Basic Information : Synopsis : Characters : Expectations : Thoughts : Evaluation : Book Group : New Words : Book References : Good Quotes : Table of Contents : References
Basic Information:
Author:
Malcolm Gladwell
Edition:
ePub on Libby from the Los Angeles Public Library
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN:
0316478520 (ISBN13: 9780316478526)
Start
Date: June 1, 2020
Read
Date: June 14, 2020
388
pages
Genre:
Essay
Language
Warning: Low
Rated
Overall: 3 out of 5
Synopsis (Caution: Spoiler Alert-Jump to Thoughts):
Gladwell
uses the traffic stop and subsequent death of Sandra Bland to show
how when we meet someone who is a stranger, we do not know how to
interpret them. He then traces various scenarios, such as spies and
terrorists who have a vested interest in keeping their secrets
secret. But then there is the subject of policing-how to be an
effective police force, keeping their communities safe? He shows how
the Kansas City police department targeted certain high crime areas,
but then other law enforcement agencies mistook that model and
leading to aggressive traffic stops as a guise to investigate
something suspicious looking.
This
comes back to examining Sandra Bland, the traffic stop and the police
officer. What was trying to be accomplished and why did the situation
escale out of control?
The
conclusion which Gladwell makes is that we need to default to the
assumption strangers are acting to truth rather than a lie.
Cast of Characters:
- Sandra Bland-African American. Commits suicide after being pulled over by a Texas cop, resisted orders and was put into jail. Had a podcast called Sandra Speaks.
- Florentino Aspillaga-Cuban spy, defector. Revealed all of American’s Cuban spies were double agents.
- Tim Levine-a psychologist who has wondered about the how to relate to strangers.
- Reg Brown-a DIA analyst who works trying to figure out how the Cubans are trying to influence intelligence.
- Ana Belen Montes-worked on Cuban affairs in the DIA. DOuble agent.
- Scott Carmichael-DIA counterintelligence
- Bernie Madoff-Ponzi Scheme
- Harry Markopolos-the person who exposed the Bernie Madoff scheme.
- Michael McQueary-assistant coach at University of Pennsylvania
- Jerry Sandusky-Defensive Coordinator at UPenn. Convicted of child molestation
- Larry Nassar-physician who abused female gymnasts
- Amanda Knox-convicted in an Italian court of murder, but acquited on appeal
- Brock Turner-Stanford student accused of rape after a faternity party
- James Mitchell-Psychologist. Involved with the interrogation of terrorists.
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-Brains behind the 9/11 attacks.
- Slyvia Plath-American poet who committed suicide in England
- George Kelling-Police expert who looked at Kansas City policing in the 1970’s and did an experiment on patrols.
Expectations:
- Recommendation: Paul Swearingen
- When: May 29, 2020
- Date Became Aware of Book: May 29, 2020
- How come do I want to read this book: Paul referenced it in a Facebook talk on the racial tensions following the death of George Floyd
- What do I think I will get out of it? A better understanding of what people of different views and cultures are trying to communicate.
Thoughts:
Structure
to the book:
Premise:
People do not know how to read strangers. This leads to issues.
Example:
Sandra Bland getting stopped, not even for a traffic infraction, but
because an officer came up quickly on her and she did not signal a
lane change.
- Why can’t we tell when a person is lying?
- Strangers are not easy to understand
- Why does meeting a person make it harder to judge a person than seeing a summary of them?
- We default to that people are being truthful.
- Lies are rare
- In most cases defaulting to truth is proper
- As lies grow in a society, the more need to examine statements, which causes communications to break down.
- Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor … provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside.
- Facial expressions mean different things to different cultures.
- We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor.
- The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.
- Coupling Theory is that given the desire to do something you also want the opportunity to do it.
- when you are confronting a stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger--because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is
- Focused policing achieves results.
- Police departments interrupted this to look for anything suspicious and figure out a legal way to stop the vehicle.
- Think more in terms of a doctor than a prosecutor.
AUTHOR’S
NOTE
If
my kids read this book, I wonder if they would think they had a
similar father as Gladwell did?
