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The Malcolm Gladwell Compilation
- Bryan Carmichael
- Oct 14, 2020
- 19 min read
All articles with mentions to Malcolm Gladwell’s writing
Notes:
All starred concepts (*) originated from Malcolm Gladwell
The concept and naming of the Friends Fallacy is the belonging of Malcolm Gladwell and the Friends producers.
Disclaimer:
These articles are only partially related to Malcolm Gladwell’s writing - most of the explanations, examples and analysis are original
Processing of Information
Introduction
The majority of what we learn is through information spread by others to us, but is the majority of what we hear true? How can we differentiate the facts and the fiction? Fake news has become such a big problem in recent years that it has come to the point where some people just don’t believe anything they hear.
This, especially in times of the CoViD-19 pandemic, is a problem, which gives us the question: How can we trust what we see and hear? The answer is filtration of data in three aspects. Likeliness of truth, defaulting to truth and basic human perspective.
Likeliness of Truth^
Firstly, in order to filter out the good info from the bad info, we need to assess the likeliness of a certain piece of information to be true purely from the content and the way it was said. Faulty content is more or less straightforward and I’ll explain it further in the next section, basically there can only be such a believable case. Most things said, though they don’t seem like it, are standard black or white pieces of information. The part that confuses people into believing the lies are the outstanding ways in which they are told.
This is exactly what scammers specialise in. James Veitch, a meddlesome comedian who specializes in repelling scammers by outscamming them, explains that scammers purposely write their scam calls and emails so ridiculously but then make them sound reasonable. This way, the only people who would actually respond are the most gullible people, who are the easiest people to scam.
Therefore, even though the likeliness of the content to be true in such situations would be very low, there are still few that would get tricked by the presentation of the information and would end up believing it anyway.
Diving further into the presentation of information, we will now look into the case study of Ana Montes, displayed beautifully in Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers.*
Ana Montes was a DIA agent that was convicted of being a Cuban spy. However, she was actually only convicted five years after the suspicion first came about. Why is this? Because not only was she able to fool all her interrogators into thinking she was innocent, but she also had the likeliness of truth on her side.
She had a brother and a sister who were both in the FBI and worked on exposing Cuban spies and threats, she had a boyfriend who worked at the Pentagon whose job was Latin American Intelligence, his job was to go up against spies like her.
With all her family connections around her, there was just no way that anyone would suspect her of being the spy. It was a perfect cover, and the best part was that nobody, not the brother, sister, or boyfriend, saw it coming. In fact, when she was arrested, people were crying out in disbelief.
With this all in her pocket, all she had to do was sit and smile through the interrogations and she’d be all good. It is unknown where her mistake occurred that ultimately had her arrested five years later, but even with that, she evaded the U.S. Government and successfully spilled classified secrets to the Cubans, all because of the natural bias of likeliness of truth.
Defaulting to Truth
Secondly, we need to process our data while trying our best not to default to truth. Defaulting to truth isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that it can be misleading sometimes.
So what is defaulting to truth?
It’s similar to likeliness of truth except that this form of misconception is from the content/evidence, whereas the misconception in likeliness of truth is from the presentation of information.
Earlier, I said that most pieces of information are more or less straightforward, and while this is true, there are some cases of grey, where the information presented by one may not be what it seems, and in reality another set of information presented by various others may override your existing information set.
Facts are words, but are words facts? Is it really the case that the more content you have about a topic, the more likely it is to be true? Simply, no. Because the 759 page document you have about flying pigs may just be 759 pages of lies, whereas a 6 line article about why pigs don’t fly may be perfectly factual, thus winning the debate with a smaller word count.
This is the story of Bernard Madoff.* (While I did learn about him from Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers, the perspective of the story I will use isn’t exactly the same as Gladwell’s.)
Bernard Madoff was an investor in New York with flowing white hair who had a fund that certain companies were investing in. His profits were skyrocketing, but not in a good way, and nobody could figure out why.
When he was arrested for operating the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, the portfolio manager of one of the hedge funds that invested in Madoff’s company was interviewed about his perspective on Madoff.
The manager explained that he had doubts, but he didn’t want to call Madoff out on it, on the account that he may have been wrong. Gladwell explains that this manager had doubts, but not enough doubts, which caused him to default to truth. If we go deeper than Gladwell’s explanation, we can discover why he defaulted to truth specifically.
It all comes down to basic evidence and material. Everything mentioned so far was that his profits are sketchy but big, he’s a well trusted, certified U.S. investor, and that he had flowing white hair. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to have a big enough doubt to call him out on it. Comparing it to Poker, Madoff bid a big bluff, but the manager didn’t have a strong enough hand to call him out on it.
