In the flesh, Malcolm Gladwell is exactly as I imagined him to be: engaging, polite, dauntingly cerebral and supremely self-assured in that way that the exceptionally gifted often are. At 55, there is still something of the sporty, if slightly gawky, teenager about him; his jeans and a lightweight hoody accentuate his height and wiry thinness.
The signature afro has been tamed somewhat and, if anything, makes him look even younger. He is not big on small talk, and one senses that every hour in his working day is geared towards maximum efficiency.
Gladwell’s new book is called Talking to Strangers and, here we are, two strangers, conversing over tea in a fashionable Covent Garden hotel about the difficulties that can sometimes arise when, as he puts it, “we are thrown into contact with people whose assumptions, perspectives and backgrounds are different from our own”.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Like the previous bestselling books that made his name — The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008) — Talking to Strangers is essentially an exploration of human behaviour that also challenges much of our received wisdom about that behaviour and its motivations. Unlike them, though, it lacks a single iconoclastic, zeitgeist-defining idea, instead roaming far and wide to illustrate the problems, individual and collective, personal and ideological, that dog our interactions with others in our globalised, but increasingly atomised, culture.
“Any element which disrupts the equilibrium between two strangers, whether it is alcohol or power or place, becomes problematic,” he says. “The book is really about those disruptive influences.”
His subjects range from the spectacular failures of the FBI to detect spies within its midst to the gullibility and greed of investors who lost vast fortunes by trusting their money to the fraudster Bernard Madoff. Along the way, he demolishes the Italian authorities’ case against Amanda Knox, the American student accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia in 2007. And, using recent research into the concept that crimes are intrinsically linked to the locations they occur in, he suggests new ways of tackling crime prevention. He even employs the same research to insist that the poet, Sylvia Plath, might not have killed herself had she not been living in a house with a gas cooker. So far, so Gladwellian.
For his fans, who are legion, this is familiar territory: an iconoclastic take on the big subjects we think we know about and the even bigger subjects whose complexity is such that we need someone to explain them on our behalf. If there is one arresting concept in the mix it is the truth default theory, a concept formulated by the US academic Timothy Levine, who specialises in deception. Put simply, it states that our fundamental reaction to the receipt of any kind of new information is to believe it. This, it strikes me, may help explain the state we are in, from post-truth politics to the proliferation of conspiracy theories. It is, though, much more complex than that.
While our instinct to default to truth leaves us open to deception and facilitates fraud on an often grand scale, it also underpins nearly all our initial interactions with others and, as such, enables friendships to form, relationships to start and business to be transacted.
“The bottom line is that civil society simply cannot function without default to truth,” says Gladwell. “I can’t converse with you, for instance, if I subject every statement that comes out of your mouth to critical scrutiny before I accept it as true. Conversation cannot proceed without default to truth.”
This is pure Gladwell — although, as his critics will almost certainly point out, it is, in fact, pure Levine. Part of Gladwell’s genius — and his success — is to render the complex theories and dogged statistical research of academics palatable to a mass audience often by anecdotally illustrating their effectiveness. He is an unabashed populariser, whose big project, he tells me, is “to get people to take human psychology seriously and to respect the complexity of human behaviour and motivations.”
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS