Note: this is a long (2400 word) rant excoriating Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Talking To Strangers. If you like Gladwell’s work, you may not want to read what follows.
Malcolm Gladwell is a public intellectual for people who don’t feel any pressing compunction to think. While I am highly skeptical of Gladwell’s ideas, I read him all the same. I read him for the same reason I read Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People. In my early teens, my father gave me a copy and told me I might enjoy it; never mind the message (which I quickly recognized as a banal paean to narcissism); pay attention to the anecdotes. As my father observed: “This Dale Carnegie fellow, he’s a great storyteller.” The same can be said of Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell’s methodology follows a pattern that allows him to share with his readers his one true gift: storytelling. Gladwell takes a big idea—in this case, the Truth Default Theory of Timothy Levine—and contextualizes an abstraction by deploying the anecdotal to ask if the big idea has explanatory force in particular situations. For example, he introduces a highly publicized scenario, the Jerry Sandusky affair, where a beloved college football coach is ultimately revealed as a sexual predator. The question that arises here is: how did Sandusky deceive people for so long given that his behaviour was so egregious and so blatant? Or what about Larry Nassar, coach of the USA Gymnastics national team, who sexually assaulted upwards of 250 young women, sometimes when their parents were in the room?
Enter Truth Default Theory: we are conditioned to assume people are telling us the truth; we set aside our default to truth only when we experience a trigger that overwhelms our conditioning; we will default to truth even as we entertain doubts about a person. Gladwell trots out a succession of spies, con artists, and predators, and soon we’re adding to his list examples from our own experiential rolodex. In short order, virtually every sour encounter we’ve ever had looks like a nail for Gladwell’s truth default hammer.
Maybe Gladwell should submit to his own examination. Why should we believe him? Maybe he’s just a grifter with a book contract. Maybe we should marshal our doubts and see if we accumulate enough of them to effect a flip that forces us to set aside our default to truth and approach Gladwell with a critical eye.
1. What is truth?
It might have been prudent for Gladwell to open by pointing out that, in the long history of philosophy, no one has ever offered a satisfactory definition of this slippery concept we call truth. Gladwell is hawking an explanatory tool. Unfortunately, the most it is ever possible for him to deliver is an interpretive tool. He offers one—among many competing (and not necessarily mutually exclusive)—interpretation of events. But, as it turns out, his is anything but the last word on the matter.
When I was an undergraduate studying English literature, I had a professor who said (of reading) that the conclusions we draw depend upon our point of entry into the text. My entire degree was an expansion of her observation. I would never arrive at a definitive reading of a text, complete unto itself and durable for all time. What would mark me out as a good reader was my capacity to hold in mind an array of competing interpretive strategies, an openness to the emergence of as-yet-unthought-of strategies, to place a work in conversation with its wider culture, to treat everything I think and do as provisional, to feel at ease with uncertainty. Gladwell’s anecdotal scenarios—spies, con artists, and predators—are texts, and he invites us to adopt his interpretive strategy as the interpretive strategy, complete unto itself and durable for all time. His confidence inspires my doubt.
2. Case Method
Gladwell’s approach looks like case method—the pedagogical tool of choice for law schools in common law jurisdictions, like Harvard Law or my alma mater, University of Toronto Law. Our understanding of the law emerges from the examination of specific cases, just as the law itself emerges from a continuous and forever incomplete dialogue between abstract concepts and concrete situations. To students exposed to the case method, one thing quickly becomes apparent: there is no pedagogical benefit from studying easy cases. We need the hard cases, the liminal cases, the ragged edges that challenge our complacency. The problem with Gladwell is that he only ever offers cases that fall foursquare within the limits of the theoretical framework he’s flogging.
What about scenarios which confront us with competing versions of the truth? Take, for example, the all-too-common scenario where an abuser denies the abuse and is believed while the child/victim reports the abuse and is ridiculed. How does a truth default account of human interactions address what appears to be a consistent falsehood default in cases involving reports of abuse from vulnerable people—children, women, people with disabilities, the homeless, the mentally ill, queer folk, people of colour, on and on? Might something else be going on here? Something not captured by the Truth Default Theory? Something to do with power relationships? Something to do with structural bias that favours those in authority?
3. Gladwell as apologist for power
Speaking of structural bias…I find it revealing to follow Gladwell’s account of how Jerry Sandusky’s abuse first came to light. The primary witness was a Penn State assistant football coach, Michael McQueary. He reported what he saw to head coach, Joe Paterno, who reported it to athletic director, Tim Curley, who reported it to senior administrator, Gary Schultz, and together, Curley and Schultz went to the university’s president, Graham Spanier. No one acted on the reports; everyone assume Jerry Sandusky was just horsing around when he showered naked with minors.
Gladwell observes that there are good reasons (perhaps grounded in evolutionary biology?) why we can’t expect people to cut against the grain of their truth default. If parents were universally suspicious of other people’s intentions, no one would do anything. Children would cower at home under the stairs. While his observation is true enough, it’s irrelevant to the very case he holds under his anecdotal microscope. The question isn’t why ordinary people like parents, act the way they do, but why people in authority, entrusted to care for the welfare of young people, fail to act as they ought. It took ten years to arrest Sandusky. Afterwards, Paterno resigned. Curley and Schultz were charged, convicted and incarcerated. And Spanier, the university president, was fired. Six years later, he was convicted of child endangerment. (However, an appellate court threw out the conviction as he was going to prison.) Gladwell’s deep takeaway from all this?
When we try to send people like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers—without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
In other words, if we apply Truth Default Theory, we must conclude that Spanier could not help himself and therefore is not culpable.
