Just Finished Reading Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers, from 2019, is the third book I've read by journalist Malcom Gladwell...the other two are Blink and The Tipping Point: click on the titles to read my reviews from this blog.   I first became aware of Talking to Strangers a couple of weeks ago when Melissa and I were browsing through a now-rare local used bookstore...Book Gallery West if you must know.  Stepping up to the cashier for our purchases, the customer at the counter was purchasing just the book I'm reviewing today: I stepped out of character and had a pleasant chat with him and the cashier, thinking that Gladwell would be happy to see me "talking to strangers".  But after I checked out his book on Libby and began to read it, it became soon clear that this was no "overcome social awkwardness" how-to book.  Gladwell's major premise is that there are embedded biases in human interaction that, while they tend to ensure a more orderly and peaceful flow of social discourse, from time to time they also create some serious problems.  One is what he calls "default to truth" whereby there is a bias toward believing in someone's honesty, often in spite of the objective outside evidence...Neville Chamberlain's belief in Adolf Hitler concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938, the many flimflammed by con investor Bernie Madoff just a few years ago, and the difficulty some American intelligence professionals had in concluding that a woman working for them was a double agent for Castro's Cuba are just three of the examples he presents of this bias going terribly wrong.  Then Gladwell goes on to discuss another bias, that of "transparency" whereby society has constructed standards of outward social behavior that supposedly tell when someone is being honest or not...he uses an episode of the TV sitcom Friends to illustrate when people are acting transparent...and thus presumably believable.  He then claims that many, however, while still being honest, do not necessarily abide by the sometimes-arbitrary rules of transparency, citing as an example the case of Amanda Knox, a young American woman falsely accused and convicted...later released...for the murder of her roommate in Italy after many thought her demeanor was untransparent and therefore suspicious.  Finally, the tragic case of Sandra Bland, who was arrested after a spurious traffic stop in Texas and later committed suicide in jail, ties together the author's thesis regarding defaulting to truth and transparency.  This time, he claims the policeman on duty should have defaulted to truth with her and not allowed his perception that she wasn't being transparent influence his judgment, which created an escalating conflict leading to the unnecessary arrest.  I, on the other hand, have a different take on it: the dude was a complete @$$hole, full of his own sense of power and dominance.  I clearly get where Malcolm Gladwell is going in this book...I see folks strangely following and believing every word of scoundrels like Putin and Trump nowadays and wonder when they decided to flush their critical thinking abilities down the toilet.  But the same people don't "default to truth" when they regard Zelensky or Biden, so I think this is more the case of them being prideful and stubborn with their own viewpoints.  What I'd like to see is a book where Gladwell takes his earlier "Blink" and "Tipping Point" theses and integrates them thoroughly with the ones he propounds in this book.  Talking to Strangers was interesting, but I don't always agree with the author's conclusions...