Gladwell
wonders if the best conversations between strangers allows strangers
to remain strangers.
Introduction:
“Step Out of the Car!”
Sandra
Bland gets stopped for a routine traffic stop after newly arriving in
Texas. But things get out of hand and she ends up in jail. There she
commits suicide. Previously she had done podcasts called Sandra
Speaks.
2
In one of them she has this paragraph:
I
was the only black girl on an all-white cheerleading squad… Black
people, you will not be successful in this world until you learn how
to work with white people. I want the white folks to really
understand out there that black people are doing as much as we
can...and we can’t help but get pissed off when we see situations
where it’s clear that the black life didn’t matter.
Gladwell
says that Talking
to Strangers
is his attempt to understand what happened on the side of the road
that day. But in reality, he is using Sandra Bland as a place figure
to show how even non-racist actions or laws or thoughts can become
racist in practice.
Gladwell
says that in this incident one
side saw a forest, but no trees. The other side saw trees and no
forest.
3battles
overwhelmingly involved neighbors.
He speaks of various countries and empires. In a book called
Collapse,
Jared Diamond identifies conflict among neighbors as one of the
reasons why societies collapse.
Gladwell
talks about the conversation between Cortez and Montezuema. It had to
go through two translators and three languages. This in itself
introduced complexity. There was also the complexity of unknowns
talking to unknowns. Today
we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose
assumptions, perspectives and backgrounds are different from our own.
If
we were more thoughtful as a society--if we were willing to engage in
some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of
strangers-she
[Sandra Bland] would
not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.
This is the key take-away from the book.
PART
ONE: SPICE AND DIPLOMATS: TWO PUZZLES
ONE:
Fidel Castro’s Revenge
1Story
of Florentino Aspillaga revealing Cuba’s double agents.
2A
former spy by the trade name of The Mountain Climber met with
Florentino Aspillaga. It was there that Aspillaga revealed the
double agents. The double agents were The Mountain Climber’s
agents.
3The
Mountain Climber felt the tradecraft was sloppy with the Cubans. The
East German spy chief wrote that all of the American agents in East
Germany were also double agents.
This
gets to the first of Gladwell’s puzzles: When
someone is lying to us, why can’t we tell that they are lying?
Even
polygraph machines were not detecting when people lied. So they
replaced polygraph machines with face-to-face interrogations. It did
not work.
Gary’s
note: For a behind the scenes look at the CIA and spycraft, take a
look at Tony Mendez’ book, The
Master of Disguise.
TWO:
Getting in Know de Fuhrer
Chamberlain
needed to understand Hitler. So he took a daring trip to Germany to
meet him. He came away with the impression that Hitler was someone
who you could talk with and come to resolutions. Gladwell notes that
Chamberlain
was trying to avert a world war and it seemed to him that he would
benefit from taking the measure of Hitler for himself.
Obviously things did not work out as Chamberlain thought they would
as Hitler played the part of a man who seemed reasonable.
You
wonder about trying to resolve conflicts by meeting face to face with
someone. Was this something Trump was trying to accomplish by meeting
with Kim of North Korea? If that is the case, then Trump fell into
the same trap as Chamberlain.
2Chamberlain
tried to see Hitler through the lens he saw other world leaders. He
tried to make sense of it and concluded that Hitler was OK with
limits. He observed Hitler and took measure of him. But instead of
getting an accurate sizing of Hitler, it did the opposite-he
completely misread Hitler. Why?
It
was not only Chamberlain, but his foreign minister Lord Halifax and
the ambassador to Germany who all came away with similar impressions.
4Gladwell
now talks about a judge who has to make bail decisions. It is his way
to talk to each person before he decides.
A
guy by the name of Sendhil Mullainathan built a test to see if they
could automatically do better than a face-to-face meeting. They went
through 554,000 cases to decide to release 400,000 of them. The
computer program did 25% better than a judge going face-to-face.
(Gladwell talks about what makes the computer a better judge than a
judge. Also he recommends that we read Mullainathan’s paper)
Puzzle
number two: How can meeting someone make us a worse judge of that
person?