The problem with that conclusion is that the person in question was the president of an institution of higher learning whose primary mandate is to nurture habits of critical thinking. At this point, maybe a different default theory would serve us better. For example, Bernard Lonergan founds his epistemology on a single simple proposition: we are born with an unrestricted desire to know. He draws on the developmental psychology of Piaget who observed that children are innately curious and only lose their curiosity as they are thwarted by such things a socialization, institutional authority, and hacks flogging books for seven figure advances. In effect, Talking To Strangers is a gift to people in positions of power by giving them a tool to exempt them from personal responsibility.
4. Truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
There is a woman who begs on various street corners near my home. I have seen her begging since the day I moved into the neighbourhood more than five years ago. She has a protuberant belly and holds a sign that says: “Homeless, Pregnant, and Hungry.” Every time I pass her, I see strangers coming out of the subway station who say “Aw…poor thing” and drop coins into her cup. If we give this scenario a Gladwell gloss, the woman is able to perpetrate her con because the strangers coming out of the subway station default to truth. Meanwhile, I have sufficient doubt to reverse my default: I have observed that her pregnancy has now run to more than five years. The Gladwell gloss fits the scenario like a glove, except for one small fact: my behaviour has not changed. I know the woman is not pregnant, but I give her money anyways. It does not matter to me whether she thinks she’s perpetrating a con. The two other claims on her sign are still true. It is important to me that I not allow my insistence that people be truthful undermine my capacity to feel compassion. Quite simply, when trying to understand human relations, it is surprising how often the truth turns out to be of no importance.
5. Supplemental theories
Gladwell supplements his claims about Truth Default Theory by introducing two other major claims which he applies like Band-Aids to a sore. The first is really just a variant of Truth Default Theory. He calls it the issue of transparency. We hold certain (possibly culturally mediated) assumptions about what a person’s facial expressions convey regarding their interior emotional states. However, our ability to read facial expressions is a skill we grossly overestimate. A fair cohort of our fellow humans display facial expressions unrelated to anything. If we treat a facial expression as a truth proposition (like a sign that says: “Homeless, Pregnant, and Hungry”), most people are inclined to default to the truth of whatever they read on the face, and will not change their reading until there is enough reason to do so. His point is: reading facial expressions is notoriously unreliable, but despite the evidence, people rely on it anyways.
The second supplemental theory is the notion of coupling, a notion that arises in the context of a discussion about suicide. Here, the suicide which gives anecdotal grounding to the abstract concept is Sylvia Plath’s. The question he asks is: would Plath have committed suicide if the means—the UK’s universal supply of town gas—weren’t so accessible? Conventional thinkers subscribe to the displacement theory which holds that when a suicidal person is thwarted in executing their original plan, they move on to an alternate plan until they complete their intention. He then cites suicide rates both before and after the UK phased out the supply of town gas in order to demonstrate that displacement theory is wrong. Suicide rates went down when town gas was discontinued. Therefore something else must be at play.
There are a few problems with Gladwell’s conclusion:
a. suicide statistics
Historically, suicides have been grossly under- and mis- reported. Reliable statistics do not exist. It is ludicrous to draw an association (never mind a causal link) between the elimination of town gas and a drop in UK suicide rates.
b. failure of logic
It is logically impossible to speak of displacement in relation to an eliminated suicide method. No one who is suicidal will think: “If I had felt this way ten years ago, I could have killed myself with town gas, but now that I can’t do that, I might as well sit around and mope instead.” They might not even know that town gas was once an option. Instead, someone who is suicidal asks: “Of the available methods, which works best for me.” Gladwell treats displacement as an epidemiological issue subject to statistical analysis. However, displacement describes individual behaviour in specific circumstances. A person resolves to shoot himself but can’t find any bullets. What does he do instead?
c. Gladwell’s alternative theory is contested
The alternative to displacement is coupling: the act is coupled to one place and not readily transferred to another place. The Golden Gate bridge—North America’s #1 suicide destination—is a case in point. People who feel suicidal go there to jump off the Golden Gate bridge. If something prevents them from jumping, they don’t resort to a plan B; instead, they lose their resolve and survive. The plan to jump is coupled to the site. Why, Gladwell wonders, does San Francisco city council not install a barrier to prevent jumping? For an answer, he might look to North America’s #2 suicide destination, Toronto’s Prince Edward viaduct which has been the site of no suicides since the installation of the Luminous Veil barrier. Yet its effectiveness remains controversial since the city’s suicide rate—to the extent that it can be measured—does not appear to have changed. Maybe it’s just Toronto. Nevertheless, despite contradictory evidence, Gladwell takes coupling as a given without any critical scrutiny. Critical scrutiny would spoil his tidy narrative.
In Talking To Strangers, all narrative roads lead to Sandra Bland. You may have heard about her in the news and in the subsequent fallout of the Black Lives Matter movement. In July, 2015, a state trooper pulled her over for an improper lane change. Things quickly escalated. The trooper forcibly pulled her from the car, handcuffed her, and took her into custody. Three days later, authorities found her hanging in her holding cell. Gladwell wants to know how things could have gone so wrong. Using his special blend of explanatory alchemy, Gladwell throws together a dash of Truth Default Theory, a pinch of Transparency, and a teaspoon of Coupling Theory, and stirs it into a smarmy syrup that is (forgive my bluntness) as murky as all fuck.
A young black woman from a northern state is driving along a Texas highway. A white state trooper pulls her over and, when she insists he accord her the rights she is owed under the law, their exchange goes south. Why on earth does Gladwell think that, in order for us to understand this exchange, we need his objective scientific analysis? Whatever happened to Occam’s razor? A simpler explanation will do nicely: the state trooper was a racist sexist asshole.
Malcolm Gladwell’s adventures in explanatory fetishism are utter dreck.