Who Are You?

Review and reflections on Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell (Penguin, 2019; 386 pages, paperback)

• Tragic Misunderstandings
• Are You Lying To Me?
• Making Them Talk
• When and Where
• Elsewhere

Tragic Misunderstandings

Talking with Strangers is built on tragic misunderstandings of people who are not like us. An innocent young woman goes to prison for murder, no because of evidence but because she “acts funny”. A notorious spy hid in plain sight because she was supremely confident. A Prime Minister fails to avert war because he believed the charming leader when they met in person. Leaders of an educational institution overlook an appalling paedophile for many years while he perpetrated his crimes almost in plain sight.

These are hard topics, serious matters that probe the darkest sides of human nature. But the lessons drawn out of these cases challenge so much of what we think we know about other people. In fact, true to type, Malcolm Gladwell once again overturns all our long-held assumptions about Talking to Strangers.

Are You Lying To Me?

I don’t know you, but I have to choose whether to trust you or not. If I think you look shifty, or you won’t make eye contact with me, or perhaps you are evasive when asked a straightforward question, then I am going to be less trustful. Am I right? Often the consequences may be trivial Or deadly serious if I am a judge or magistrate, and you have been arrested and brought before me. If I have to make the decision to detain you or let you out “on bail” before your trial, how certain am I that I can trust my own eyes and ears. Are you reliable? Are you hiding your true intentions?

The last situation is one of the several pieces of research which Gladwell’s book explores. How successful are “arraignment” decisions in detaining those people who are likely to re-offend if they are released? The results showed that judges are not very good at it, compared with an anonymised AI algorithm, which has no information on what the defendant looks like or how they answer questions or how they behave in person. We value looking at someone face-to-face and we trust our judgement and experience to use that encounter to spot the bad ‘uns. But we cannot. And we also cannot trust our evaluation of ourselves: how confident are we in our decisions about strangers? Always over-confident, it turns out. These are objective measurable data. I cannot tell if you are lying to me.

And this was the problem with Neville Chamberlain declaring “Peace in our time!” after meeting Adolph Hitler. This was the problem with counter-espionage experts who refused to believe – even in the face of evidence to the contrary – that their long-term colleague was actually a double agent for most of their career. This was the problem with education leaders and parents not suspecting paedophile sports coaches and priests and doctors who were abusing their own children. We “default to truth” and, whether consciously or not, take the other person’s word about their good intentions.

And the few who do not act that way are exceptional individuals, and uncomfortable to be around.

Making Them Talk

Alongside the tales of abuse in this book, some of the most disturbing passages were about the development and testing of what became known through the euphemistic Newspeak of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”, particularly as used by the US military and allied forces to interview suspects during the Iraq Wars. Torture. Dress up the words however you like – it’s torture. Exquisitely refined physical and mental cruelty to break any individual, to get what may be vital information out of the hardest of adversaries, against their will.

The methods are horrible. The people who developed them are extraordinarily matter-of-fact about the details of the most “effective” sleep deprivation or waterboarding. They were meticulous in testing these torture techniques out on each other and then on trainee military and intelligence personnel. And these techniques worked. Everyone breaks, even the most disciplined and prepared of hard-case terrorist opponents. They talked.

And yet… when the information from these non-cooperative sources is evaluated, it is more often than not found to be useless. The kingpin terrorist leader who eventually broke under pressure or these inhuman methods confessed in detail to a huge number of terrible crimes, either carried out or planned. Yet almost all of them were pure fantasy. The psychological techniques had altered his mind to the extent that he would say anything, sign anything, confess to anything, and even indulge in high-blown fantasy so that his notoriety should hit anti-heroic levels. The cruel torture may appear to be “effective” (and therefore defended against criticism on some utilitarian moral argument) but is as good as useless.

When and Where

And the catalogue of stranger-encounters with awful outcomes continues to stack up as Gladwell moves on. After your friend dies and people who do not know you do not perceived that you are grieving “normally” (which is how exactly?) then you can end up as the murder suspect – that was Amanda Knox. Or two young people barely even remember hooking up at a drunken party, and hours later someone finds themselves accused of rape. Was it misinterpreting each other’s intentions and consent, or does too much alcohol make the whole concepts of “intention and consent” unknowable even to the persons themselves?

The themes which he brings out from these stories are real insights into human psychology and society. They are not just bright ideas cooked up by an imaginative journalist and story-teller, but testable behaviours, real effects in the world. We should be more familiar with concepts like “alcohol myopia” and “default-to-truth” . Then in criminology studies, detailed statistics about the locality of crimes, the times and places of suicides should be better understood in order to inform better policy decisions on policing and public welfare. Yet half-understood, the insights can become misapplied in well-meaning bureaucracies to produce stupidity on stilts, such as police chasing targets which alienate whole populations and destroy civic trust.

We desperately need to learn to talk to strangers better. Both individual lives and civil society depend on it. I urge you to read this book.

Like other books by Gladwell, this one is very neatly presented. Each section starts with a compelling case history and a memorable phrase which later serves as a shortcut to complex ideas. You can be confident that in Gladwell’s hands, these disparate and sometimes conflicting ideas will come together to a satisfying – if disturbing – conclusion. His writing is tight; nothing is wasted. The occasional tangent gets pushed into a footnote, that is always illuminating. In this review I have not tried to explain any of the cases or the lessons that emerge. I wrote just a flavour of what struck me as important and surprising. After all, Gladwell tells these stories better than most can.

The hype on most book jackets is usually over the top, but this book has genuinely influenced how I think. Do I trust others more or less than I should? Am I alert to the shallowness of most press reports? Do I notice the cheap opinions of politicians who too quickly condemn the outsider? What of my own prejudices and biases? If we feel uncomfortable after reading this, perhaps we should.

Elsewhere

• Matthew Syed – Sideways: Absurdity on Toast. This podcast, from BBC iPlayer, imaginatively explores the absurd outcomes of apparently logical bureaucracies and well-intentioned humans trying to do their best. The results are inexplicable. counter-intuitive and absurd. This episode of Sideways is not what it seems….
• I would recommend all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books that I have read: Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, etc.
• Hoorah for Public Libraries! I borrowed Strangers from the Lord Louis Library, Newport, Isle of Wight.

Photo credits:

• Neville Chamberlain, on his return from Munich on September 30, 1938 – source: Article by Sean Scanlon, Appeasement and ‘Peace for Our Time’ on the website of the National WWII Museum, New Orleans.
• Waterboarding – By Uncredited photographer. Distributed by United Press International / Washington Post (21 January 1968) / wikimedia
• Amanda Knox – photo credit: Patrick Kehoe / The Guardian for an article “It’s a New Kind of Prison” (The Guardian 22 March 2025)
• Malcolm Gladwell’s books – picture credit: Monocle; image sourced from Madhumitha Srinavasan’s article Turn Everyday Thinking Upside Down With Malcolm Gladwell’s Books on LitFind by Bookscape.