by Malcolm Gladwell
I finished a book. I didn\’t really like it, so am having a hard time thinking what to say. The subtitle: What We Should Know About the People We Don\’t Know. Which seems to be, in a nutshell: you\’ll never be able to judge strangers accurately. You will misread their facial expressions, truthfulness and intentions more than half the time. This book has lots of examples from famous court cases, encounters with police gone badly wrong, incidents of sexual assault and pedophilia, meetings between enemy leaders of countries, high ranking FBI agents who were duped by spies for years and so on. All about how people who are trained to pick out the lies and find the wrongdoers are so very often wrong. There\’s a part about studies that show how deprivation and torture makes prisoners very bad about providing information- it affects the brain, the memory- so the info they do give is probably inaccurate. So why do people keep getting tortured in order to extract information? There\’s another section all about suicides- in particular with details on Sylvia Plath- which I found educational to read in one sense, and very upsetting in another. The takeaway seems to be: as a human race we\’re bad at judging people we don\’t know. We guess wrong. So stop trying? It doesn\’t really give any suggestions on that. Only that we shouldn\’t be too harsh on people who were taken in by strangers or misled, because it\’s so very easy to fall prey. I found the implications depressing honestly. There\’s a lot more, but I don\’t really feel like thumbing through the book to remind myself of them right now. Check out Goodreads, or some of the links below. Lots of different opinions on this one.
Borrowed from my sister.
Rating: 2/5 386 pages, 2019
more opinions:
Book\’d Out
Rhapsody in Books Weblog
anyone else?
