Like his other books, Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers (2019) was an enjoyable read.

While I agree with much of what he writes, there are few points that I would like to explore and challenge some.

His overall thesis seems to be that humans are somehow poor at interpreting strangers, which leads to misunderstandings and social problems.

He examines a few high-profile case studies to support this thesis.

Bernie Madoff is one of those cases.

Madoff ran a hedge fund that reported unusually high returns for many years until it was finally revealed to be a Ponzi scheme.  While certain individuals expressed suspicion of his financial dealings, these suspicions were systematically disregarded.

Gladwell raises the question of why the public could be so wrong for so long in its interpretation of Madoff’s identity.  Gladwell seems to address this in two ways.

First, citing the perspective and studies of Tim Levine, Gladwell explains people in social life tend to “default to truth” in their social interpretations of strangers because it enables efficient everyday social transactions.

Conmen and fraudsters are mostly outliers in a system in which it is substantially more important for people to trust other members of their social system.

Frequent suspicion of people’s motives and identities would be too disruptive to everyday social interactions.

Second, Gladwell and Levine believe that some people’s presentations are inherently difficult to interpret correctly.

They call them “mismatches” because their outward demeanor does not match with what most people would interpret as their identity or intent.  Madoff’s demeanor and behaviors conveyed a modest genius—not a sociopathic fraudster.  He was uniquely hard to read.

What Gladwell seems to overlook here is Madoff was not a “stranger” in the sense of people not having social data on his identity.  A stranger, as I conceptualize it, is a person who has no known reputation that can be used as a reference point in interpreting their identity in a social interaction.

Madoff, in contrast, had a sterling reputation as an extraordinary investment genius within a community of trusted elites.  It was because of this reputation that people jockeyed at the opportunity to let him manage their money.

The reputational accountability of behavior is an important form of social control across all social systems, but may be relatively more prominent in small-scale societies in which individuals often live their entire lives in the same communities and can more easily track a small number of identities.

The “stranger” has a different kind of status in these settings.

Among the rural Makua with whom I conducted ethnographic research in Northern Mozambique, for instance, people were often suspicious that a stranger visiting their community was a potential thief. They reasoned that the stranger will not be concerned with reputation in a community that they will soon leave.

Meanwhile, the stranger had their own anxieties that community members would seize the opportunity to steal within their own community because they understood that the blame for the theft would be cast on them as the stranger.

Thus, while Madoff is an interesting case, it does not seem to support Gladwell’s thesis on how humans are poor at interpreting strangers’ identities.

Madoff was trusted by so many for so long precisely because of the momentum of his social reputation.  People would have been more successful in identifying his fraudulent orientation in 1-on-1 social interactions with him if they had not been misled by his well-established reputation.

Gladwell also discusses an intriguing study conducted by an economist (Sendhil Mullainathan), three computer scientists, and a bail expert (Kleinberg, Leskovec, Ludwig, Mullainathan 2018) .  The group constructed and tested an artificial intelligence algorithm to make bail decisions on a database of New York City defendants.

Even though the AI system had overall less information on the defendants, the study found that it made better overall bail decisions than the original New York City judges assigned to these cases.  More specifically, the defendants that the AI algorithm selected for release were 25 percent less likely to commit a crime before trial than those that the judges had released.

The judges, in fact, had access to more in-person data than the AI algorithm.  They were able to observe the defendants’ testimonies personally.

Thus, Gladwell and Mullainathan’s team asks why would judges—individuals who we presume would be relatively skilled at assessing criminal identity and intent—have a poorer interpretation of these strangers than the AI algorithm?

This case study, unlike that of Madoff, does support Gladwell’s and Levine’s thesis that people are poor at interpreting strangers in face-to-face social interactions.

While Gladwell’s analysis focuses on the interpretive component of social interaction, it tends to overlook the “presentational” or “performative” component of social interaction.

As Erving Goffman (symbolic interactionism), Harold Garfinkel (ethnomethodology), and scholars of conversation analysis recognize, social interaction is composed of two symbolic enterprises—an individual must present themselves in social interactions and a fellow interactant must interpret that presentation.   The interactants take turns presenting and interpreting throughout the social interaction.

Goffman highlighted the strategic component of an individual’s presentation—they present themselves in a way to manage the fellow interactant’s interpretation of them.  In other words, they are constantly attempting to shape people’s impressions of them.

Depending on the individual’s intent, they might attempt to deceive a fellow interactant by falsely presenting themselves in a role that they assume the interactant will perceive to be authentic.

Part of why humans are poor at interpreting stranger identity is because humans are also effective at deception.

One might imagine that criminals would be inclined to deceive judges.  In fact, higher-functioning criminals are likely to have been the most effective in deceiving judges into perceiving them as low-risk.

Thus, the judges might make worse bail decisions than the AI algorithm because the AI algorithm is never exposed to the in-person deception of a corrupt stranger.

Gladwell shares some of Levine’s assumptions about the evolutionary origins of people’s propensity to “default to truth.”   There is a selection pressure to default to truth in one’s social interactions with others because of its social benefits—“efficient communication and social coordination”—far outweigh the occasional social drawbacks of getting deceived.

While this perspective makes sense, it does not distinguish adequately between one’s social interactive disposition with strangers vs. with members of one’s everyday community whose identities are known.

It probably is adaptive to default to truth with fellow community members, but it might also be adaptive to default to suspicion with strangers.

In the small-scale hunting-and-gathering social systems in which humans have spent most of their evolutionary history, one could imagine that there would be a strong selective pressure to interpret stranger identity correctly.

The stakes attached to incorrect identity interpretation could be lethal—limiting an individual’s genetic transmission.

On the other hand, if there is a selective pressure to interpret stranger identity more effectively, then why are humans not better at it?

It strikes me that there is an equivalent, countervailing selective pressure among humans to be able to deceive strangers effectively.

These two interactive dispositions – the ability to deceive and the ability to detect deception – coexist as a kind of oppositional pair where an incremental improvement in one necessitates a similar enhancement in the other to maintain a kind of functional social equilibrium.

In other words, humans struggle to interpret strangers’ identities because strangers excel at deception.

Written by Nicholas Kottak, PhD

Nicholas Kottak, PhD is the President of Ethnographic Solutions, LLC.

Ethnographic Solutions is a leading ethnographic research company for pharmaceutical firms and healthcare companies.

Ethnographic Solutions offers a unique methodological and analytic approach to physician-patient dialogue research, day in the life patient ethnography, sales representative effectiveness research, and business process efficiency studies.

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