haven’t evolved lie-detecting ability because dishonesty, he reports with mild surprise, doesn’t occur frequently, and when it does, it usually causes little harm. The benefits of trust overwhelm the risks of getting burned. Trust and truth enable communications and transactions in life and in commerce. Still, Gladwell relates ruefully, your trusting nature will sometimes get you – or other people – in trouble.

Punishing truth-telling leaders who report wrongdoing sends the wrong message about leadership.

Gladwell retraces the horrible saga of sexual abuse of athletes at Penn State University. Jerry Sandusky helped coach the Pennsylvania State University football team for many years. Gladwell details his habit of showering naked with young men, often at night. Over the course of more than 30 years, only two vague reports of potential abuse arose, and no one in authority pursued either one.

In another case, Gladwell discusses the notorious physician Larry Nassar, the official doctor for the USA Gymnastics women’s national team. He sexually abused his patients for at least 20 years. Despite repeated complaints – some from daughters to their parents – no one believed anything negative about Nassar, including many of his victims. Gladwell discloses that it wasn’t until detectives found 37,000 graphic images of child pornography on his computer that the tide turned and people saw the monster.

For Sandusky, trust didn’t turn into suspicion until 2010 when nine-year-old testimony resurfaced. In 2001, Penn State assistant coach Michael McQueary had seen and heard Sandusky in a locker-room shower with a young boy, naked, grunting and pressing up against him, front to back. McQueary didn’t intervene, Gladwell recounts, and waited five weeks to tell head football coach, Joe Paterno. After investigations by senior administrators, including failed attempts to identify the victim, and after interviews with McQueary that were inconsistent with his other statements, Penn State president Graham Spanier simply dropped the matter, believing that Sandusky was just being a guy who pals around with kids. Spanier defaulted to truth, even though it was a lie. People default to trust, Gladwell contends, because society couldn’t function otherwise.

You can’t determine someone’s emotions by reading the expression on his or her face, especially in a “mismatch.”

Evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin believed that similar, easily interpreted expressions – of joy, sadness, fear, surprise, and the like – were consistent for all peoples and cultures. Gladwell reminds readers that, in fact, they aren’t, which explains why people can’t accurately gauge strangers’ emotions or intent across, or even within, cultures. Books and movies depict people in stereotypical expressions of various emotions, such as surprise. But in numerous experiments in which subjects encounter scenarios they later rate as highly surprising, Gladwell informs readers that only about 5% registered facial expressions that others normally associate with surprise.

Gladwell sticks to this theme tightly in this work and every example builds his case that encounters between strangers are fraught with bias. Job interviews, bail hearings and interactions with police would have better results, the author relates, if the parties never saw each other. However, he says, social norms and the nature of being human demand face-to-face interactions. In this, Gladwell finds a paradox.

He cites the example of American Amanda Knox. In 2007, Knox went to jail in Italy for the murder of her roommate. An Italian jury convicted Knox, an American studying in Perugia, based almost entirely on the facial expressions, behaviors and emotions she displayed during her encounters with police after the murder. Gladwell asserts that all circumstantial and physical evidence – including DNA – pointed to an Italian drifter and known criminal who was spotted around Knox’s apartment and who fled to Germany the day after the murder. Nevertheless, in keeping with the classic errors Gladwell describes, the police regarded Knox’s behavior as inconsistent with how they conceived a person should act after her roommate’s murder. Knox was innocent, but she spent four years in jail before the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation acquitted and freed her.

Gladwell avers that extensively trained law enforcement professionals, like most people, do well at spotting real liars whose comportment fits the stereotypes of liars – evasiveness, lack of eye contact, rambling answers to simple questions, and such. He notes with some amusement that professionals perform worse than average people when they encounter difficult cases of truth tellers who act like liars, and vice versa. “The harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves,” the author writes, “the more elusive they become.”

To further illustrate this conundrum, Gladwell turns to a high-profile interrogation that failed to achieve its desired results. During the examinations of captured al-Qaeda operatives after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stood out as the most important prisoner. Gladwell tells how the CIA believed KSM, as he was called, was the brains behind the attacks and that he had been planning follow-up operations. But the techniques CIA agents used to question him – sleep deprivation and waterboarding – often cause trauma that impairs peoples’ memories.

After four years in custody and the application of increasingly desperate enhanced interrogation techniques, KSM confessed to an astonishing 27 executed or planned terrorist attacks. Some of his accounts were impossible to reconcile because the targets didn’t exist in the timeframes he cited for the planned attacks. Gladwell does not explicitly state that the thinks the tortuous methods applied to KSM produced only fantasies, but he makes his feelings plain.

The nature of behavior among strangers is linked to the circumstances, conditions and context in which they encounter each other.