5Summarizes-that
we cannot make sense out of strangers.
6He
talks about a test run by Emily Pronin where people filled in missing
letters. When asked what the completed words said about them, they
said it does not reveal much. But when shown other people's words,
they made analysis. Pronin calls this illusion
of asymmetric insight.
This is the conviction that we know people better than they know us.
This leads
us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient
than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are
the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.
If
Gladwell can convince us of one thing, it is that strangers
are not easy.
PART
TWO: DEFAULT TO TRUTH
THREE:
The Queen of Clubs
1
Talked about the shooting down of a Cuban refugee propaganda plane by
the Cubans. They had warned a military person that they could. The
warning was ignored and the plane was shot down.
2
Gladwell thinks the scenario in 1 is too well orchestrated. So does
Reg Brown. He talks to Carmicheal who does an investigation into
Montes. But comes up with nothing. Five years later Montes is shown
to be a Cuban agent.
3
Was Montes a great agent? Not particularly. There were all sorts of
warning signs which go explained away. Gladwell says that it was not
because Montes was a great spy and was brilliant, but that there is
something wrong with what we see.
4
Tim Levine gave a test which essentially challenges a person to
cheat. He then goes back and asks if the person cheated. But the real
part of the test was when they asked a third party to review the
video and determine if the person cheated. The result was that there
is a great deal of inconsistency about telling who cheats and who
does not. The question then gets asked, why
are we so bad at detecting lies?
Levine’s
theory is called TDT-Truth-Default
Theory.
We default to that people are being truthful.
In order to get out of this mode, we need something to trigger us to
disbelief.
Milgram
did a shock test in which the subject would give someone a shock if
they did not answer correctly. About 40% of the subjects thought that
something else was going on than the person getting shocked. But they
continued on with the experiment. This is collaboration about the
need to trigger something to get beyond the truthful stage.
5
Back to Montes. Carmichael missed several signs in his interview with
her. Mostly because he was expecting what she had to say was true,
not because he really suspected her.
Levine
notes that lie
detection does not-cannot-work the way we expect it to work.
6
Conclusion: the extra information we get from facial expression can
be misleading and does not aid us in understanding the person. So
when the judge is trying to determine who will skip bail or cause
trouble, the record is more important than the person themselves.
6
Montes was exposed when the code-breakers figured out messages being
sent to Cuba.
FOUR:
The Holy Fool
1
Talks about Bernie Madoff. A financial company realized that
something was up in the holdings it had with Bernie Madoff. So did
they sell all? No, only half. Could not get beyond the default to
truth - in this case, they could not quite believe Madoff was as much
of a liar as their analysis said he was.
Harry
Markopolos was the one person who did not default to truth. He tried
to warn, but everybody else would not believe.
3
Russian Holy Fools-those eccentrics, usually the village idiot, who
calls out what they see without regard to the consequence. Today we
have whistleblowers.
A
corollary to Tim Levine’s default to truth is that lies are rare.
So in most cases the default to truth does not have consequences.
But there are times it does not work out, such as in Montes’ case.
A
corollary to the corollary is that we cannot all be Holy Fools as
that would be a disaster as there would not be any trust in society
and nothing gets done. Gary’s Note: The more lies told the less
society functions efficiently. Eventually things will break down.
4
Markopolos fits into the corollary of distrust breeds inefficient
communications
5
Markopolos turns paranoid
FIVE:
Case Study: The Boy in the Shower
1
Interrogation of a witness, Michael McQueary to Jerry Sandusky
molesting a teenager. Lots of questions both in terms of what
happened and the length of time till it was investigated.
Sandusky
was a well known, benevolent person who helped thousands of boys
from impoverished and troubled backgrounds. He took them to football
games, wrote the kids, and generally was a friend to them.
The
police started to investigate Sandusky about 8-9 years after this
incident. But come up empty. Then they heard about McQueary.
3
If McQueary witnessed a rape by a 60 year old on ateen, why didn’t
McQueary stop it? When a family physician hears McQueary tell the
story, he is not sure that a rape actually occurred.
