Malcolm Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers” is not an easy book to review. It is both compelling and frustrating. Its incredibly fluid writing turns its case-studies into great stories that are fun to read. Yet it is also disappointing in its theoretical framework and how it goes about demonstrating the three main points that constitute it.
Many reviews have pointed out, sometimes quite angrily, that Gladwell’s account of certain stories makes it seem that the author finds excuses or minimizes perpetrators’ responsibility in vile racist, pedophile or rape crimes. That was obviously not Gladwell’s intent and it is definitely not his belief that these crimes should be minimized as the mere result of faulty communication between strangers. I would argue that the book’s lack of scientific rigor and its attempt to explain too much are largely to blame for these impressions.
As compelling a writer Malcolm Gladwell is, he does have a tendency to select stories, cases and scientific data to fit his arguments rather than testing hypotheses against the evidence and potential alternative explanations. Such an approach leaves room for misinterpretation. It also exposes the author to criticism with regard to the inclusion (consciously or subconsciously) of his own personal biases into what he attempts to pass as well-researched points about human behavior.
This book is therefore - unfortunately - largely unbalanced. Despite its extremely compelling and well-documented stories (“The Queen of Cuba” chapter is particularly worth reading) and Malcolm Gladwell’s undeniable talent as a writer, this book fails to convince on the theoretical front. It tries to explain too many highly-complex behaviors based on just a few cases, placing them under the massive umbrella of communication issues among strangers.
This latter and central concept is actually never properly defined, which makes it difficult for the reader to make sense of Gladwell’s main research objective. Given how compelling the chapter about spying is, Gladwell’s theorericall framework could have been applied solely to that domain, by looking for example at other cases of double-agents gone unoticed and the circumstances under which they were eventually uncovered. This could have led to interesting and more controlled analysis, enabling the author to gain insights from potential variance occuring across similar cases (rather than testing his argument against a range of very different single cases that are not really comparable).
Ultimately, “Talking to Strangers” can be a fun read if one does not have too many expectations and is not too demanding in terms of gaining insights that result from a methodologically coherent research design.
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