“There are clues to making sense of a stranger,” the author writes. “But attending to them requires care and attention.” To illustrate this thought, Gladwell adds another complication to the problem of dealing with strangers. Beyond your inability to read strangers’ emotions and your powerful bias to believe what they tell you, he affirms, you must face the additional problem of context. Where and when you meet a stranger, Gladwell emphasizes, matters.

He takes an unexpected turn when he cites the famed suicide of poet Sylvia Plath in 1963. Those who knew her, Gladwell contends, weren’t surprised. Plath had talked and written about her suicidal thoughts and plans, and had attempted suicide on more than one occasion. But suicides like Plath’s confuse people. They believe, the author stresses, that those who want to kill themselves are determined to keep trying. In reality, suicide depends a great deal on context.

Plath committed suicide by putting her head in her oven and turning on the gas, a method used at the time by thousands of British people each year. The noxious gas piped into their homes offered a quick, clean, painless and effective death. When, for other reasons, the British government undertook a national program to phase out this kind of gas between 1964 and 1976, Gladwell details the astonishing social trend that suicides dropped in perfect correlation with the rollout of the project – but not only suicides by gas. The overall suicide rate dropped dramatically. Most people believe that those who decided to end their lives wouldn’t change their minds simply because authorities removed a method. But fences on bridges and other inconveniences that block people from committing suicide also save lives.

Likewise, Gladwell alleges that about 50% of the crime in cities around the world occurs in context – that is, in fewer than 5% of city blocks and streets. Despite efforts by criminologists and experiments to demonstrate clearly the coupling of context and crime, people have a hard time accepting it. As an example, Gladwell explains that for a period of more than 20 years, the Kansas City, Missouri, police force experimented with evidence-based policing. Unfortunately, all of their and other police forces’ experiments, including adding new police officers, failed – that is, until the early 1990s, when one succeeded wildly. The Kansas City police identified the area’s most crime-ridden district and pulled motorists over for almost any reason. Police were trained to treat everyone respectfully but to look for clues that might arouse suspicion. They were taught to default to their suspicions rather than the truth – but, crucially, only within the right context and with sensitivity. Crime rates fell by half. The news spread: Here was a method that worked. Police departments all over the United States, Gladwell notes, began applying what had become known as Kansas City Policing.

One of those places was Prairie View, a small town 50 miles outside Houston, Texas, where, on July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland had an awful encounter with state trooper Brian Encinia. He had taken the Kansas City methods to heart. Gladwell divulges that Encinia pulled over dozens of motorists every day – black, white, male, female. He didn’t discriminate. The author reveals that, as Encinia saw it, his job was to pull people over on any pretext, check them out, look for anything suspicious, and write a ticket or issue a warning. He did what he was told and trained to do. At first at least, Bland wasn’t a special case.

In nearly every police force outside Kansas City, the training for the transition to the Kansas City approach skipped critical ingredients. Gladwell foreshadows the unfolding tragedy by underlining that Officer Encinia had received no special training to go with the new tactics. Instead, he was told to look for the stereotypical signs of deceit. The Prairie View police department had forgotten to teach context. Also, instead of focusing its tactics in high-crime areas, it applied them everywhere.

Encinia, the author reports, pulled Bland over for failing to signal a lane change. It happened in a place with no crime, where the new methods were almost certain to yield no results other than extra revenue for the force. Bland acted as other people might. At first, she was cooperative but grew indignant at having been pulled over for something so minor. Encinia wasn’t schooled in nuance or tact. Bland’s behavior raised his suspicions and fears, escalating the situation unnecessarily. Bland refused to get out of her car for him until Encinia threatened her with a taser. He called for backup. Ultimately Bland was arrested and surprisingly charged with assaulting a police officer. The force would later fire Encinia, but Bland didn’t live to see it. Three days after her arrest, Gladwell reveals, she hung herself in her jail cell.

Exercise mindfulness when you talk with strangers. Listen more, stay humble and never rush to judgment.

Gladwell sums up his theme by stating that you can’t engineer perfect encounters with strangers. Approach conversations carefully, mildly and cautiously. Don’t read a great deal into peoples’ expressions or mannerisms. Use your truth default to remain cautious, not suspicious. “If I can convince you of one thing in this book,” the author writes, “let it be this: Strangers are not easy.”

Investigating the Ineffable

Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell takes a slightly different and welcome approach in his new work. Instead of exploring the implications of quantitative metrics – such as his famous “ten thousand hours” – he moves into the world of the ineffable. This means Gladwell often describes negatives, such as how the Italian police completely failed to trust rational evidence and insisted on believing their faulty instincts about Amanda Knox. This prism humanizes Gladwell and makes him seem less coldly analytical and more compassionate to human error and foibles. That greatly adds to the charm of his prose, which is always intelligent without pretension, easy to read and oddly memorable. This may be Gladwell’s most empathetic work. It proves absurdly engaging, great fun and a potential source of unexpected self-insight.

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About the Author

Acclaimed Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell’s previous books include The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw – all New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the podcast Revisionist History.