What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

I’ve finished reading Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, so just a summary: Talking to Strangers is Malcolm Gladwell’s attempt to understand the incident involving Sandra Bland, who tragically took her own life in her jail cell about three days after being arrested over a traffic violation.

In the book, Gladwell begins by telling Sandra Bland’s story and then discusses various components of communication with strangers and why we aren’t very good at it. He brings it all together at the end, showing how each of these components contributed to the disaster that occurred with Sandra Bland. Overall, I thought the book was pretty good. Although I don’t think anything will ever top Outliers, the storytelling here and the information in the middle were fine. But the end of the book really tied everything together when he showed how these different factors played into the tragedy of Sandra Bland’s death.

One point I came across in another review was the critique that Gladwell avoids talking explicitly about race and racism and their role in the interaction. While he touches on the topic, mentioning various factors that contribute to the misunderstanding between the officer and Sandra Bland—such as gender (the officer being a man and Bland being a woman), geographical background (she was from Chicago, he was from Texas), and race (she was Black, and he was white)—he doesn’t delve deeply into racism or implicit and explicit racial biases.

Default to Honesty and the Queen of Cuba

That said, Gladwell focuses on broader reasons why we fail to communicate well with strangers. He uses various examples, like the Amanda Knox case and that situation with Brock Turner, that college student who raped a drunk girl by a dumpster. He also discusses a theory by some professor (I can’t remember exactly, maybe something called the “default to honesty”). The idea is that when we interact with others, we tend to assume they are being truthful. Because if we were constantly suspicious, society would struggle to function.

Gladwell talks about cases like Rupert Murdoch and the Queen of Cuba, as well as the Cuban spy in the FBI. In these examples, there were signs that things weren’t as they seemed, but because people defaulted to honesty in new situations, they were able to rationalize the discrepancies. Even though there were red flags, they weren’t numerous or severe enough for people to believe they were being deceived.

Deference to Authority

Also, again with the… I think it was the Stanley Milgram case, an experiment where an experimenter instructed participants to deliver shocks to a person when they gave wrong answers. Even when it seemed like the person was in extreme pain, the participants still continued to administer the shocks. The focus here was on the power dynamic and how, despite a substantial portion of participants doubting that the person was actually being shocked, they still defaulted to believing that the situation was real because they trusted the authority figure. I don’t remember exactly how it connects to the Sandra Bland case right now.

Policing Practices and Sandra Bland

Then he talks about policing and how, some time ago, there was this idea that, in order to catch actual criminals, officers couldn’t just stop citizens walking on the street, as that’s basically illegal. But what they could do is pull drivers over, and if they had enough suspicion, they could legally search their cars. The theory was that if you pull over enough people for minor infractions and search their cars, eventually you’ll find something.

The police officer who pulled over Sandra Bland was operating under this tactic, even though it wasn’t really the right situation for it. This kind of policing works best in high-crime areas at high-crime times, like late at night in the rough part of the city. But he pulled her over in a suburban area during the daytime, where the likelihood of crime was low. That was one of his many mistakes.

In the interaction between Sandra Bland and the officer, there was a lot of background—her past encounters with cops, mental health issues, and so on. When she was pulled over, she was understandably irritated, and that frustration came through in her interaction with him. But instead of de-escalating the situation, the officer failed to manage it properly.

As for Sandra Bland’s history, I think she had been pulled over maybe eight times in the past, leading to a few thousand dollars of debt.

Yes, so Sandra Bland was basically starting a new life in Texas. She was interviewing for a job, and she had driven all the way from Chicago, having just recently arrived in Texas, when she got pulled over by a cop. Like I mentioned before, she’d been pulled over many times—maybe 16 times or something like that—in the past few years. She was preparing to start fresh, and then, boom, she gets pulled over again, this time because she was trying to get out of the officer’s way but didn’t use her signal when doing so.

So, there was a lot of frustration and irritation with the situation, and the cop just didn’t handle it well.

I’ll come back to this again later, but in sum, I’d note once more that Malcolm Gladwell is a great storyteller. To tell his story, he does indulge in generalizations, which may be necessary for this kind of work, but it’s something to keep in mind—you have to take his conclusions with a grain of salt. Overall, it’s a good book, very Gladwellian.

Original draft written in June 2020.