Malcolm Gladwell: ‘I’m just trying to get people to take psychology seriously’

The Canadian writer made his name bringing intellectual sparkle to everyday subjects, and his new book - about how strangers interact with each other - is no exception

In the flesh, Malcolm Gladwell is exactly as I imagined him to be: engaging, polite, dauntingly cerebral and supremely self-assured in that way that the exceptionally gifted often are. At 55, there is still something of the sporty, if slightly gawky, teenager about him; his jeans and a lightweight hoody accentuate his height and wiry thinness. The signature afro has been tamed somewhat and, if anything, makes him look even younger. He is not big on small talk, and one senses that every hour in his working day is geared towards maximum efficiency.

Gladwell’s new book is called Talking to Strangers and, here we are, two strangers, conversing over tea in a fashionable Covent Garden hotel about the difficulties that can sometimes arise when, as he puts it, “we are thrown into contact with people whose assumptions, perspectives and backgrounds are different from our own”. Like the previous bestselling books that made his name – The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008) – Talking to Strangers is essentially an exploration of human behaviour that also challenges much of our received wisdom about that behaviour and its motivations. Unlike them, though, it lacks a single iconoclastic, zeitgeist-defining idea, instead roaming far and wide to illustrate the problems, individual and collective, personal and ideological, that dog our interactions with others in our globalised, but increasingly atomised, culture. “Any element which disrupts the equilibrium between two strangers, whether it is alcohol or power or place, becomes problematic,” he tells me. “The book is really about those disruptive influences.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zFkhTP