Journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in New York. Photo / Getty
He's America's most famous intellectual, whose best-sellers Blink and The Tipping Point challenged the way we see society. Now he's tackling the dark side of human nature – what do we ever really know about other people? Sathnam Sanghera meets Malcolm Gladwell.
In the years before Bernie Madoff was jailed for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in world history, numerous individuals had suspicions about him. Renaissance Technologies, a Long Island-based hedge fund that found itself with a stake in one of his funds, thought something was amiss, concluded after an investigation that "none of it seems to add up" but, rather than selling its stake, just halved it, an executive later telling investigators, "I never, as the manager, entertained the thought that it was truly fraudulent."
Peter Lamore, an investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission, tackled Madoff in person about why, in defiance of all logic, his returns didn't go up and down as stock markets went up and down and was told he had an infallible "gut feel" for when to get out just before a downturn. Lamore later recalled, "I thought his gut feel was, you know, strange, suspicious." He took his concerns to his boss, who also had doubts but did not find that Madoff's claim was "necessarily … ridiculous".
Why were so many evidently smart people incapable of accepting the truth? In his new book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know, Malcolm Gladwell, America's most famous intellectual, whose postulations, such as that 10,000 hours of practice are required to achieve mastery in any field, have changed the way we think and whose observations (such as that you can boost your child's chances in life by delaying their entrance into kindergarten) have altered behaviour, presents a hypothesis: human beings have a default tendency to believe other human beings.
It goes against what seems to be happening in politics and social networking but Gladwell uses research from social scientists to illustrate that our natural operating assumption is that people are honest. It's why, he argues, a spy went undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon for years, why a US gymnastics coach who was convicted as a serial child molester continued to receive support from one of his victims even after 37,000 child porn images had been discovered on his computer, why Chamberlain believed Hitler when the German chancellor insisted he wasn't going to invade Poland and why we tend to believe cheating spouses when they deny they're having an affair.
It's fascinating. Although the various lessons of the book ("The harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become"; "The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility", etc), which like its predecessors (The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath), is packed with dazzling facts (did you know that when the US Transport Security Administration conducts audits at airports, 95 per cent of the time guns and bombs go undetected? Or that banning handguns could save 10,000 lives a year, just from thwarted suicides?) and cultural insights (Sylvia Plath's death may have been a symptom of the fact that, before "town gas" was replaced by natural gas in British households, many homes had "readily available lethal means", with suicide rates in the early 60s being the highest they've ever been for women in England), also makes for an incredibly self-conscious meeting at the Covent Garden Hotel in London.
"You know, if I gave you the choice between interviewing someone and no one else or being able to interview everyone around someone and not them, which would you choose?" asks the 55-year-old writer, choosing sparkling water over the offer of coffee. "I would always choose interviewing everyone around someone and not them. Biographers who are writing about a dead subject can be far more insightful, I think, than biographers who are writing about a live subject. Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should have stayed home and read Mein Kampf. I was actually stunned by the fact that on the Allied side, the only head of state who had met Hitler was the Canadian Prime Minister, who, by the way, fell in love with him."
For what it's worth, Gladwell is very much like the man people have suggested. I've been told he is introverted and he really is, legging it out of the photoshoot as quickly as possible, speaking his perfectly formed sentences so quietly that the background jazz feels as intrusive as death metal and, when the conversation turns to alcohol, describing himself, to no surprise whatsoever, as a quiet drunk. ("I mean, two glasses of wine is my limit, and I just get … sleepy, then, you know … subdued.")
People have also suggested he is patholologically relaxed - and he is, laughing away the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator that some wag has launched online to mock his work. ("Oh, that's not criticism: it's a kind of joking. It's a lovely parody") and embracing criticism ("My position on this is that the number of your critics is a function of the number of your readers, so the more critics you have means the more readers you have.")
The one surprise, however, is that Gladwell does not come across as particularly American. In my head I have Gladwell down as an archetypal New Yorker, possibly because he is a staff writer for The New Yorker, has written endless New York Times best-sellers and is forever being interviewed in the New York cafes he writes in. ("I don't really have an office. I like buzz. It's because I worked at a newspaper.") But to meet him is to be reminded that he grew up in a small town in Canada in the 70s ("It made Switzerland look like the Wild, Wild West") and that he was born in Fareham, Hampshire. ("I have a number of descriptors: Canadian, English, Jamaican. American I would rank fourth.")
He credits his mother, Joyce Gladwell, a Jamaican psychotherapist, for shaping him as a writer but his late father, Graham Gladwell, a mathematics professor from Kent, seems to have had more of an influence over his personality. Graham, who died in 2017, is a strong presence in the new book, featuring in its dedication and a story in an author's note where he spends an afternoon in conversation with a major celebrity about gardening oblivious to his fame, as well as being cited in a chapter about transparency – the idea that facial expressions mean different things to different people in different contexts and in different parts of the world – when he responds to a knife-wielding intruder in his holiday home by simply pointing at the assailant and saying, "Get out NOW." (Incredibly, the intruder, who had a knife at Joyce Gladwell's throat, did.)