McQueary
also was not a reliable witness as he got dates mixed up, not by a
day or two, but a whole year and time of season.
4
Larry Nassar had sexual encounters while operating as a physician for
the female gymnastics teams. This occurred even while parents were in
the room witnessing the event. The parents could not say it was
happening.
5
One person, who realized he was the victim which McQueary witnessed,
denied he was a victim. But then later changed his mind. And then he
could not remember that Sandusky was in his wedding.
Gladwell
is building a case that what we see and what we remember are two
different things.
6
Society
cannot function otherwise
[than default to truth].
And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those
victimized by default to truth, deserve our sympathy, not our
censure.
7
Gladwell’s thought: We
think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame
them when they default to truth…
But Gladwell goes on and says we do not consider the consequences of
this.
The
unobservables create noise, not signal.
(See Nate Silver’s book, The
Noise and the Signal)
Our
strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are
socially necessary. … the requirement of humanity means that we
have to tolerate an enormous amount of error.
PART
THREE: TRANSPARENCY
SIX:
The Friends Fallacy
1
Talks about an episode of Friends where Chandler falls in love with
Monica who is Ross’ sister and Ross does not take kindly to it.
2
Facial expressions telling what kind of emotion you are portraying.
Ta;ls about scoring smiles and other facial constructions.
6
Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor …
provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on
the inside.
Facial
expressions mean different things to different cultures.
SEVEN:
A (Short) Explanation of the Amanda Knox Case
1
Amnada Knox was wrongly convicted of murdering her college roommate
in Italy. Her
case is about transparency.
2
We
tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor.
But when there is a mis-match between the person’s actions and the
reality, we do not see transparency but deception. Sometimes we
cannot recognize this.
3
The mismatch in Knox’s case is that she would giggle when
confronted or when someone tried to comfort her, she would freeze up.
She was quirky.
4
When law enforcement officers took Levine’s test about who was
telling the truth and who was not, they got close to 100% on those
who were transparent. But the mismatched ones were closer to 14%.
EIGHT:
Case Study: The Fraternity Party
1
Story of Brock Turner and the rape of a passed out college girl.
2
When is consent for intercourse, consent? The rules seem unclear,
particularly when there is alcohol or drugs involved.
3
No witnesses to what was happening at the party. Lights low and
drinking out of control.
4
Related a story of an anthropologist where drinking till drunk is
socially acceptable in a very controlled circumstance in a remote
part of Bolivia.
5
Alcohol's
principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of
vision.
It basically narrows to me, not to care about others. Being drunk
allows the understanding of yourself to change.
6
An English version of the Turner story. A man and a woman end up in
bed, not for sex, but for comfort. But signals get misread and he has
sex with her. She says it was non-consensual. She was not being
transparent to his advances.
7
Gladwell goes into the physiology of a drunken blackout.
PART
FOUR: LESSONS
NINE:
KSM: What Happens When the Stranger Is a Terrorist?
1
Describes a little bit of the interaction between KSM and Mitchell.
Finding out the details of another possible terrorist attack was
imperative. What Gladwell is interested in is not the waterboarding
or other enhanced techniques, but about how information was gotten
from KSM
Transparency
is a seemingly common sense assumption that turns out to be an
illusion. Both [default
to truth and transparency],
however, raise the same question: Once we accept our shortcomings,
what should we do?
2
Describes techniques they use to train service people about survival
if captured. One of the things which they tried to do in this school
is to show that given enough time and pressure, you will talk. But as
an American soldier your task was to resist to the best of your
ability.
3
Jensen and Mitchell devised the torture used by the CIA.
4
Why do some soldiers develop PTSD and others who undergo the same
thing do not? But in doing so, he watched interrogations and realized
that the actual fact of hard interrogation caused memory loss, not
pressuring them to confess.
5
The confession of KSM. Then the question was, was KSM’s confession
true? Some may have been true, but others were fabricated. Gladwell
says that the more pressure you exerted on KSM to get him to talk,
the more the quality of information was compromised.
The
right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.
