Malcolm Gladwell talks with Jelani Cobb about Gladwell's fascinating new book, Talking to Strangers

[Applause] [Music] good evening how are you all hey Malcolm how are you so so it's an interesting thing I was worried about this event you know I actually thought that was looking forward to it because we've had such a slow news week there's been like nothing going on and it was like yeah least I'll have this thing on Friday and I also was told I should start by saying that there will be a book giveaway at the end of this event for anyone who can dig up dirt on Joe Biden yeah those two announcements out of the way good talk good to see you good to talk with you we we had we had never met before this yeah I think we said hi briefly it like a New Yorker party five years ago or something like that so I guess we can just kind of jump into it and say why could it possibly be important to be able to discern whether someone's telling the truth right now well exactly well that's one of the you know one of the puzzles that I'm interested in this book which is we should be good at that and we're not so you would think evolutionarily you would think that we would have been selected based on our ability to tell whether people are lying right that would it's such a crucial thing you think that but in fact that is not what happened because we're terrible at where as a group we are terrible now we are some people who are good at it but you know if I paraded a hundred people across the stage and each one of them said a statement that was true or false and I asked the audience to to pick the liars their accuracy rate would be your accuracy rate would be at best 54 percent like slightly better than chance that's it which is really really really really really puzzling and that's the kind of that begins that observation sort of once you could have taken seriously you know I think it launches a whole kind of cascade of really interesting thoughts we would start out and the abstract saying okay someone may lie to me someone may you know had someone called me this week and I said I can't talk have the person making a request I can't talk I have to run into a meeting in five minutes can I call you back and so this person very I guess strategically called me back 15 minutes later but it was some number I didn't know and I was still in my office yeah what are you doing answering your office phone this is a problem I have to just take the thing out right there's nothing good that comes from answering your office English ever happen nothing good ever happens as a result of this but I was like apparently seeming to have been caught in a lie she was like well I thought you'd be gone to your meeting and I was going to leave a voicemail but the real purpose of that call wasn't see if I was lying because I was like I'm on a video meeting so oh did you pack she said haha yeah which wasn't true now so in the lying literature is is own fascinating little subsection of psychology and so there's many many debates about what a lie is so one of the things so Tim Levine the vine the guy who a lot of a lot of this book is based on his work he's one of the sort of world's lying experts and one thing when lying experts get together where things they debate about is okay so how frequent are lies and that depends on what you call a lie so is what you told that woman a lie and what the vine would say is no it's not really a lie because any untruth told to maintain the social fabric is really a kind of white lie and doesn't count Elias wood is a deliberate and malicious attempt to misrepresent experience in order to profoundly you know alter the perception of the person who's really that's what a lie is right you weren't doing that when you said I have a meeting in five minutes what you were trying to do is very you were trying to avoid having to say something that was disruptive which was I don't want to talk to you right right and I did have a meeting was just more than five minutes away I think I don't think LaVon would call that a lie he would say so when you use this more restrictive definition of lying you discover that very very very few people actually lying right and those few hours if you look at the total universe of lies so if we catalogued the realize told by everyone in this room what we discovered suppose we can't everyone in this room wrote down all their statements for the last 24 hours and we analyzed them about which ones are realized what we discover is there are three people in this room who lied like non-stop you would like we would like those three people to raise their hand the rest of you probably didn't lie much at all and so that alters the odds so then you realize oh the strategy of believing everything that people say is a sound one so if you encounter if you're unlucky enough to encounter one of those three Liars in this room you're in trouble but you're on to encounter them very small and you know they can't can they tell you a lie that actually destroys your life probably not so it's this is divine this is a lot of islands argument that evolution actually there's no reason for evolution to have selected us to be good at telling lies because lies are Toba such a small number of people that you're actually but you you're selected for your ability to believe in others because that's actually really efficient and adaptive but if the story doesn't end there though you know we kind of get into more practical circumstances in which what Levine calls the default to truth it plays out in ways that become very complicated and have lots of other implications Bernie Madoff for instance yeah like how does this really well I would he miss a good example this so Bernie is a real liar like catastrophic we can we can assume that right and but does Bernie when did you think about Bernie Madoff his so Bernie manages to pull off think about his scam for a moment he scammed last twenty five years roughly he manages to bilk people around the world of whatever it was fifteen twenty billion dollars he doesn't actually get caught he turns himself in so absent the financial crisis of 2008-2009 Bernie could still be going strong today in fact if Bernie had found a