Audience Q&A session with Malcolm Gladwell

so this is this is a really good question especially because I was raised in New York in the 1970s in 1970s and 80s which means that I'm an intensely skeptical person especially and been interacting with strangers yeah in my default is raised eyebrow yeah and the question is do you generally tress strangers but do you find yourself with your guard up do I trust well I actually I am I am quite trusting because I unlike you I grew up in rural southern Ontario which is about as far from that's kind of part of the description of having lived there it's like required of you isn't it yeah you you yeah if you grew up in Queens I grew up in the Queens is here I grew up in the continuum I'm on the other I don't think that anyone ever told me a lie until I you know went to college we had the bad people at my high school were people who smoke cigarettes Wow that was considered that was you know when you define so deviancy if you think about this when you're a teenager deviancy is simply doing the thing that most other kids don't want to do right so in your high school you know and you know you know urban high school in America wherever in some deviancy is like way over here because the norm is to be you know taught for whatever you in order to be deviant you gotta go like way up but possibly possibly you don't think what I think is interesting about that is that when I reflect back on it there wasn't our what we thought of deviance II was not really there was maybe more braggadocio or whatever associated but it wasn't genuine it really wasn't yeah well even then I mean I'm sure if you had imported a random sample of students from my high school to a New York City High School in 1970s and 80s but god these kids are wholesome they would have had us know these guys mind would add they would have a stroke with their we did I didn't know a single there was not a single unwed mother mm-hmm in my high school there was no drug use that I had I didn't he idea that you would take drugs was something it was completely unknown it was literally about smoking cigarettes and the school I think that people running the school were aware of just how good they had it so they went out of their way to make smoking cigarettes seem like it was just like the most unbelievable violation of every you know I don't know like I feel like in a minute we can launch a political campaign going taking people back to that time pretty magical so dude I can tell you the most deviant thing I did is it so I was anxious Oh Lord here we go hey this is the part that like when people write about this event it will only be quoting what you say right now I realize I've never told this story I just I just I just popped into my head that so I was very anxious as I had two Confederates when I was in high school and we were very anxious to be rebellious but all of the conventional avenues of rebellion had been closed off in our so it was that really had to sit and think about what is the best way for us to so we had a tradition in our school called The Snow Queen which was like a like a our schools you know Miss America pageant kind of thing and someone would be crowned Snow Queen so on the on the day so all the school would gather and they would declare the winner of Snow Queen and the Snow Queen would come up to the stage and she would sit in the chair and so it would put the crown on her head biggest deal of the years so when the crown was put on the head of the Snow Queen we jumped up onstage with a huge banner which is so large that it obscured the Snow Queen and the banner said this is the height of deviancy for me the banner said Snow Queen today Housewife tomorrow Oh God oh my god we staked out the hard feminist position and that put us like beyond the pale that that was like people could not believe what we had just done the image of image of young Malcolm in the dean's office no they blame you behavior you didn't even call me honor they were like so just just I mean they were so reeling from what this meant that they didn't mean they couldn't process it you guys but did not happen but there's no snow queen there's no there's no and yes in nomenclature this should be I will confess snow is very different and it does in Queens of nineteen so I will confess the the most deviant thing I did in high school no the statute of limitations is not up I told my I can't believe the you what is your opinion of the kid what is your opinion of the college entrance lies the college or the oh you mean this yes can't be Lori Loughlin first of all yeah my first the first and obvious reaction to it all is this guy singer who's like cheating on the thing you know doing he's the ringleader he's charging fifteen grand if you're gonna check these are people you give desperate parents of millions of dollars who are prepared to shell out seventy five thousand dollars to send their kids to mediocre schools and you you only charge fifteen pay what is the matter with this guy I want to shake him you're risking like a jail sentence and you're and all of this and you're doing it for 15 grand mm-hmm you're cheating on an LSAT for 15 like that's how I can't get past that what kind of role model is he is he it's very funny it's like the old is a Jimmy Cagney movie never steal anything small some people are able to detect lies not blatant when speaking to strangers how are they able to do this and why why are they able to do what most people can't so there is a really interesting literature in what are called super detectors and they are first of all very very very very rare and but there are people who like in that in a test where you know that I described there one in every whatever 10,000 people are gonna get eighty percent right and the only thing I ever heard about those that kind of person was someone who had done a study on them and said the