PART
FIVE: COUPLING
TEN:
Sylvia Plath
1
Story of Plath’s suicide near Christmas time. Alred Alvarez wrote
that For
the unhappy Christmas is always a bad time.
3
Gladwell talks about the changes which England made in supplying
natural gas. They had “town gas” which was made from coal and had
all the necessary ingredients for a successful suicide. Then in the
60’s it was changed to natural gas. Because natural gas has a less
lethal combination of elements there were less suicides by gas. The
question raised, would it be replaced by something else?
Coupling
Theory is that given the desire to do something you also want the
opportunity to do it. In the suicide by town gas case, since natural
gas did not have similar lethal qualities, would their be a
corresponding rise in slides by sme other means? The answer is no.
Galdwell
notes that those who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only
want to do so at a certain point in time.
The
first set of mistakes we make with strangers--the default to truth
and the illusions of transparency-has to do with our inability to
make sense of the stranger as an individual.
4
Where is crime connected? Weisburd saw that it was even more
concentrated than in neighborhoods, but more like along certain
segments of streets, like a block
5
In order to validate the theory that crimes happens in smaller
locations, they needed to look at crime by address.
Sherman,
Weisburd’s partner, knew the police chief in Minneapolis.
Interestingly this is also where George Floyd was killed. Wonder what
kind of connection, if any, to Sherman/Weisburd’s study to how the
police responded.
They
were finding that crime is highly coupled to location, similar to
suicide is coupled with the means of suicide. This means that
when you are confronting a stranger, you have to ask yourself where
and when you’re confronting the stranger--because those two things
powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.
6
Talks about The
Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath. Gladwell says the Plath was looking for a specific
way to kill herself, not just any way.
Gladwell
quote Anne Sexton: Suicide
is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
Sort of pondering this statement. Is it because suicide is an act of
destruction while poetry is an act of creation? But what happens if
you feel you can no longer create? Or creation is too painful? This
is not my issue, but my ponderings.
Gladwell
turns from suicide to the real aim of this chapter: concentrated
policing. Weisburd researchers talked to prostitutes in an area to
determine what happens when an area becomes too policed to do
business. Rather than move over a couple of streets, then go into
other lines of business, for the most part. Gladwell sees the power
of coupling place to an act.
ELEVEN:
Case Study: The Kansas City Experiment
1
First experiment in Kansas City was to divide up three areas: control
group where no change in patrol’s occurred; second is to intensify
patrols; third is to remove patrols. After a year, there were no
significant differences.
2
20 years later, Lawrence Sherman had ideas on how to reduce crime in
Kansas City which had a crime rate 20 times the national average. He
thought reducing the amount of guns was the solution. He had a team
go to every house in a ⅔ square mile area and talk with neighbors
about guns and leave a brochure. 88% said they would use the hot
line. Actuality- 2 calls came in. Problem was that people were locked
in their homes and could not observe.
3
How to reduce the amount of illegal guns? Cannot search homes without
cause. Cannot stop people. But you can stop a vehicle for infractions
and look it over v\for other issues. There is virtually
limitless list of legal reasons to stop a motorist; they are also
free to add any other reasons they may dream up, as long as they seem
reasonable.
Gary’s
note: There are some memes going around now which say that nobody
should fear the police unless they do something wrong. I wonder how
many of them would feel that way if they saw this.
Kansas
City got around the search and seizure rules by having two patrols
look for suspicious drivers and stopping them for some pretext. This
dropped the crime rate significantly.
Gladwell’s
note: Police Officers want
to feel that their efforts are important , that what they do matters
, that their hard work will be rewarded.
This
revelation caused a widespread change in how policing was done.
Gladwell said that they tried
to replicate what Kansas City did. But there was something lost in
the translation.
4
Police departments needed to get more focused was the message which
should have been brought. Instead the message which was received was
that the police should be stopping anything which looked suspicious
to them. So traffic stops in some states more than doubled.
TWELVE:
Sandra Bland
1
There is an investigation after Bland’s death. Gladwell excerpts
the interviews. The arresting officer is fired. Gladwell notes that
the arresting officer was a tone death bully.