"He responded emotionally but there wasn't a physiological correlate. There are two reasons. One, that he was a reserved Englishman, so he's just not going to have the same palette of emotions as an Italian. If you knew my father, you would have seen him in other stressful situations and you would have come to understand that the 'frightened' face, for whatever reason, was simply not part of his repertoire. In crisis, he turned deadly calm. And the second thing is – this is a funny thing that I'm mildly obsessed with – he had a very, very low resting heart rate. People don't really talk about this. Our heart rate is a kind of signature of our emotional arousal. I often ask people, 'What's your resting heart rate?' It's a really reliable clue to people who have non-stereotypical emotional responses. Runners are like this as a group. They're not going to raise their voice. They just don't do it."
So is Gladwell always as calm as his father was? As well as the genetic inheritance, Gladwell is a runner, being named among Canada's fastest teens at 1500m while at high school, running a 4:54 mile at the age of 51, and at 55 his whippet-thin runner's physique is the most noticeable thing about him, next to his hair. "Yeah, I'm not emotionally volatile." When was the last time he cried? "Oh, I cry quite frequently. What I don't get is angry. I don't raise my voice. I don't get demonstrative." Does he feel as British as North American? "Well, to the extent that I resemble my father, who I think of being so stereotypically British as to be almost a caricature; I mean, he was an emotionally reserved, bookish gardening fanatic who liked to take long walks with his dog. I also am emotionally reserved, like long walks, am sort of bookish, feel very comfortable around the English. I mean, the thing about America is that my America is New York, which is the least representative place. It's full of people who are there because they don't want to be in America. So when I go into America, I feel as exotic and different as you do."
The other person Gladwell uses an example of the problem with transparency in the book is Amanda Knox, and her initial, false conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher. "If you believe that the way a stranger looks and acts is a reliable clue to the way they feel … then you're going to make mistakes," he writes. "Amanda Knox was one of those mistakes."
And the use of examples from current affairs, to demonstrate the many challenges of understanding strangers, whether it is the effect alcohol has on behaviour (he uses the example of Brock Turner, the former Stanford University swimmer who was sentenced to six months in jail in 2016 for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, to argue that alcohol is not "an agent of disinhibition" but "an agent of myopia" in which "short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away") or how the shame and horror of sexual abuse can produce denial (he talks about how the victims of retired college football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was eventually convicted of rape and child sexual abuse, "acted as if nothing had ever happened. They didn't confide in their friends. They didn't write anguished accounts in their journals. They dropped by, years later, to show off their babies to the man who raped them"), marks the book out from its predecessors.
A change, Gladwell says, that was prompted by the experience of making podcasts, which include Revisionist History, which offers counter narratives to popular events or ideas (listen to the episode entitled "The Prime Minister and the Prof" and you'll never view Winston Churchill in the same way again). "A podcast is so immediate. They're emotional, and the form invites you to tackle difficult subjects. It gave me a jolt of courage in writing the book."
The key case study, however, which is used to both preface and conclude the book and is used to demonstrate most intensely "what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers", is the example of Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old African American woman who was found hanged in a Texas jail in 2015, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop. "I was deeply affected by that wave of cases that happened in 2014, 2015, 2016 in America involving police officers and African Americans, but the Sandra Bland case affected me the most, maybe because we have the tape and so were able to hear the encounter. The thing with Sandra Bland is there's nothing sinister going on: she's just driving home from a job interview. She's pulled over for the lamest of reasons; she just wants to smoke a cigarette in her car. And it was the sheer banality of it: it's the middle of the day; no crime has been committed; the cop isn't a problem cop."
Is some of the anger his own? He has written before about how when he grew his hair, he was suddenly being pulled over all the time. "I was profiled in such a mild way, I almost feel sheepish about lumping what happened to me with … you know."
Does he feel unsafe, as a person of colour, dealing with the police in America nowadays? "I have several advantages. One is that I'm pale brown. I'm not black. It's funny – I have younger Jamaican cousins, and I remember recently walking down the street [with them] – they're in their 20s and they're much darker than I am – [and] age is a huge part of this. To be male and young and black is a powerful combination."
Does he feel that Donald Trump has made things worse? "Well, you know, the thing that our parents told us when we were growing up turns out to be true, which is that the tone of behaviour in any society is set at the top. When the guy running the country behaves in a profoundly uncivil manner, it gives licence to other people to behave in the same way."
I could tell you how Gladwell dissects the Bland case. How he shows that the police officer was of the generation of police officers who has been taught, as a result of popular crime theory, to not default to truth: to pursue doubts in every possible situation even when there aren't any, and hence escalated tensions. How he demonstrates that the officer wrongly believed in transparency – that people's demeanour is a reliable guide to their emotions and character, and as a result "mismatched" Bland, thinking she was a criminal when she was actually just upset, having recently tried to commit suicide after the loss of a baby and having had 10 previous encounters with police over the course of her adult life, including five traffic stops, which had left her with $8000 in outstanding fines. But you should read the book. Not only will it change the way you see and approach strangers, the precision with which he analyses this incident is one of the most powerful and damning indictments you'll read of race relations in American society.