way to kind of bridge that the market quickly recovered Bernie Bernie would be going crazy right now right like I mean really doing well so but the question is does Bernie does the so point number one is there's very few Bernie's there's only one Bernie there's none it turns out there's not like one hundred of these people so this scam looks like it's really easy to pull off you have to look relatively distinguished you have to have a large number of rich friends and you have to be able to say with a certain degree of credibility you know I am an extraordinary investor how hard is that you and I could do this I mean we don't have a lot of rich friends but like after the the event tonight we will be launching the firm Gladwell in Cobb so it's not but it's not that hard but in fact there's only one mm-hmm there's only one guy who does it on a massive scale and does Bernie destroy the financial system and you know it's just know everyone most of the people who invested with Bernie got locked up they got a surprising amount of their money back life went on so the strategy I had tell us during the book of this Renaissance capital the greatest hedge fund of all time they they find themselves with a stake in a Madoff fund before he's busted and they have this internal communication in which they send e-mails back and forth and when they're like they don't believe that Madoff is for real cuz they're these guys aren't the smartest guys on earth and they're like this doesn't make sense Bernie moving all just red flags but they're like yeah and they don't sell the stake so like there this is a group of people who have this default to truth they're like sitting in the audience in like the Long Island somewhere they all have like yachts and private planes they've made billions of dollars why are they merely billions of dollars because they don't spend a lot of time worrying about whether their counterparties are frauds they just assume everyone's honest turns out that's a really good way to make a lot of money right the people who are sitting in their home like so paranoid that their money is under a mattress those people don't make any money right so it's like it's weirdly adaptive to be taken in by madoff his you know if it's a sign that you are someone who's generally trusting mm-hmm it's probably a positive thing so okay let me push back on that a little bit but on the opposite side of that we have lots of institutionalized design and things that we wouldn't necessarily call outright lies but lots of what was happening on Wall Street was certainly deceptive where people were packaging financial products in such a way as to make it appear that you were bribe buying sirloin you were actually buying dog food yeah and so doesn't that count of the widespread nature of that doesn't that count as a kind of dishonesty that people are invested in yet really invested in I would actually disagree I've always thought the striking thing about let's just confine our conversation to America for a moment the striking thing about American the institution malicious actions by American institutions what's striking about them is their absence of dishonesty so the the weird thing about this country is that no one bothers to hide the nasty thing they're doing so no let me give you an example in North Carolina they engage in like unbelievable acts of gerrymandering in order to minimize the impact of democratic or African American voting do they hide it not even bother it can't be bothered to hide it they're like so it's so open and on the surface all you could do it I mean what's amazing when you fall over that particular case for example is that it sounds when you look at the people who are uncovering it it sounds like they like turn to page to right oh there's massive German like it wasn't even I remember I did a piece years ago about the guy who broke the Enron story the guy the Enron story was broken by a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and I am terribly embarrassed to say I forgot his name which is in Barrett you know but anyway but it's really brilliant intrepid reporter how does he break the Enron story the answer is he reads their annual report so in the earlier in Woodward and Bernstein what they get like mark felt and deep throat and like secret sources and they mean no this guy I actually sat down was like how did you pick Vegas well I started to read the 10-qs and 10ks and the end of reports and then he's like I didn't really understand them so I called up Enron and Enron flew he was in Dallas Enron was in Houston and Juan flew a team down to Dallas to meet with him and they sat in a room and he was like they explained everything to me and so he wrote it up and that was the story that brought down Enron it came from n so like this is why I've never understood everyone like and so Jeff Skilling which jail for 20 years and Jeff Skilling's still can't be was the CEO of anyone he still if you check in with him from time to time not personally but if you look up with him he still can't figure out why he's in jail because from his perspective he's like you know I may have been running this scam but I told that boy I thought and everyone pretended like you hid it from a second I actually didn't hide it from you it's in it's all I own is on page 56 I told you what I was doing so I think this is the modern there's just no no one's lying anymore like that's so 19th century today it's all on the surface just tonight I I won't even and I had made a I've tried not to talk about the T word but what's always striking about him it's the same thing he tells you exactly what's on his mind people call him deceptive that's not deception this kind of weirdly like narcissistic transparency I don't think you should be that hardened Clarence Thomas we can I this is totally parenthetical but I had the most interesting conversation I know there's a book out now which kind of really examines his legacy but when I was doing my revisionist history podcast on on the LSAT I talked to this judge called Jeffrey's uh there was a Supreme Court Clerk of Scalia's and then and now is a very very very well-known prominent federal judge was uh he's on the short