However, the evidence displayed turned out to be big and weak, and the opposing evidence that called him a fraud was much more reliable, despite it being substantially smaller in quantity.
The person that called him out in the end was named Harry Markopolos and he had sent in a case proving Madoff’s guilt years before Madoff was caught, but it was never reviewed because the SEC didn’t think it was substantial enough to make a difference.
“I gift-wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them, and somehow they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities.”
Gladwell quoted Markopolos.
Looks can be deceiving, and sometimes the smaller set of information turns out to be the stronger set.
Basic Human Perspective
Finally, the easiest one to understand and relate to, basic human perspective. This area is self explanatory. This is the part of our processing that is unique and purely unmeasurable. It is our interpretation of the information we have.
A classic example is the experiment where you put a person on either end of a certain number and have them tell you what the number is. One end will identify it as a ‘6’, and the other end will identify it as a ‘9’. It’s about the perspective that you view certain pieces of information.
A good case study about this would be the Chamberlain-Hitler incident.*
It’s 1938, and the world is on the brink of war. The leader of the Allied powers, the UK, had just changed its leader, to Neville Chamberlain. He hoped that he could bring the war to its end before it had even started, and he’d be seen as a hero if he succeeded.
With this in mind, he organized many meet & greet sessions with the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler. They met multiple times and negotiated peace and freedom to all people around the world.
While Chamberlain thought that his dreams were coming true, Hitler also thought that his dreams were coming true, his enemy wanted to sue for peace before he had even started!
Winston Churchill even described Chamberlain’s visits to Hitler as “the stupidest thing that has ever been done”. However, Churchill’s judgement against Chamberlain’s isn’t exactly fair.
Churchill got the advantage that he was looking upon Chamberlain’s actions with Hitler and learning from it, meanwhile Chamberlain had to experience it all on his own, and Churchill could only call Chamberlain’s tactics stupid because he’d already seen it fail, in the moment perhaps his verdict might have been different.
Going back to Chamberlain, he was becoming friendlier with Hitler by the second, he was falling under Hitler’s spell. Hitler managed to convince him that things would turn out fine and that no war would happen, which of course is not what happened.
Both Chamberlain’s judgement of Hitler and Churchill’s judgement of Chamberlain fall under this category of perspective and human instinct. We see one side of the picture and that side is what shapes our views. However, by opening up more sides we can get a better sense of the whole situation.
This is exactly how court cases go, you get both sides of the story, and then you make a verdict based on which case is more likely by content, and more likely by presentation (which ties it back to everything above).
Conclusion
Based on everything above, how do we filter real information from fake information? Three key aspects: Content, presentation and interpretation. If a piece of information passes all three filters, then it is most probably true.
Filtering information and trusting certain data is especially important right now with the CoViD-19 virus and it is crucial that we listen to the right instructions and practice the right protocols. Staying safe and containing the virus is the #1 priority, you decide whether to trust that or not.
^ For those who have read the book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know, Likeliness of Truth is not an area of focus, I have split his section on ‘Defaulting to Truth’ and added deeper analysis to both subsections to show that content and presentation are two independent topics.
Transparency & The Friends Fallacy
Introduction
All emotions have expressions, but these expressions aren’t always used to show off the emotion. Often, people hide their emotions and say/act things they don’t mean. Other times, people may have expressions or looks that may seem to represent one thing but in actuality mean something completely different. This is the confusion of transparency. The concept where sometimes things aren’t what they seem on the first level.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers, which I’ve also previously used in earlier articles, constructs a good case on what it is and why it is misleading. I will now attempt to redesign said case and re-explain it to make it arguably clearer than it already is.
What is the Friends Fallacy?
If any of you have seen Friends, you’d be indirectly aware of the Friends Fallacy. Have you noticed that a lot of the time when the characters are talking to each other, they’re facial expressions give away the way that they’re feeling? Like blatantly. If someone is unhappy, they display an exaggerated unhappy face, there is no possible way to mistaken that character’s emotions.
The example used in Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers is the scene where Ross finds out about Monica (his sister) and Chandler (his best friend)’s secret relationship. He storms into the apartment with an angry look on his face. He is end-of-the-spectrum angry.
“My best friend, and my sister! I cannot believe this.”
he rants.
Monica attempts to calm Ross down as Chandler cowers behind her. When he understands that the two really love each other, his emotions change completely and smiles as he exclaims,
“My best friend, and my sister! I’m so happy!”
So why is this a fallacy?