2
To look for guns and other suspicious stuff on every passing car is
to look for a needle in a haystack, literally. For example, a TSA
examiner will probably never see a terrorist object in 50 years of
searching.
To
make this search process work, you have to assume the worst in
everybody. The officer has to be on the lookout for “curiosity
ticklers”. Such as the car looks lived in, has air fresheners,
being nervous. Then the officer is instructed to drag out the stop as
long as possible. In order to find the drugs or illegal guns, the
officer must not assume the default
to truth
mode, but understand that each person is guilty until proven
innocent.
Gladwell
shows that the officer involved in the Sandra Bland case’s day was
a bunch of suspicious traffic stops.
When
looking at Bland, the officer had a whole series of things which he
could either force to happen an infraction or get an infraction. He
noticed the out of state plates, the food wrappers, and air
fresheners.
3
When questioned about his suspicion of Bland, it is revealed that he
thought in terms of transparency. She appeared nervous. Her demeanor
makes it look like she is trying to hide something. Police officers
are taught that eye contact is another key. Deceptive people do not
avoid eye contact. She has several “strikes” which make her look
suspicious. All of these things raises flags about her and mark her
as a dangerous person. So he treats her that way.
One
key factor is that Bland is not one of these transparent people, she
has things in her past which makes her fidgety. She is mismatched in
her signals. She has had a suicide attempt, She has had ten
interactions with the police costing her $8,000. She has lost a baby.
She is trying to start over in a new place.
Like
Harry Markopolos in the Madoff, the price of not defaulting to truth
is paranoia. You think everybody has hidden motives, everybody is
sinister. The officer thinks that Bland is dangerous and interprets
every action she makes in this light.
The
thing which was wrong that day was not that the officer did not
follow the book, but that the book dictated his behavior when Bland
was not a person which the book was written for.
4
The US Federal report on the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson
surprising conclusion was that people were not so much angry about
what happened ot Brown, but the style of policing. Ferguson was the
model for Kansas City type policing.
The
problem with the Kansas City style policing is that you need to be
thinking more in terms of a doctor than a prosecutor. A prosecutor
says there was a crime and tries to prove it; a doctor will only do
surgery if there is something they can do to correct things.
Also
the Kansas City policing was confined to one special place-where the
crime was concentrated, not throughout the city.
The
two basic questions to ask about the officer:
- Did he do the right thing?
- Was he in the right place?
5
Gladwell’s conclusion is that Sandra
Bland’s [death]
is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to
strangers.
But does Gladwell show us how to do this?
6
Gladwell tackles how to work as a society. His first thing is that we
need to use default
to truth
as the standard, rather than the suspicion that everybody is guilty
until proven innocent. But what do you do when the CIA is
investigating a double agent, a person whose life is based upon a
lie? Gladwell pretty much says that is the cost of working as a
society. But what about the high crime areas? Just let them be? Not
sure that Gladwell really addresses that.
What
he does address is that the Kansas City tactics should only be used
in high crime areas, not over all the area.
Gladwell’s
conclusion about Bland’s death: when
things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
====
Gary’s
concluding note: Gladwell makes good points that we cannot always
correctly judge a stranger-or maybe even someone we know, my
thought-with certainty. Misjudging them, and there is a pretty good
chance we will misjudge them-results in things from a minor faux pax
all the way to a person’s death. Gladwell says that as a whole, we
have to accept that the occasional falsehood will slip through.
I
think he does a good job of pointing out ways where suspicion causes
problems. But the weakness of this book is that he lacks a model for
tackling separating out the deceit from truth. He just says this is
the cost of an efficient society. That does not sound very promising
for anybody who has to deal with deceit.
Evaluation:
Talking
to Strangers
is a typical Gladwell book-he looks at things and sees that they are
not what they seem to be. In this case, he takes the traffic stop of
Sandra Bland and works through the background about why things went
so wrong. He takes us through Cuban double agents, Islamic terrorists
and scientific studies to name a few. His conclusion is that if we
can default
to truth-that
people are speaking the truth as they know it, then we would have a
lot better world to live in.