I ask him if he lives by his theories and the rules he has helped publicise. So many now have gone mainstream, from the Law of the Few (which states that a select few individuals make ideas and fads popular through their social networks), to the broken windows theory (which posits that if you concentrate on the small things, such as cleaning up graffiti and repairing broken windows, it will create an environment in which people are less likely to commit serious crimes), to thin-slicing (a psychological process in which people read personalities within moments of seeing people, predicting how likely someone is to get promoted based on their clothes, for instance, or inferring whether someone is gay or straight from glancing at his or her face). Meanwhile, Gladwell's case for "academic redshirting", the increasingly popular practice of delaying kids' entrance into kindergarten, has, it's been argued, helped lead to between 4 per cent and 9 per cent of nursery schoolchildren being "redshirted" in America annually.
"A lot of what I write about doesn't apply to me," comes the reply. "So I write a lot about law enforcement, I'm not in law enforcement. I write a lot about education, I don't have children." I mention an interview he conducted with a colleague of mine in 2014 where he said, "I'm definitely going to have kids one day." Will he? "Um, I still hope to, yes." He has a girlfriend? "I have a girlfriend." There's an awkward pause before he continues, "I mean, in Outliers I wrote about the relative age effect but in fact, in school, the opposite happened to me: I was pushed ahead and I was the youngest in my class."
I tell him I was surprised to read that he didn't do particularly well at college: Gladwell's grades were not high enough for graduate school. "Yeah. I had mixed results. I took courses because I was interested in the topic but there are certain things, like philosophy, that I turned out to be disastrous at." After being rejected by a series of advertising agencies, he accepted a journalism position at The American Spectator and spent more than a decade in business journalism. I tell him an old joke a colleague used to tell when I was also in business journalism, comparing our chosen field to prison sex: from the outside, no one can see the appeal of either but once you're in it, you think you might as well give it a shot. "Writing about business?" he responds without laughter. "I really enjoyed it. I find the most open-minded audience you will encounter is not in the university, it's in a group of businesspeople."
The fees must help. I read he charges US$45,000 a speech. "I have a practice of not commenting on my rates." Maybe I'll try to book him, I joke. Has money changed his life? "Well, I don't worry about it any more, so if you imagine what your life would be like if you stopped worrying about money, that's what my life is like. I'm at the lowest rung where you help the family or you give money to charity. But there's this thing that happens to people when they get financially comfortable. They use it as an excuse to remove money from their thoughts, or they do the opposite: the enhanced amount of money enhances the amount of time they spend thinking about it. I am the former, not the latter." What does he invest in? "It's essentially [all in] index funds. I'm very nervous, and also I've read too much Nassim Taleb [former trader and risk analyst] to believe that any individual investor has some kind of genius perspective."
Does he have any indulgences? "I have more than one car. I'm very, very serious about cars." Which cars does he have? "I have a Volkswagen Golf R, 2018; I have a 2002 BMW M5, and I have a Porsche Boxster."
Not only is Gladwell incapable of uttering an uninteresting sentence and is more than probably worth his speaking fee, he also has excellent taste. I could talk to him on the subject of cars alone for several more hours but we're running out of time and I'm also aware that another of his lessons in his book - albeit used to demonstrate that torture doesn't work as a method to extract reliable information - is that, "The harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become."
Before we part, however, I discover he is attempting to buy an old Mercedes 280 from 1982 and he thinks he might have been scammed. "I found an old one, which I kind of liked and I paid money up front to this guy who had one and this was eight months ago. I still don't have the car. I'm excessively trusting. I don't spend time worrying about the bona fides of people I deal with, so I [might] have been taken in … It's a better way to be."
Which brings us back to Madoff and perhaps the most important lesson from Gladwell's book. There was, as it happens, one person who did not "default to truth" with the fraudster: an independent fraud investigator called Harry Markopolos, who tried to get the authorities to investigate Madoff on numerous occasions. Gladwell describes him as a man with a tendency to tell "awkward jokes", who grew up watching his immigrant uncles chase customers who had stolen from their business, an obsessive of "the sort to wipe down his keyboard with disinfectant after he opens his computer". A man who, when he had an opportunity to meet a prosecutor to discuss Madoff, chose instead to leave information anonymously, turning up at a social event wearing a bulky overcoat and clutching a sheaf of documents wrapped inside two plain brown envelopes because he was so paranoid.
"If everyone on Wall St behaved like Harry Markopolos, there would be no fraud on Wall St," concludes Gladwell. "But the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall St." Or, to put it another way, if being duped is the price we occasionally pay for trusting strangers, it's a price worth paying.
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell, (Allen Lane, $40) published September 17.
The director donned gumboots and a Russell Crowe T-shirt to get the festivities started.