list for the Supreme Court and in the course of our conversation he had this really interesting Clarence Thomas take which was as follows he was like because we were talking about clerks and he was like cuz the clerk's are the crooks you bring in to the Supreme Court are the kind of that's how you know that's the generation of next generation of legal whatever you think everyone on the Supreme Court hires their clerks from Harvard and law and Yale and all those prominent law firms except for Clarence Thomas mm-hmm who hires his clerks from basically smaller law schools in the middle of the country and then if you look at where lock clerks go everyone else law clerks go to the coast two prominent firms or two fancy jobs Clarence Thomas's clerks all go and take jobs generally take jobs in the state judiciary's around the country um you know they become Attorney General's of states in the south or they become and he was like if you think about this from Clarence Thomas's perspective he is actually he's the one building this extraordinary power base he's populating because this guy's whole theory is that state courts are way more powerful than we think we forget how important they are in shaping policy Curtis Thomas is peopling this state legal systems of the middle part of the United States with all of his clerks he was like he's playing a long game that no one is is understanding which I thought was really interesting that if you so if you look at him from the perspective of other justices you miss what he's doing he's just playing a different game right he's thinking ten and twenty years out yeah I mean I could believe that and I think it's interesting to your to your point about the lies and deception I think it's interesting that one of the things I've noticed in reporting is that the lower you go on the food chain the less elegant the attempts to deceive you are yeah and so in terms of North Carolina when I was there and all the gerrymandering things were happening and I was going around the state with Reverend William barber for this piece that I was working on and I'm talking to some of the people who were around dealing with kind of voter suppression stuff and this woman relays this story I just spoken to this person who was like a state Rep or something and this woman relays this story about him she was like yeah well you know he's a straight shooter and I was like what do you mean by that and she said I accused him of trying to suppress black people's votes he very indignantly replied we don't suppress your votes because you're black we suppress your votes because we vote for Democrats here we are so this is actually I think I find it I think this is a a relatively recent shift in the nature of kind of malfeasance so the earlier model when you're in a when you're in the 19th century where information is scarce the way you deceive is by hiding information right so you don't know what's going on because I have taken this crucial fact and I haven't disclosed it I've I didn't know to rock whatever we're now in the opposite kind of world in a world where information is everywhere right when when you're in an information-rich environment the way you hide secrets is in plain sight mmm you just you know this is the in one case the thing about Enron was yes they had it all they told you that yes they were disclosing everything but their their you know their quarterly report was this big and it was in he was unbelievably dense language and you had to read the footnotes and you had to be you didn't know your accounting you couldn't be like an average Joe that's a very very modern way and that seems to me what's going on with this sort of gerrymandering in there just like you know we'll hide it in plain sight and you need to be diligent and do your homework but it's not like it's not like we're lying or we're saying X and it's actually why it's like no mm-hmm so I think I wonder about this though like one of the other things to avoid the t person and not to Clarence Thomas but one of the things I guess I think that's striking about that phenomenon was the extent to which this person is voluminously deceptive just a prolific liar but as perceived as scrupulously honest by a particular block of the American public yeah and it's not that I mean in some of things are not subject to political spin there's a video of him saying that he has no relationship whatsoever to Vladimir Putin there's an earlier video of him saying that Vladimir Putin is a friend and one of those things is not true yeah and so it seems that in addition to this there is actually a kind of a kind of partnering in this act of deception that people will believe what they want to believe that you know when Donald Trump is accused of being a liar people say that this is you know spin or he'd go to the Washington Post fact checker page you could go to a verdict on peut eight pages where there's an actual index of running index of the number of lies that he's told people will say they think he's honest yeah well he's maybe what they mean when they say he's honest as they believe that he's authentic hmm so that he may believe the thing that he's saying at that moment that he says it she's slightly different but I would say that he's very transactional in his relationship to the truth so he's very you know he's a real estate developer no I don't mean a not harshing on nosy developers but if you think of the nature of that world there are some businesses where you profit the route to business success is by having a set of stable relationships that continue over a long period of time where it is where you are incentivized to be a good faith actor to be open and honest and transparent and to be but in that world I had if someone in real estate explains to me in that world you it's deal related you do a deal and then you start over again and spend of mine was explaining he said if you look at the history of real estate deals in a particular market what you will see is that very often in deal a that happened in the 2001 this person totally screwed over this person and then go and go three years ahead and they don't do another deal together mm-hmm they're like they're fine