He
lays out pretty well how Sandra Bland should never have gotten into
the trouble she did. The problem I see with this book is his solution
of assuming everybody is speaking the truth seems a weak. In one of
his early examples he talks about Chamberlain meeting Hitler and the
complete disaster that was. And yet, if we follow Gladwell’s
argument, we will just need to live with the consequences when
someone lies, like Bernie Madoff.
On
one hand, I do recommend reading this book to understand a bit more
of how we got into the style of policing we have today. I cannot
recommend his solution.
Notes from my book group: (None of my book groups have read this book)
As
you read the story of Susan Bland, what thoughts do you have at the
start of the book? At the end of the book? Do you view the police
officer as a villain? As a product of the system or some other role?
What could the officer have done to decrease the tension in the
situation? Do you think he wanted to? What could Bland have done? Do
you think she had the tools to do it? The desire?
What
are the policies which the police officer is trying to use in Sandra
Bland’s situation? Do you think they are racist? Were they being
applied in a racist fashion?
Gladwell
write If
we were more thoughtful as a society--if we were willing to engage in
some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of
strangers-she
[Sandra Bland] would
not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.
Do you think this is true?
Several
examples are given about our inability to detect lies or even if a
person is telling the truth in a non-normal way. These include Cuban
double agents, Chamberlain meeting Hitler, judges setting bail, and
Amanda Knox. Gladwell uses an experiment by Tim Levine to show how
inadequate we are in telling truth from lies. Is Gladwell’s
presentation convincing? What do you think it shows? How did you
react to some of the examples either from our past or from Levine’s
experiments? After reading this, how well do you think you can read
someone else? How good can you be read?
Amanda
Knox exhibited unusual behavior when questioned about her death. Were
the police wrong to use her behavior as a reason to be suspicious?
When a person does not exhibit behavior which you are expecting, what
reactions do you have? Does it build trust or distrust in the person?
Have
you been lied to before? Have you known it was a lie when you
encountered it? How were you able to tell?
Gladwell
uses a phrase, default
to truth.What
does that mean? Is this something which is useful? Can we make this
a complete rule? What exceptions would you make? How is this concept
central to Gladwell’s book? Would it have made a difference in
Sandra Bland’s case? How does Gladwell deal with it in the story of
Chamberlain and Hitler or Bernie Madoff?
If we do the opposite and default
to being suspicious, how does that affect our interactions with
people? Can our society function with either default
to truth or a default
to suspicion? How would you shape a standard for us to live by?
Jensen and Mitchell use torture
techniques to get information from Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed.
They appeared to be successful. Were they? One what level? Gladwell
concludes this section with The
right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.
What would the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have looked
like if this was used? Do you think this would have been a
successful interrogation philosophy with him?
Coupling
Theory according to Gladwell says that a person will only do
something in a particular way if there is opportunity for that action
at a certain time and place. He uses this in several places, but
particularly in terms of suicide and crime. How does he show this to
be true? Are you convinced and why? How does this affect your
perspective on places you would visit?
The
Kansas City experience melded the ability to stop vehicles with
places of a high incidence of crime. How does this make use of the
Coupling Theory? Is it an appropriate use of the theory? How do you
think the residents felt about this action? How do you scale up this
experience? Or should you? What does Gladwell say went wrong with
applying this experiment?
Police
Officers want
to feel that their efforts are important , that what they do matters
, that their hard work will be rewarded.
How can the police be properly rewarded? Do you think this would help
work through some of the issues which we have with how police do
their work today?
Gladwell
talks about the purpose of traffic stops in the era of suspicious
policing. How will you react now that you have heard about why the
police pull people over at times?
Gladwell’s
conclusion is that Sandra
Bland’s [death]
is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to
strangers.
How does Gladwell want us to talk to strangers? What do you think of
his solution?
Is
the policies described by Gladwell on policing oriented towards
certain races? Do they end up targeting certain races? How come the
people of Kansas City seemed to welcome the tactics used by their
police department? How would you change these tactics to seem more
fair?
Many
of these questions are either from or adapted from LitLovers.