Well, suppose you’re walking down the street and you come across a woman who has been sulking behind the scenes because she just got dumped by her boyfriend. When in public, people often hide their negative emotions because of embarrassment, fear and just common etiquette. Nobody wants to be around a grump that they don’t know. Back to the woman, if she were to follow the Friends Fallacy, she’d most probably be walking around weeping, or muttering to herself, or acting dejected. However, how many people have you seen in real life acting like that? Not many. It’s not that nobody on the street has been rejected, but simply that they’re hiding their true emotions in order to give themselves a better public image, which is perfectly understandable.
This, in turn, rejects what the Friends logic represents and contradicts everything that is portrayed in the TV show. Imagine if Ross had hidden his anger from Monica and Chandler, they might have kept on living not knowing that he secretly despised them together, which is a bad relationship to have with a sibling.
That’s one reason why people are open with those they’re close with so that there is no miscommunication or misunderstanding to them as to what you’re feeling. Some friendships are so close that they even start to think alike and make alike decisions resulting in a mental connection (read my previous article, Minor Telepathy, to find out more).
Another reason as to why Friends is a fallacy is the lack of universal signalling of a certain emotion. Studies have shown that in different cultures, their versions of happy, sad and other emotions are different from one another.
For example (as taken from Talking to Strangers), 113 Spanish school kids were surveyed and asked to answer what emotion they thought a certain face was showing. Among the kids, there was no difficulty among the group identifying the ‘Happy’ emotion, 100% voted for the smiling face. The majority for ‘Sadness’ and the pouting face was 98%, ‘Fear’ and the gasping face was 93%, ‘Anger’ with the scowling face was 91%, and ‘Disgust’ and the nose scrunching was 83%. By and large, they did well. When the same test was given to kids from the Trobriand Islands, their results were surprisingly different.
The Trobrianders, unlike the Spaniards and most of 1st world society, had trouble matching the correct face to the correct emotion, with the percentage of matching the smiling face and the happiness emotion being 58%. Pouting and 'Sadness' was 46%, 'Fear' and gasping was 31%, 'Anger' and the scowling face was a minuscule 7%, and a scrunched face with 'Disgust' was 25%. Can you believe that only 7% of the Trobrianders thought that the scowling face meant anger? The majority thought that the gasping face meant anger and another 20% thought that it was the smiling face. How ridiculous to us is that?
This is due to the fact that these two cultures were brought up differently and thus uses different facial expressions to determine different emotions. Therefore no facial expression can convey an emotion to all the different cultural groups
How do we best describe transparency?
Putting the Friends Fallacy aside for a second, we now move on to the concept of transparency. Transparency is essentially when you have someone who looks a certain way but in reality, is a completely different person to what you thought.
Transparency occurs all around us and we hardly ever realise it. However, we often find when reflecting on an event that went wrong or something that didn’t go as planned, we find that we make mistakes at the moment due to transparency which we don’t see at the time.
This is common in sports games when we misjudge an opposing player in some way. For example, in the sport of rugby, wingers are usually the fastest players on the field, which as a result requires a thin and agile body structure. The bigger players (135 kg or so) usually play as front-rowers or loose forwards. However, there is a Fijian winger named Nemani Nadolo who weighs 137 kg (he’s huge!), and yet he’s still able to run like every other winger despite his size. Most people playing against him would attempt to run down his wing thinking he wouldn’t be able to catch them, but he not only is able to cover his wing, he is also able to hammer anybody who dares to run at him using his huge body size!
Bringing the topic back indoors, we can also apply transparency to scenarios where people are dishonest. Everybody is taught about the signs to detect a liar: twirling hair, stutter in the voice, blushing; the whole deal. However, these signs aren’t the most reliable ways to spot the lie either. My first article, Can we trust what we see and hear?, explains in detail the best ways to filter and process information and it’s largely based on content and the layout of said content. Facial expressions and vocal stutters are unreliable because of the simple but deadly trap of transparency.
Malcolm Gladwell, in Talking to Strangers, refers to a series of experiments to determine whether someone is truthing or lying based on facial expressions. In particular, the second subject he introduces is especially interesting.
Referred to as Nervous Nelly, when the interviewer asks her a series of questions, she twirls her hair, she randomly pauses when she speaks, she gets repetitive, she fidgets around. Everything about her according to her physical appearance screams, “She’s lying, just catch her already!” Even Gladwell was convinced she was lying… but she wasn’t. Everything that Nelly said to the interviewer was the unchanged truth. The entire audience of people watching her from the control room was baffled. She looked so afraid of every question and was acting as shady as you can get, yet she still told the truth.