with it it's like you're in that business because you have no memory and because you think that and you have to have no memory right because here's the thing the other crazy thing this is also part of the gem this is my real estate theory of Donald Trump what is the real estate world the real estate world is we know with absolute certainty that it looks like this right it's like gyrates wildly in according to some unknown cycle so it is absolutely the case that if you continue to build buildings over a long period of time there's gonna come a point when you're gonna build a building and democracy in the collapse anything to be left holding the bag so given that reality why do real estate developers keep building buildings because they have no memory it's very useful you can't you can't be someone who has a memory of the last downturn when you were left holding the bag and went bankrupt and persist in this business so what is Trump here's a guy who keeps he keeps going bankrupt and then he just goes back for more and people keep spending money or giving him money and why cuz they don't have memories either even the whole world in that world in that universe has no memory they're like we don't care about what happened three years ago so I think this when it comes to lies it's like to him if he said it two months ago it's no longer doesn't matter anymore that was two months ago I'm on a new deal now and we get to make it up all over again I honestly think that's the way he operates what you're saying is then 2016 people didn't so much vote as they purchased a waterfront property it's like the sight unseen they did and then they in 2017 they like flip that for 2017 Trump and then I mean I do think there is this and I think we perceive in that world where you are constantly reinventing yourself with each new deal mm-hmm he gets really good at communicating his kind of enthusiasm for the truth of the moment which is what he's and that's what people are responding to in the moment it seems this is what he believes right now I mean I think that's terrifying but I mean I have a kind of ambient terror that exists at this point that become almost like background noise but there's another another thing that I'm curious about in terms of this idea of truth and other things I was thinking about in the book which is that we are pretty bad at discerning when someone's trying to deceive us and you give some startling examples especially about the CIA and you know in in Cuba and in East Berlin and just kind of like time and time again were there things that is really well trained rigorously educated experienced people make these mistakes that seem to be inscrutable but in other circumstances I wonder like specifically with Madoff and with a situation in Penn State with Jerry Sandusky if what role self-interest plays in it or the old adage it's hard to get someone to learn something hard to get someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on them not understanding it yeah and so some of these people are not operating in good faith I mean is that part of this how does that fit into this yes part of this story so I think you know if you think about some of these classic cases that I talked about in the book and you mentioned the Penn State one mm-hm and I also talked about the Michigan State one but I think they're very very different cases but there are versions of the same thing a pedofile is operating in an institution for a long period of time and it takes the system years and years and years and years to catch up with the pedophile and the question is why I think that there are kind of obviously a custom a constellation of reasons why a pedophile would persist for a long time in the case of Penn State I am I am inclined when it comes to the leadership I am inclined to be generous in my interpretation of their motives because I honestly don't believe that is in anyone's interest or at least in that case I find it very very hard to believe that they would have an interest in caring in covering up sin duskies crimes the issue there was the person who was making the accusation against Sandusky was not actually making a clear accusation against Sandusky he was saying something that was really really complicated and hard to understand and vague why because pedophilia is something that is in some cases really hard to understand and explain and difficult to so I think those there was something very human in the failure of Penn State to kind of properly respond to Sandusky's the allegations against Sandusky I'm not so sure about it Michigan State Michigan say it's very different Michigan State is you have countless people coming forward particularly the girls he's abusing coming forward and telling their parents and telling people's I think there's 14 documented instances of people coming forward with credible accusations against NASA over the course of how many years Nasr continues to practice in Sandusky remember there's none of that he's investigated once and cleared and then there's this other really really vague thing that mike mccurry comes forth with so they're really sort of separate but I think it's important I do think it's important to have for us to have in our kind of arsenal of explanations for an experiment be hey view one that is not punitive and judgmental like you can't every time something goes wrong in society is it is it is entirely unfair to say that when something goes wrong in society it's because somebody was negligent or self-interested or or criminal in their response I don't think that in general I just think that about the things that happened to me we are no but I think but I do think you know that is part of it it's very hard for us to look at a case where a pedophile has been operating for many many years and not wanna you know once we have convicted the pedophile and not want to keep going and you know what you know pull down the hole so you know the whole structure you know what's the word it's the it's the Samson effect yes I agree but I also think that there's more like we have a set of circumstances where people fairly predictably default to disbelief as opposed to defaulting the truth where we