37 pages • 1 hour read
Malcolm GladwellTalking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Lessons”
Chapter 9 Summary: “KSM: What Happens When the Stranger Is a Terrorist?”
In March 2003, the CIA detained a senior Al Qaeda official accused of planning the September 11 attacks. The detainee (referred to by his initials, KSM) was interrogated by the psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Mitchell and Jessen developed what were known as enhanced interrogation techniques, although some people simply considered them torture. After years of experiencing sleep deprivation and waterboarding, KSM confessed to a long list of crimes in March 2007.
Before becoming interrogators for the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen worked on the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program, which trained military personnel in how to handle interrogation. This program involved subjecting the trainees to realistic simulations of what enemy interrogators might do to them. Although the trainees knew that none of the simulations were real, a significant number of them experienced traumatic stress. The psychiatrist Charles Morgan conducted studies of SERE participants and found that the experience had a profound effect on their memories. When the whole point of interrogation is to get the subject to share what they know, it is highly problematic if their ability to remember is affected in the process.
This naturally raises questions about KSM’s confession: Was he confessing just to make it all stop? Were his memories affected by four years of abuse? Was he trying to gain a measure of fame by claiming credit for anything and everything? Trying to get KSM to talk meant compromising their ability to learn anything from him.
Gladwell believes there is a lesson we can learn from KSM’s case. We’ve seen that the strategies we use for making sense of strangers are far from perfect—but once we acknowledge that, we must determine what to do with that knowledge. We have to accept that sometimes we can’t know everything we want to know about a stranger. If we approached strangers with more “caution and humility” (261), perhaps some of the problems explored in this book would never have happened.
Part 4 Analysis
Part 4 is a brief section with a brief lesson. KSM’s case is not about default-to-truth or the assumption of transparency. It is about the fact that we can try as hard as we can to learn what is going on inside someone’s head—we can coerce them with waterboarding and sleep deprivation—and we can still fail. We may never know for sure if KSM was really planning to attack everything he confessed to, from the Panama Canal to Heathrow Airport.
Instead of worrying about how we can do a better job at figuring out strangers, we should perhaps turn the magnifying glass on ourselves. Why do we view strangers as puzzles that we can solve if we just try hard enough? Gladwell’s view that we should approach strangers with more humility means being more introspective about our own actions and assumptions.
In the stories that Gladwell has examined in this book, many of the problems arose not just from people judging strangers wrongly, but from people being quite confident that their erroneous judgments were correct. Chamberlain felt that he fully understood Hitler. The police investigating Amanda Knox were so convinced that they had the right person that they felt they didn’t need any physical evidence. It is inevitable that we judge people wrongly at times, but we should be more cautious about assuming that we have things right.
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