- Why the title of Talking to Strangers?
- Does this book work as a way of explaining Sandra Bland’s death? As a way of understanding policing today?
- Did the ending seem fitting? Satisfying? Predictable?
- Every story has a world view. Were you able to identify this story’s world view? What was it? How did it affect the story?
- In what context was religion talked about in this book?
- Why do you think the author wrote this book?
- What would you ask the author if you had a chance?
- What “takeaways” did you have from this book?
- What central ideas does the author present?
- Are they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual, medical, or scientific
- What evidence does the author use to support the book's ideas?
- Is the evidence convincing...definitive or...speculative?
- Does the author depend on personal opinion, observation, and assessment? Or is the evidence factual—based on science, statistics, historical documents, or quotations from (credible) experts?
- What implications for you, our nation or the world do these ideas have?
- Are these idea’s controversial?
- To whom and why?
- Are there solutions which the author presents?
- Do they seem workable? Practicable?
- How would you implement them?
- Describe the culture talked about in the book.
- How is the culture described in this book different from where we live?
- What economic or political situations are described?
- How did this book affect your view of the world?
- Of how God is viewed?
- What questions did you ask yourself after reading this book?
- Talk about specific passages that struck you as significant—or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...?
- What was memorable?
New Words:
- Zygomaticus (6): a muscle of the human body. It is a muscle of facial expression which draws the angle of the mouth superiorly and posteriorly to allow one to smile.[1] Like all muscles of facial expression, the zygomatic major is innervated by the facial nerve (the seventh cranial nerve), more specifically, the buccal and zygomatic branches of the facial nerve
- Alleles (7): a variant form of a given gene, meaning it is one of two or more versions of a known mutation at the same place on a chromosome. It can also refer to different sequence variations for a several-hundred base-pair or more region of the genome that codes for a protein
- Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
- Henry V by WIlliam Shakespeare
- Behind the Shock Machine by Gina Perry
- Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception by Tim Levine
- Normal Two-Dimensional Singularities by Henry Laufer
- The Most Hated Man in America by Mark Pendergrast
- The Expressions of the Emotions of Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
- Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
- Death in Perugia by John Follain
- How Emotions are Made by Lisa Felman Barrett
- Drunken Blackout by Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton
- Why Torture Doesn’t Work by Shane O’Mara
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
- The Savage God by Alfred Alvarez
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- A History of British Gas Industry
- A Final Leap by John Bateson
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Live or Die by Anne Sexton
- Tactics for Criminal Patrol by Charles Remsberg
Good Quotes:
- First Line: Many years ago, when my parents came down to visit me in New York City, I decided to put them up in the Mercer Hotel.
- Last Line: We blame strangers.
- AUTHOR’S NOTE xi
- Introduction: “Step Out of the Car!” 1
- PART ONE: SPICE AND DIPLOMATS: TWO PUZZLES
- ONE: Fidel Castro’s Revenge 17
- TWO: Getting in Know de Fuhrer 28
- PART TWO: DEFAULT TO TRUTH
- THREE: The Queen of Clubs 53
- FOUR: The Holy Fool 89
- FIVE: Case Study: The Boy in the Shower 107
- PART THREE: TRANSPARENCY
- SIX: The Friends Fallacy 145
- SEVEN: A (Short) Explanation of the Amanda Knox Case 168
- EIGHT: Case Study: The Fraternity Party 187
- PART FOUR: LESSONS
- NINE: KSM: What Happens When the Stranger Is a Terrorist? 235
- PART FIVE: COUPLING
- TEN: Sylvia Plath 265
- ELEVEN: Case Study: The Kansas City Experiment 297
- TWELVE: Sandra Bland 313
- ACKNOWLEDGEMETNS 347
- NOTES 349
- INDEX 389
References:
- Author's Web Site
- Malcolm Gladwell reflects on Sandra Bland case
- Wikipedia-Book
- Wikipedia-Author
- Amazon-Book
- Amazon-Author
- GoodReads-Book
- GoodReads-Author
- New York Times Review
- NPR Review
- The Guardian’s review
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