find someone typically a person who is a victim of a very powerful person and we don't believe them especially around things like sexual assault especially around things like child molestation and pedophilia we have kind of layers of disbelief that has been associated with you name them Bill Cosby or certainly for very many years Harvey Weinstein or the the more prolific [Music] wrongdoers we have a default I think it's safe to say in society where someone that says this happened to me and me going yeah what's your angle you know what are you trying to sell me yeah well the so this is actually consistent with with default to true theory which is that so what the vine would say is this that what we're doing when we default the truth is we're picking the most statistically likely interpretation of the behavior so you are inclined towards the status quo if the status quo is the one that seems most plausible so think about it you have the bill cosby's news bill cosby for example it's a classic case of this mm-hmm so you have people coming forward over the course of many years with allegations against Bill Cosby so and society all of us in some ways if we hear about those allegations and some cases we didn't hear about them is that but if we did we were we have two alternatives one is that this guy who's like America's dad who seems like the very picture of you know of virtue and is accused of something that's so weird of drugging young women I mean and and we sort of say well what is the likeliest interpretation of this well the likeliest interpretation of this is that these are some kind of we this is some kind of you know weird weird made up or exaggerated or something and the lend that Bill Cosby is who we think he is he's spent 20 years in the public eye establishing his reputation as this kind of father figure so what liván would say is it takes a long time for those allegations to rise to the level that pushes us out of our support for the kind of statistical status quo so it makes sense so you're right you have to when you're evaluating in many of these cases you are evaluating two allegations one is in support of the statistical status quo and one is at the very beginning seems like a real stretch and your inclination is always going to be to support the one that is statistically most likely until the others rise to the level of like with Weinstein I think I would be remiss in like all of my my kind of mentors which would cussed me out if I didn't point out that the idea of the statistical status quo being that the men were falsely accused is kind of the exact point that think that people have been raising about this that yeah if someone's going to accuse you of rape they're not likely to be lying about it well no more likely to be lying about it then if they accuse you of mugging them or assaulting them or whatever any things that we kind of to give afford more credibility to those kinds of accusers no I so I think your absolute right I would agree with you that this the concept of the statistical status quo is itself something that we construct is not rationally constructed it's constructed out of our biases and our prejudices in our previous so it's like I mean I so we are you get the kind of default to truth that your society creates so we had for many years a society which was inclined to believe men over women in this instance so that when we were confronted with these kinds of cases that's where we went right we were drawing on years of experience with how we handle these cases in the past it took you look at the kind of Cosby's a good example those allegations about Cosby are out there for I don't know how many years a lot of years and in that period there is its base if I'll be talking about 15 years where we kind of are are slowly and many people people that Gloria Allred people like all people are very slowly and carefully trying to turn our our whatever kind of engine we have of this of how we construct our sense of what the statistical status quo is they're trying to alter it and say actually these things are more credible actually there's more cases than you think of they're trying to get it up to that level where we readjust our sets of what is new what is a believable accusation that's not something that can be done overnight the me to movement is the beneficiary of that long process of reconfiguration I suspected in when it comes to child molestation it's gonna take a little longer mm-hmm but they're also so I think but yes so I would agree this is a subjective process necessarily a subjective process and you know there are tons of cases where we add race into the equation and there you see that even more startling right but it's still you know you still have to come to terms with the fact that people have constructed this subjective statistical status quo right you can't that's that's the way human psychology works and that's what I'm trying to describe in this book is what is the mechanism for disbelief of these kinds of allegations that's that's what about one divine would say is that's what's going on so I think it's interesting because in the kind of through line of your work there's always this kind of relationship of you know social psychology and in a broader sense social science and its applicability to journalism which is something I've always been fascinated by myself interest in these questions of history and you know I think I try to have my work somewhere at the intersection of my understanding the world as a historian understanding the world as a journalist I think are they're ever points when you're doing your work and you know this is one of the things I think that people who kind of deal with studies and you know controlled experiments and these kinds of things and come back and it's just too muddled for you actually to say like I can't see where this is going like one of the frustrations of approaching the work the kind of work in the kind of way that you do yeah well there is the frustration in not frustration but is a fact of social science then unlike history like history although in a different way that the conclusions of social science are in constant evolution mmm-hmm so you