Before anybody comes at me and says it might have been a one-off thing, it’s really not. This mistake is made all over society. In the workplace, in the courtroom, in the hospital, even in restaurants! The instant that somebody says, “I misjudged you”, they’ve realised that they’ve fallen for transparency and were mistaken about their thoughts of the person in question.
Why does transparency occur?
So why is transparency so important and why does it occur so often? This, unfortunately, isn’t something that is explained in Talking to Strangers, which is slightly sad because I believe that it is the most important part of the concept.
Our brains like to connect concepts. They will draw connections between anything and everything. If something may be related to another thing, our brains will try to relate the two things as well as they can. Much like Google Translate. We automatically assume that somebody is a certain way from the way that they act, which is completely normal I may add. It’s just misleading. However, this isn’t easy to fix, as it goes all the way back to the root psychology of our cognitive processing. In other words, transparency is cognitive.
Taking the example of twirling hair from earlier, kids originally twirled their hair as a method of calming anxiety, so naturally, as an adult, since people in interrogations often get anxious, they would twirl their hair as an instinct from their childhood. People who are liars are typically more anxious when being interrogated and thus tend to twirl their hair more often, leading to the conclusion in our brains that all people that twirl their hair are liars.
This of course isn’t true and is exactly why we can’t trust certain cognitive instincts such as body movements and fidgets. People who are guilty and innocent are both subject to fidgeting during interrogations which invalidates the method of detecting the liar.
This is the case for most other typical ‘lying’ gestures we see often. We naturally think that someone who is fidgeting is hiding something since we know it to be a sign of stress-relieving. However, as the sign has been connected and reconnected with other events and emotions, it has morphed into something far from its original meaning (much like Chinese Whispers), which confuses our brains and leads them to believe that the sign symbolises the morphed meaning rather than the true meaning.
What are the consequences of transparency?
Unfortunately, in extreme cases, transparency can cause negative life-altering decisions to certain people caught up in the wrong mess. This is the story of the Amanda Knox case.
Meredith Kercher was murdered in her home on 1 November, 2007. Her killer’s name was Rudy Guede and from an evidentiary standpoint, he’s most certainly the killer. He was in her house on the night of her murder, his DNA was found everywhere and he had a criminal record. You’d think he’d be the prime suspect considering he admitted to all of that and gave suspicious reasons as to why he was there in the first place. If you thought that, you were one step ahead of the police. Instead of focusing on investigating him and proving his guilt (which really isn’t hard seeing as he confessed to all of it already), they decided to interrogate Kercher’s roommate, Amanda Knox.
Amanda Knox was a beautiful young woman with high cheekbones and striking blue eyes by Gladwell’s description. She had a list of all her previous sexual partners and was nicknamed ‘Foxy Knoxy’. Gladwell described her as the femme fatale. She was even spotted the day after the murder at a lingerie shop purchasing new red underwear.
As it turned out, however, all those descriptions were not what they seemed. She wasn’t named ‘Foxy Knoxy’ due to her sexual appetite, it was given to her as a child from the way she played soccer, her sex partner list was only written because she was concerned that she was HIV positive and wrote down her sexual encounters to figure out who she may have gotten it from, and finally, she was purchasing new underwear because she wasn’t allowed into her home due to police restrictions meaning she had no clean clothes. She wasn’t the femme fatale, she was normal, doing normal people things in a normal sort of way.
“I was the quirky kid who hung out with the sulky manga-readers, the ostracized gay kids, and the theatre geeks,”
Gladwell quotes Knox from her 2011 memoir, Waiting to be Heard
Unfortunately for Knox, she served four years in an Italian prison before being acquitted. That’s the horrifying and sad truth about the consequences of being fooled by transparency.
How does transparency connect with the Friends Fallacy?
So how do these two concepts (one horrible and one entertaining) relate in detail? If we think of transparency as a spectrum, from least transparent to most transparent, Friends resides at the end of the spectrum at ‘most transparent’. As the name implies, there is no confusion in terms of emotion, everything is 100% clear (unless you’re living in the Trobriand Islands I guess). The fallacy part is on the other end of the spectrum (as it is the opposite of Friends) at ‘least transparent’. Nothing is as it seems and we’re always second-guessing.
Factually speaking, the Friends Fallacy is a form of transparency, the most extreme kind specifically. Every case of transparency lies somewhere on the spectrum of transparency, I’d personally classify Amanda Knox as a more extreme case and Nervous Nelly as a less extreme case, you get the picture. However subtly, wherever on the spectrum, transparency plays a crucial role and must be carefully accounted for when making decisions.
