One Night in Seattle with Malcolm Gladwell

The author, public speaker, and staff writer for ‘The New Yorker’ discusses why we’re so bad at spotting liars at a sold-out show in Benaroya Hall

By Linda Morgan September 24, 2019

Malcolm Gladwell—if you haven’t read any of his recent best-sellers, you know him from The Tipping Point and Blink—is not interested in rehashing the election of Donald Trump. At least that’s what he told everyone on Wednesday evening at Benaroya Hall. Gladwell, who famously claimed, in his book, Outliers, that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in any field, and turned the term “tipping point” into an overused cliché, spoke to a sold-out audience as part of Seattle Arts and Lectures’ new season.

What Gladwell is currently interested in is discussing his latest book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know, which explains why we often misunderstand, miscommunicate with, and what’s even worse, are deceived by people we meet.

Drawing examples from well-known ripped-from-the-headlines stories, he noted that Bernie Madoff turned out to be a bad guy who nearly everyone thought was a good guy; that Larry Nassar fooled all the athletes’ parents, even a mom who’s an MD; and how years ago, Fidel Castro pulled a very big one over on the CIA.

Were these liars brilliant manipulators, or as he says, “evil geniuses?” Not so much. “Bernie Madoff is not that bright,” said Gladwell. “He’s just a pretty good actor.” You don’t need superpowers to deceive people, Gladwell said. “You just have to be brazen.”

The truth is, we are simply not great at spotting liars. “Evolution has not selected us for that,” he said, quoting his colleague, Timothy Levine, a researcher on deception and professor at the University of Alabama. “We evolved to trust people. Only when the evidence gets overwhelming do we question them.”

That’s not actually a bad thing, Gladwell said. If we didn’t fundamentally trust people, how would we be able to put our kids on the bus each morning? To walk down the street at night? “You want to have faith in your fellow man…That means you will sometimes be deceived.”

Ultimately, deception happens to all of us. But according to Gladwell, the fact that we are so readily duped comes from a good place. “It’s not because we’re doing something wrong, but because we’re doing something right.”