When I found out that my book club was reading this book, I was a little bit disappointed. I had really enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell's books in the past, but for me, the bloom was off the rose because I'd read an article online by two academics who criticized Gladwell's approach as incautious and misleading. The notion that I might have been misled had troubled me, and had dimmed my enthusiasm.
The book opens with Gladwell telling the story of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was arrested in a traffic stop in Texas, and unable to raise bail, hung herself in her cell about three days after she was arrested. Interestingly, Gladwell does not mention that Bland was unable to raise bail in this book. The fact that she was unable to raise bail has always troubled me, and I'm grateful that there's currently a trend to reduce bail for poor suspects in certain cases. Had Sandra Bland not been in jail for so many hours and days she might still be alive. That's not to take away from the analysis presented in the book; it's not directly relevant to Gladwell's thesis, which is about how often we rely on visual cues for assessing people we don't know and how often judgments based on visual cues are erroneous.
What I found as I continued to read was that this book, like Gladwell's others, is very entertaining. I read almost the entire book in one sitting, which really surprised me. And, Gladwell has modified his approach; this book has extensive footnotes.
Gladwell explains that an experiment in Kansas City indirectly led to setting the stage for Sandra Bland's arrest. Social scientists identified the blocks with the greatest number of criminal incidents. Patrol teams were assigned to these special blocks in one neighborhood, and asked to aggressively police, by which I mean that they were instructed to pull people over for small infractions of traffic laws and look for any evidence of other crimes. In these special areas, this strategy was successful. However, this practice of pulling people over for small infractions has been misapplied to neighborhoods that are not "hot spots" for crime and this is the context for Sandra Bland's arrest. The case of Sandra Bland is a complicated one, and Gladwell is not offering a policy prescription, but I infer from this case that police forces using this strategy in low-crime areas is inappropriate.
Two of the topics Gladwell discusses in presenting support for his theses are areas he's explored before: facial expressions (in Blink) and suicide (in The Tipping Point). In his discussion of facial expressions, Gladwell mentions Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, which collected research from others and asserted that expressions of aggression, sorrow, etc., are universal. I'd read The Expression of the Emotions in college and loved it, and so was disappointed to learn that research has recently been done to show that abilities to read facial expressions are not universal. The research is complicated; as presented, the different results in an attempted replication of experiments may result from different methodology.
In The Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote of the "contagious" quality of suicide: that the suicide of one influences others. I accepted this as true, because I knew of a such case in my high school.
Here, Gladwell writes about the context of suicide. When San Francisco's authorities proposed creating a net or a barrier to prevent suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge, members of the public opposed the move, believing that potential suicides will find another way. Interestingly, Gladwell cites a case that shows this is not necessarily true. And he frames it in an interesting way, telling the story of the suicides of the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
In the years in which the British used "town gas" in their stoves, which contained a large amount of deadly carbon monoxide, suicides like Sylvia Plath's, rates rose. After "town gas" was replaced with natural gas, which contained almost no carbon monoxide, suicide rates dropped. Gladwell found a second example of this phenomenon. Suicides like Anne Sexton's, where she closed the garage door and sat in her car while her garage filled with carbon monoxide, have dropped markedly since catalytic converters were introduced; catalytic converters emit a very small amount of carbon monoxide which is not lethal. Gladwell is saying that the ease with which a suicide can occur influences the individual. I find this fascinating; I wish I could easily learn whether scholars and researchers who study this topic agree with Gladwell's conclusion. (Here's an online article that does seem to agree with Gladwell's conclusion: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/03/trends-suicide). It certainly has policy implications; it suggests that it would not be a waste of time and money to create a barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. I must note that Gladwell has been criticized for drawing false or misleading conclusions: https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php
Sandra Bland's experience was an example of what Gladwell calls mismatch, the misreading of visual (or behavioral) cues. It's relevant to the Sandra Bland case because the officer who arrested her reported that she was agitated and that he feared for his safety; it appears that he misread her anxiety as guilt.
The book opens with Gladwell telling the story of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was arrested in a traffic stop in Texas, and unable to raise bail, hung herself in her cell about three days after she was arrested. Interestingly, Gladwell does not mention that Bland was unable to raise bail in this book. The fact that she was unable to raise bail has always troubled me, and I'm grateful that there's currently a trend to reduce bail for poor suspects in certain cases. Had Sandra Bland not been in jail for so many hours and days she might still be alive. That's not to take away from the analysis presented in the book; it's not directly relevant to Gladwell's thesis, which is about how often we rely on visual cues for assessing people we don't know and how often judgments based on visual cues are erroneous.
What I found as I continued to read was that this book, like Gladwell's others, is very entertaining. I read almost the entire book in one sitting, which really surprised me. And, Gladwell has modified his approach; this book has extensive footnotes.
Gladwell explains that an experiment in Kansas City indirectly led to setting the stage for Sandra Bland's arrest. Social scientists identified the blocks with the greatest number of criminal incidents. Patrol teams were assigned to these special blocks in one neighborhood, and asked to aggressively police, by which I mean that they were instructed to pull people over for small infractions of traffic laws and look for any evidence of other crimes. In these special areas, this strategy was successful. However, this practice of pulling people over for small infractions has been misapplied to neighborhoods that are not "hot spots" for crime and this is the context for Sandra Bland's arrest. The case of Sandra Bland is a complicated one, and Gladwell is not offering a policy prescription, but I infer from this case that police forces using this strategy in low-crime areas is inappropriate.
Two of the topics Gladwell discusses in presenting support for his theses are areas he's explored before: facial expressions (in Blink) and suicide (in The Tipping Point). In his discussion of facial expressions, Gladwell mentions Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, which collected research from others and asserted that expressions of aggression, sorrow, etc., are universal. I'd read The Expression of the Emotions in college and loved it, and so was disappointed to learn that research has recently been done to show that abilities to read facial expressions are not universal. The research is complicated; as presented, the different results in an attempted replication of experiments may result from different methodology.
In The Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote of the "contagious" quality of suicide: that the suicide of one influences others. I accepted this as true, because I knew of a such case in my high school.
Here, Gladwell writes about the context of suicide. When San Francisco's authorities proposed creating a net or a barrier to prevent suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge, members of the public opposed the move, believing that potential suicides will find another way. Interestingly, Gladwell cites a case that shows this is not necessarily true. And he frames it in an interesting way, telling the story of the suicides of the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
In the years in which the British used "town gas" in their stoves, which contained a large amount of deadly carbon monoxide, suicides like Sylvia Plath's, rates rose. After "town gas" was replaced with natural gas, which contained almost no carbon monoxide, suicide rates dropped. Gladwell found a second example of this phenomenon. Suicides like Anne Sexton's, where she closed the garage door and sat in her car while her garage filled with carbon monoxide, have dropped markedly since catalytic converters were introduced; catalytic converters emit a very small amount of carbon monoxide which is not lethal. Gladwell is saying that the ease with which a suicide can occur influences the individual. I find this fascinating; I wish I could easily learn whether scholars and researchers who study this topic agree with Gladwell's conclusion. (Here's an online article that does seem to agree with Gladwell's conclusion: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/03/trends-suicide). It certainly has policy implications; it suggests that it would not be a waste of time and money to create a barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. I must note that Gladwell has been criticized for drawing false or misleading conclusions: https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php
Sandra Bland's experience was an example of what Gladwell calls mismatch, the misreading of visual (or behavioral) cues. It's relevant to the Sandra Bland case because the officer who arrested her reported that she was agitated and that he feared for his safety; it appears that he misread her anxiety as guilt.
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