In 'Talking To Strangers,' Malcolm Gladwell Explores Why It's So Hard To Do
The latest book by the author of Outliers and The Tipping Point looks at miscommunication throughout history — and finds it's really hard to know whom to believe.
Malcolm Gladwell doesn't reference a famous line delivered by a prison chain-gang overseer to the character played by Paul Newman in the classic 1967 film Cool Hand Luke: "What we've got here is failure to communicate."
But it's one of the few communication breakdowns he overlooks in Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't a sweeping survey tour of miscommunication, through stories ripped from the headlines and history books. It's a fascinating, if sometimes meandering journey. Gladwell's premise in these tales is that humans "default to truth" — that is, we tend to take on face value the things people tell us, even if we should know better.