you may favor one particular approach one day and then you wake up and the world is altered it's so in my even in my own work you know in tipping point I had a kind of approach to understanding the drop in crime in New York and I was quite enamored at the time as were many people with with the broken windows idea right in subsequent books I have abandoned that entirely and now my in this current book for example a lot of my focus is on the consequences of that kind of you know and how the and how the dangers of that kind of approach to fighting crime far away the benefits that is a function both of my own evolution you know to saying this issue but more broadly of Social Sciences evolution in 1999 we honestly didn't know why the crime why crime had dropped in New York we had no we had really really big we still don't really know but now we're kind of getting we're probably a lot smarter about it but you so if you were someone writing about crime in New York as I have in almost every one of my books over the period 1999 to 2019 you're gonna show you're gonna have to be contradicting yourself right you because the science has moved so kind of dramatically and the kinds of things that we think about like I always remember in the in the there's a Tracy Chapman song I which is the one about um through the wall go through the wall look at on the other phone she died she has a song which is written in the 1990s I believe of the early arts which is all about hearing a couple ok remember going it's gonna be a woman being abused through the wall right huh and she has a line about how it's pointless to call the cops because they'll come really late if they come at all and you realize oh that song would never be written today that song is about the 1990s the paradigm of policing in the 1990s was the cops were absent right the paradigm of policing in that neighborhood in 2019 is the cops are omnipresent right right and it reminds you the world changed dramatically and we weren't thinking about back then we were thinking about what are the consequences of not having cops around now we think about oh my god what are the consequences of having cops everywhere right it's a whole different set of like and that I've that song is so interesting cuz you if you hear it every now and again is if you lose the rate you'll hear it you're like you're like it's totally puzzling there is not a single black artist who would write a song called behind a wall today yeah I mean it's very interesting too because of you the kind of swishing genres like hip-hop is mostly talking about the omnipresence of police and what happens in the nature of policing and then if you kind of think about the broken windows approach to it I talked to George Kelling not long before he passed away actually and he had a really interesting kind of reflection on the way broken windows had been understood in saying that he was like people underestimated the extent to which he was talking about literal broken windows he said I wanted people to approach code enforcement in communities and saying like oh there's a broken window here we're gonna write you a ticket unless you put a new window in this in this frame or there's trash in this community we're gonna write you a ticket and you know the extent to which people wanted to change the environment and he lamented I think that people took the policing part of it and we said you needed to have police visible and as a presence and so on and that was the part that everyone ran with and then the other part of it just kind of fade yeah it wasn't a metaphor for him yeah it wasn't a metaphor yeah yeah he was super because he's the guy who did one of the studies I talk about in my book the he did the original Ken's the famous verse Kansas City study which influenced a generation of this is a study where she explained that done in this he was called the Kansas City Patrol study it was done in the 70s in Kansas City and by Kelly and it was they decided to see what would happen if they doubled I think the size of a police patrol in a crime-ridden neighborhood and I did a controlled experiment and what they discovered was it made no difference if you double the number of cops and this took the wind out of the sale of American policing for 25 years it's why Tracy Chapman writes the Sun behind the wall the cops had given up they're like well what's the point like we can't prevent crime you know there's nothing we can do and neighbors famous I don't know if I remember I quoted but this is incredible in retrospect interview given by the and with the head of the NYPD in the early 90s it was a guy named Lee and they forgot his last name I think we'll remember who was Lee Brown and Lee Brown actually be Brown is a serious intellectual he went on he had a PhD he went on to become I think mayor of San Diego it something like that or they had a real public service career he gives a job an interview to the Harvard Business Review in like 1993 which is extraordinary read what he basically says don't you know crime is out of control in New York don't look at me I'm just the head of the NYPD we can't do anything about it go and talk to your you know social service people or your principals who are letting kids out on the street I mean it was literally it was like he he was Pontius Pilate washing his hands right and saying I had nothing to do with it I'm just running the NYPD like the idea just here I'm just here right I mean he wasn't being cynical he was like he literally didn't think that cops could make a difference well I think you know it fast forward of course to today that's the exact opposite they have this notion that they can do everything in terms of bringing crime under control yeah I mean I think segways into the the other part of the book which is framed bracketed really by understanding the interaction between police officer brian encinia and a black motorist black female motorist by the name of Sandra bland and what happens in 2015 when encinia pulls her over and as a consequence of their interaction she winds up arrested and is found dead in her cell three days later and I think it's like kind of what what does what role does our inability to