striking thing they had in common it was there an extraordinary number of children of alcoholics mmm because and it was explained what's really we're seeing approval with which is that what is an alcoholic an alcohol an alcoholic is someone whose actions and presentation are discrepant mmm-hmm right so as a child you are constantly disentangling the way that your parent looks and the way that they the facial expressions in demeanor and though and the the way they really feel the way they're gonna behave towards you and so that is turns out to be I mean you suffer terribly but the one consequence of that is that you get really good at understanding people's sort of hidden motives right because the mistake the rest of us make is that we assume that these two things are congruent I assume that if you're gonna if you're smiling at me you must be friendly towards me but a child who grows up in a profoundly dysfunctional home does not make that assumption so it makes you realize that being a super detector carries a terrible cost it's not it is not something we would wish on anyone it's also interesting the extent to which our backgrounds shape us or or coping skills that you cultivate in one arena wind up that being adaptive and one way that translate into completely other aspects of your life that people might not even be mindful of yeah yeah and so the other question I have which I think is really interesting is what kind of lyre is Jeffrey Epstein well again I get the sense from reading about Jeffrey Epstein that he also didn't take enormous pains to hide what he was doing right I mean it seems to me that's more a case of people around him excusing his behavior like I had a conversation with somebody who had known Harvey Weinstein for many many years and when that Weinstein's story broke this person who was sort of a Hollywood person said oh yeah I remember years ago at Sundance seeing Harvey run on run down the hall after a woman who'd come out of his hotel room hmm and he said it like oh we all knew Harvey was like that but it didn't occur to him to do anything about it or say anything about it I'm I suspect that Epstein's particular so why seem wasn't lying about this it was like his brother knew about it is everyone who worked for him knew about it he didn't take great pains to hide it you know his his Epstein tick was Epstein ticking he had somebody walking around the streets of Manhattan right finding young women for him I mean so I again it says this is seems to be this separate problem which is these people who do things in plain sight then we just choose not to the rest of society chooses not to get particularly exercised by I mean isn't the term for that cowardice on the part of the rest of us yeah I mean we can be confronted with things that are egregious and the way in which we I guess there's probably a more genteel way of framing it and saying you know avoidance or you know whatever the kind of psychological term for it might be but isn't it just cowardice that we see people who do things that we know are wrong but we lack the fortitude to confront them and and intervene well the you know that the famous study on this is what was called the bystander effect study which argued that remember in the case that the Famer has been written about 17 different times 17 different ways with the kitty Genovese CKC versions and the question is why didn't people call the cops and they're like I said there are 10 explanations but one of the early famous ones was that when you witness something and you're part of a group you assume that someone else is gonna do the calling so you're like well I don't know why I have to do it we all saw it whereas if you witness something and it's just you you feel compelled to act so the I talk about the case of the stanford rape case in my book and what's interesting about that case is that the two these two graduate students come upon brock turner you know on the ground with an unconscious Emily doe and immediately they rush in and break it up it's because there's no one else but them right they are like oh it's like they don't even think twice about it they immediately charge in there they see an unconscious woman and a guy you know thrusting upon her and they're like we have no choice if we don't do it nobody will but with with someone like with something like Epstein there's literally dozens and dozens of people who are aware of his actions and none of them feels particularly compelled to be the first to raise their hand and say this is wrong I think there's also like I think correlations in terms of the ability I mean just the way that the case played out the ability of people of particular socioeconomic backgrounds of particular racial backgrounds that we're inclined to default to truth for and so our our idea of what is truthful what's honest what seems to be authentic is mediated by this in the same ways if Bernie Madoff was a brother saying look I can't explain it to you I'm just going to give you all of this money back that scheme wouldn't have run the way that it did yeah yeah by the same token I think Brock Turner's it was an african-american man that case is going to be adjudicated differently so I think some part of this is also about our social hierarchies I do get I do I do think these things are that's the kind of but that explains why the task of turn to go back to our conversation about Bill Cosby it explains why the task of turning these things around takes so long I mean that's always what to me in any number of these instances what is so fascinating and disturbing which is that you can't it isn't just the case that the first time someone stands up and says Bill Cosby put something in my drink we all snap to attention it's like it's years and years and years and years of it I mean I mentioned Gloria Allred before Gloria Allred was was representing these people