Malcolm Gladwell: ‘I’m just trying to get people to take psychology seriously’

The Canadian writer made his name bringing intellectual sparkle to everyday subjects, and his new book – about how strangers interact with each other – is no exception

Curated from The Guardian

By Sean O’Hagan

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”.

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 tells me. “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”.

Gladwell was born in Hampshire but grew up in the predominantly Mennonite town of Elmira, Ontario, where his English father worked as a maths professor and his Jamaican-born mother as a child psychotherapist. His iconoclasm began at 15, when he co-edited a rightwing pamplet influenced by the writings of conservative commentator William F Buckley. In 2016, Gladwell said he had done so to counter “Canadian leftwing dominance”. One senses that his youthful conservatism and religious upbringing still inform his writing, which, at times, can have an almost preachy tone.

In 1987, he landed a job at the Washington Post where, he later said, it took him 10 years to move from “a basket case” to “an expert” – the experience inspiring the now famous “10,000 hours of practice” theory of success that underpinned Outliers. Having later honed his style at the New Yorker, Gladwell made his name with The Tipping Point in 2000, gatecrashing the public consciousness with a book that applied the principles of epidemiology to crime. It announced the arrival of a new kind of millennial thinker effortlessly attuned to the informational thrust of the 21st century, cerebral but not forbiddingly so, heretical but not radical, his sometimes school-teacherly style oddly reassuring in an age in which reassurance was in short supply.

The five books he has published thus far have all been global bestsellers, and he has spawned a genre that might be called brainy populism. It includes unexpected bestsellers such as Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Gladwell, though, is undisputedly the 21st century’s defining zeitgeist surfer, even managing with Outliers to construct a theory that defined his own groundbreaking status as a super-prescient purveyor of ideas. Research and writing seem to consume much of his waking life: he lives alone in a downtown New York apartment. His friend, Bruce Headlam, says: “He’s dated a lot of women… But he has work to do.” His success is such that he can command $45,000 for a single corporate public speaking engagement. He drew flak in 2011 when he did three talks for Bank of America, having voiced support for Occupy Wall Street.

His popularising approach has not endeared Gladwell to his peers. Steven Pinker, his most obvious precursor in the popular science publishing boom of the 1990s, described him as “a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning”. In an extended takedown in the New Republic, the English thinker John Gray described Gladwell’s approach as “a mix of moralism and scientism” and his books as “analgesics for those who seek temporary relief from abiding anxiety”. I ask Gladwell if there is indeed an element of self-help in his writing. He seems nonplussed by the suggestion. “I don’t take that as a criticism at all,” he says. “There has always been an element of that insofar as the books are intended to be instructive, to prompt reflection on the part of the reader.” Nor is he too concerned by the lukewarm reaction to his 2013 book, David and Goliath, an examination of the role of the underdog that many reviewers found simplistic. “I don’t want to always think I can convince,” he says. “Very few people are going to read Talking to Strangers, for instance, and agree with every argument in it. That’s not the point. The point is to help them reflect on, or think about in new ways, the way they behave and their society behaves. That is the best kind of self-help, it’s not a prescription for how to improve your life, it’s a prompt.”

What strikes me most about Gladwell, though, is the determinedly apolitical thrust of his thinking. This may be a reaction to his youthful flirtation with conservatism or a more measured version of the same. When I ask him if he goes out of his way not to be perceived as a political writer, he answers curtly: “I’m not a political writer, no.” So, that was a conscious decision from the start? “In a way, yes. I feel like there are so many people who write about politics much more ably than I do.”

Nevertheless, I say, your writings may well prompt people to shift their attitudes and views, even their behaviour. In some cases, that would surely precipitate a shift in their political consciousness. “Would it?” he says, looking slightly alarmed. “If so, it wouldn’t be an ideological shift. There is nothing in this book, for instance, that is distinctively liberal or conservative, left or rightwing. It exists outside of that, by design. I don’t want this book to perceived as belonging to one political group or another. In fact, a lot of what I do is a function of my apoliticality. Because I am not looking for political answers, I am forced to search elsewhere. Plus, I don’t find people’s political motivations to be that definitive or that interesting.”

Talking to Strangers begins and ends with an example of the stranger problem in extremis: the case of Sandra Bland, a young black woman, who, in July 2015, took her own life in police custody three days after she had been arrested following an argument with a Texan police officer, Brian Encinia, who pulled her car over for a minor traffic violation. What is interesting about Gladwell’s analysis of the case is that he removes the race element from it altogether, focusing instead on the rigidly managerial ideology of contemporary US law enforcement that encouraged Encinia’s officiousness – he was considered a model police officer. “The problems with framing it in terms of race is not that it is inaccurate, it absolutely is effective,” Gladwell says, when I bring this up, “but the minute you raise race, you derail the conversation and it becomes possible to dismiss this whole story as a story about a racist cop. Now he may be a racist cop, but that is not the issue, the issue is that the system with the best intentions set him up in a certain way.”

One cannot help but wonder, though, if Encinia would have reacted in a similar way to a nervous white woman? “That’s an interesting question. The thing is, though, he stops everyone. He stopped eight people that same day in a largely white area of Texas. Now, was his attitude towards Sandra Bland slightly more punitive because she was female, younger, from out of state and black? I think that is probably correct. I have no way of knowing, but my guess is he might have been slower to lose his temper with someone he deemed familiar.”

Is there a danger that, by excluding race altogether, you ignore both the political and social context in which this encounter took place? “My argument is that because race looms so large now, when you raise it, you chase other considerations away. What I am saying here is, let’s just start the conversation by considering the straightforward policies that led to this disaster. And the fundamental human processes that led to this disaster. And if we want to talk about racism later, by all means.”

It is this kind of selectivity that in part makes Gladwell’s approach so novel and provocative, but also, his critics insist, makes his conclusions so questionable. His writing often seems to touch upon, but not fully interrogate, the urgent discontents of our turbulent times. It also raises the question: is his determination to be apolitical in itself a political stance? That would make a good subject for Gladwellian scrutiny.