talk with strangers or the kind of inscrutability of interacting with other human beings play in that interaction because she's so her the fact that she was pulled over as she's pulled over for the cop drives up behind her and she moves over to get out of the way and doesn't use her turning signal and that's the reason so it's a completely trumped-up reason for pulling her over and she she's pulled over because not because she is behaving suspiciously suspiciously in a high crime area she's in a sleepy Texas town it's two o'clock in the afternoon she's pulled over because she's got out-of-state plates she's a black woman young black woman and she's driving a Hyundai that's the reason and that is so we have a situation where the this the in all likelihood this is going to be a false positive right she you know he's pulling her over because he thinks that maybe there's some chance that she has she's guilty of some she's harboring a gun or drugs or something and if you look at Brian and Sania's history he's the cop in this case his entire career as a police officer was about pulling people over for no particular reason in the hopes that he would find something serious and he never does I mean he literally has he has hundreds of police stops in his nine months as a cop and he basically finds something serious I think two or three times I mean it's an incredible record of futility so he's running around especially a record of diligence Dylan but I mean like I'm going to keep at this it doesn't appear to be working but I'm gonna keep but he's doing what he's this is modern policing but this is the theory of he is doing exactly what he is trained to do he was instructed to go out into you know South East Texas and stop everyone who even remotely raised a red flag and just find out whether they're up to no good and so that puts enormous pressure on his abilities to read a stranger right because he's he stopping here because he has already he's already got he's already formulated a delusional fantasy that she might be dangerous mm-hmm and so he goes up to the window and she's not even remotely dangerous she just come from a job interview a pervy tech at Fairview University he but he approaches her in this with this notion that oh my god what if she's up to no good loser and but it quickly becomes terrified of her as he as he confesses later and interprets everything that she does which is evidence of her own distress of being pulled over he interprets as being dangerous as evidence of her potential you know maliciousness or pathology or and my point is you can't making sense of a stranger is so hard that you cannot have a policing strategy that depends for its successful execution on requiring police officers to read a stranger in 30 seconds that's just madness that is an open invitation to having all kinds of social pathology between police officers and the people they stop who by the way happened overwhelming them to be people of color right this is for us to be doing this as a as an order of business in policing in 2019 is it's just bananas one of the things I've noticed I mean I've tried to be fair in this and you know I worked with frontline on documentary about policing in Newark was just coincidentally was also the other place that Kelling looked at and this is research on crime but one of the things I found there and in other things that I've written about and I think it relates to this question is not only the inscrutability of other people's motives but particularly in policing a really prominent sense of confidence in their ability to read people yeah even if it's misplaced in one instance it was a cop who frisked a 10 or 11 year old kid suspecting him of having drugs and I was there I'm serving this and you know the kid had nothing on him and he said he must have thrown it in the bushes before I got there but it was never any calculation that maybe this person was innocent in that your instincts were wrong so I thought that like the encinia situation combined a lot of those worst instincts which is not only the in school but but a culture which encourages people to pride themselves or to have a great deal of faith in their cop instinct yeah so there's a huge literature in psychology on surveys of law enforcement people around the world asking them about their how they know whether someone is being deceitful hiding something guilty and cops have all the surveys say the same thing which is the police officers heavy exceedingly clear idea about what they believe are signs of guilt and deception and that those ideas are completely without foundation they're like ludicrous a number of cops who for example believe that when someone averts their eyes and smiles and moves their hands like this but that's a reliable indicator of guilt is unbelievable off the charts in fact there is nothing in fact the most fun it's in a footnote in this book there's a guy who criminologist who did this exhaustive study of cops television show cops because cops is one of the great natural experiments in policing it's 25 years of data on the way in which the cops will show the show yeah think about it every show involves cop talking to someone who is typically a young man who is either white black or Hispanic and over the course of the show we learn whether that young man is innocent or guilty so what we have is an incredible database of how black and white and Hispanic young men behave right in the presence of either guilt or innocence and what you discover is that the cop's intuitions about what guilt looks like are confirmed in white people but contradicted in black people so cops think that if you go like this look away and you kind of shuffle your feet and move your hands you're guilty white people young white guys when they do that they're guilty young black men when they do that they're innocent and right there you wouldn't problem right that they had this idea which works on their own kind cuz men in these cops are themselves white it doesn't work on that and Hispanic to their own separately then he runs in this study which is this extraordinary said he runs to like 20 different behavioral cues and shows that there are such vast differences