way way way way back then and literally nothing I mean there's a there's a moment II and I think I could maybe be getting the date wrong but cosmic gets an award at Lincoln Center in like 2009 2010 something in there everyone who is anyone in the world of comedy shows up and gives the most heartfelt you know this guy's my idol I mean this is at a time when those allegations are already out there right and it takes Hannibal Buress right to stand up and just kind of like and that thing took on a life of its own for the kind of tide to turn so it's I mean it really is a this is not something that's simple and I think it ought to I mean that's sort of what I'm trying to get it in the book is to is to is to say that you can't have a kind of knee-jerk response when things take really slow and just say they take slow because people are are evil or blind or whatever those things know it takes a long time because you know these are our reactions are functions of social structures and attitudes that have been built over a long period of time and it takes a while to turn their ship around mm-hmm so I have a statement which you all not going to like but I'm unfortunately it's very true books are available for sale but mountain will not be signing books are already find all right silence sorry but I do have one last question which is I think kind of open-ended and maybe it's a kind of Rorschach question to end on which is isn't everyone a stranger how well do we really know anyone well I mean in an uplifting note there you are I'm always reminded my favorite one of my favorite psychological studies ever was it's a famous study in psychology which is that um he dubbed was that in the 30s and 40s so they go to a large group of parents and they ask the parents to fill out a psychological questionnaire on their children describe the they're all school-aged children describe the personality of your child across 25 different dimensions then they go to the children children's teachers and they have the teachers fill out the exact same questionnaire right and the question is how close are these two questionnaires and the answer is not even remotely close there's nothing so the child that the teacher sees in the child the parent sees are completely different why because the way we behave is a function of the context or inner the people we're interacting with so can you ever know someone you can know the way that person behaves around you but you can't know the way the person behaves when you're not in the room mm-hmm right well that's well they have surveillance now that's like boom industry in it but that's why we're always you know the classic line whenever they catch the serial killer and they interview the neighbor and the neighbor always says he was so quiet seem so quiet right there's a reason for that and that is that when the serial killers around his neighbors he's not doing his serial killing right like that's part of the kind of the bar for entry into the world of serial killing is that you understand the fundamental fact that you want to keep this activity from your neighbors and somehow this escapes us we expect the neighbor we're like oh my god I don't know why you know Jackie Smith next door didn't see it how could she not see it she's living next door to the guy well right yeah that's the point that is kind of the point right and what's even amazing is that in the serial killer cases you can even get real super close to the man I mean half the time the wives sometimes don't even know what's going on and I don't think you know go back to Larry Nasser I mean they're the peoples that I have a quote in the book there was a from some of the parents of the kids who were abused by him and the most one that always just is unbelievable but true is a mother who takes her child to be treated by Nasser and she's in the room with Nasser and she observes that Nasser has an erection as he is treating her daughter and this woman is herself a medical doctor so she's a nun very sophisticated person a caring mother who is there and she sees this and she it doesn't she isn't she's like that's we her reaction is oh that's weird that must be embarrassing for him and she doesn't make any connection between this observed behavior and what is happening with her daughter and that makes you think so she doesn't she you know NASA is a known her she's taking her daughter to be treated by him on many occasions anyone who's in the gymnastics world of of around Penn State new Larry Nasser but they didn't really know him and against the yeah Michigan they didn't really know him and that you know partly because we have powerful mechanisms of denial partly because you know if you are a pedophile you spend a lot of time trying to obscure your behavior from people but partly because what we're talking about like people had many many different dimensions and it takes it took a very long time first some of those parents to come around to the idea that this man was took actually finding thirty seven thousand images on his hard drive for many of them to come around to the notion that he might be so that's when I can I talk about how this is an insanely difficult task that's what I mean so I mean I think that it's interesting especially in a period where in the craft profession we both practice you know there is a kind of public skepticism of what we do and there's a really I think fraught I think social relationship with the idea of truth right now for the period we live in and so thank you for taking on this subject and and it was a very interesting read Thanks [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The 92nd Street Y, New York

Views: 8,203

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, Jelani Cobb, Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers

Id: L-9mniLDD9A

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019