Conclusion
Congratulations on making it to the end of this article, I salute you. I hope that you have found the complex topic of transparency as interesting as I did writing this. Key points to take away: Looks aren’t what they seem, truth and meaning can be twisted so that is no longer truth nor meaning, and make sure to carefully account for all of transparency’s tricks when making decisions.
If you understand this topic, it is actually a very useful skill to have in mind when dealing with people you may be unsure about. Remembering what you have learned in this article will help you get around people you don’t know and also help you understand people you don’t know better.
A parting word from Malcolm Gladwell:
“Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
Coupling
Introduction
Have you ever wondered why someone did something a certain way? Have you noticed that sometimes people do things a certain way even when there could be a potentially easier way to do it? This is all due to the interesting concept of coupling and the links between methods and actions.
Coupling has many influences on life, it comes into play when planning for something, making a decision, executing an action, processing information, etc. That's why it is so important to understand the ideas and concepts behind this strange topic.
How does coupling work?
Coupling is the making of decisions under the influence of something. Take away that something, and the decision is no longer made, even if there are other things that could influence that decision the same way. In a way, it's what determines the predictability of a person. By grouping certain motives and events together, it makes it easier for our brains to comprehend and guess, hence the predictability of it.
The most popular example of coupling is suicide. This was explained in Malcolm Gladwell's Talking to Strangers. He states that if someone were to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, and we decide to close the bridge in order to prevent this, following the rule of displacement (the opposite of coupling), this person would just walk to the next nearest bridge and jump off it. However, what we find interestingly, is that if we block the bridge, most potential suicide victims simply walk off and get on with their lives. I know right, what? Their logic is that suicide is only worth it if they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, nowhere else will do.
An experiment was held Richard Seiden, who followed up on 515 different people attempting and failing to commit suicide between 1937 and 1971. He found that just 37 of those people had displacement as their motive and committed suicide some other way. The rest of them just stopped trying. The question now is: why is this the case?
Why does coupling happen?
Our brains find understanding concepts easier when they can draw connections between them and other things that it's familiar with. I myself associate beds to be white, simply because my bedsheets and pillowcases are white, against a beige wall. Not all beds are white, but when I think of them my mind brings up the colour white. Similarly with the example above, for those people, suicide means jumping off a bridge, without which they are unfamiliar with the concepts. That is why many people don't commit suicide more than one way.
Before the First World War, in industrial London, a lot of suicides were committed via Carbon Monoxide poisoning, which was easily accessible through town gas which powered household kitchen equipment. After the war, London converted from town gas to natural gas, the number of suicides decreased as their method of suicide, town gas and Carbon Monoxide, has been eliminated.
Another type of coupling which you may be more familiar with is stereotyping. Stereotypes are a very detrimental aspect of coupling which almost everybody is guilty of in some way or another. The brain's judgemental idea of someone, something or some place before actually experiencing it firsthand.
One huge example of this is the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement. BLM has been going on due to the fact that Native Americans have been oppressed for centuries, and to this day still don't get as many rights as the White Americans. Black people are still judged unfairly all because of coupling that has been ongoing for generations. This is a really sad reality and really has to be changed quickly. This just shows the sheer power of coupling, and how it is used in detrimental ways.
You may be thinking now that coupling is terrible and that we should try to avoid making these connections but actually, coupling is also helpful in so many ways, it's actually a cognitive shortcut to help ourselves understand concepts better. It's just that sometimes it can be misused and instead reflect detrimental values towards society.
A world without coupling...
Would be disastrous. Why would this be? Without coupling, we lose the predictability in ourselves and we lose the ability to be able to convince/persuade others to believe in something, even if it's good. With no way to predict anything that happens, betting services would go out of business, presidential campaigns would be rendered useless; life would essentially be a coin flip.
The advantages of coupling is that there is some sense of structured thinking that makes clear and logical sense when someone makes a decision. There are reasons, however vague, for somebody to vote for a certain electoral candidate for office, for example. The best part is that with coupling, the phrase "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!" actually carries meaning!
Conclusion
Coupling plays an essential part of our cognitive thinking and decision making. Without it, everything becomes impossible to predict, and life as we know it, in extreme circumstances, could descend into chaos.
When used properly, coupling can be used as a very handy tool to memorise important pieces of information, process the content of what someone is saying, as well as determine the characteristics of people from just their subtle actions and appearances (referring once more to the great Sherlock Holmes).
For more information, even more in-depth analysis is available in Malcolm Gladwell's book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know
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