not just across races but within races that any idea that the cop has is only gonna cause them to make radical mistakes why this study of cops hasn't like received more attention I don't know I mean the idea of taking of using cops as a kind of social science database is so fantastic it's like a job for like a body language translator I don't know the creators of cops know that they've spawned a whole literature 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 my default is raised eyebrow yeah and the question is do you generally tress strangers or 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 smoked 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 I'm 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 tough or whatever you know everything to be deviant you gotta go like way up but 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 the 1970s and 80s but god these kids are wholesome they would have had a know these guys mine would have had 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 II I dia that you would take drugs or something it was completely unknown it was literally about smoking cigarettes and the school I think the 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 yeah pretty magical so dude I can tell you the most deviant thing I did so I was anxious Oh Lord here we go 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 it 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 a willing 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 deviance a 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 way new behavior you didn't even call me and they were like so just did 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 and yes in a nomenclature this should be I will confess snow it's very different meaning than it does in Queens in 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 myself oh I can't believe you what is your opinion of the game what is your opinion of the college entrance lies the college or the oh you mean the scandal be Lori Loughlin pretty small yeah my first the first and obvious reaction to it all is this guy singer who's like cheating on the thing you know do I look he's the ringleader he's charging fifteen grand if you're gonna check me 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 charged 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 50 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 on 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 80% 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 hmm because and it was explaining this really much like an approval which is that what is an alcoholic an alcohol an alcoholic is someone whose actions and presentation are discrepant mm-hmm right so as a child you are constantly disentangling the way that your parent looks and 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 anyway 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 liar is Jeffrey Epstein well again I get the sense from reading about Jeffrey Epstein didn't 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 the Weinsteins 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 y'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 Weinstein wasn't lying about this it was like his brother knew about it is I don't 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 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 yeah 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 intervene well the you know that they the famous study on this is what was called the bystander effect study which argued that remember in the case the fame has been written about 17 different times 17 different ways with the kitty Genovese CKC brains and the question is why didn't people call the cops and they're like I said there are ten 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 talked 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 and certainly 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 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 and I think I could maybe be getting a date wrong but Cosby 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 is my idol I mean this is at a time when those occations are already out there right and it takes Hannibal Buress 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 up this is not something that's simple and I think it ought to 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 our functions of social structures and attitudes that have been built over a long period of time and it takes a while to turn the ship around mm-hmm so I have a statement which you all not going to like but I'm fortunately it's very true books are available for sale but mountain will not be signing books are already find dollar sign 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 died 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 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 like these 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 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 there are 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 he's a 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 quantity to her she has taken her daughter to be treated by him on many occasions anyone who's in the gymnastics world of of around Penn State knew Larry Nassif but they didn't really know him and Michigan State yeah Michigan State man they didn't really know him and that you know partly because we have powerful mechanisms of denial probably because you know if you are a pedophile you spent a lot of time trying to obscure your behavior from people but partly because what we're talking about like people have many many different dimensions and it takes it took a very long time for some of those parents to come around to the idea that this man was took actually finding 37,000 images on his hard drive for many of them to come around to the notion that he might be so that's what 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: 92nd Street Y

Views: 34,846

Rating: 4.756691 out of 5

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

Id: IZiECGrUxug

Length: 71min 9sec (4269 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019