Using science to attach a false authority to the ideas he has distilled from the stories he chooses to tell

Back in March, 2011, I wrote a post, Success and inevitability, highlighting what I perceived as some critical short-comings of Malcolm Gladwell as a source of information and knowledge. At the time that I wrote it, it seemed to me that Gladwell was fairly broadly admired, not just for his storytelling but also as a science propagandist. He now has a new book out, David and Goliath, and the reviews seem to be hammering him for many of the reasons I surfaced. And now it feels the critical pendulum might swing too far the other way.

In the public discourse, it does often seem as if there is a very short distance between rooster and feather duster. One of the more comprehensive reviews of the new book is The Trouble With Malcolm Gladwell by Christopher Chabris. The assault is wide ranging and sustained. I did like this section though, where Chabris begins to focus on what I have termed cognitive pollution - the propagation of statements as true which in fact have little or no robust evidence to sustain them.

Here’s one final indicator of Malcolm Gladwell's influence—and I'll be upfront and say that it comes from an utterly nonscientific and imprecise methodology—that suggests why he matters. I Googled the phrases "Malcolm Gladwell proved" and "Malcolm Gladwell showed" and compared the results to the similar "Steven Pinker proved" and "Steven Pinker showed" (adding in the results of redoing the Pinker search with the incorrect "Stephen"). I chose Steven Pinker not because he is an academic, nor because he’s a co-author of mine, but because he has published a lot of best-selling books and widely read essays and is considered a leading public intellectual, like Gladwell. Pinker is surely more influential than most other academics. It just so happens that he published a critical review of Gladwell's previous book—but this also is an indicator of the fact that Pinker chooses to engage the public rather than just his professional colleagues. The results, in total number of hits:

Gladwell: proved 5,300, showed 19,200 = 24,500 total

Pinker: proved 9, showed 625 = 634 total

So the total influence ratio as measured by this crude technique is 24,500/634, or more than 38-to-1 in favor of Gladwell. I wasn't expecting it to be nearly this high myself. (Interestingly, those "influenced" by Pinker are only 9/634, or 1.4 percent likely to think he "proved" something as opposed to the arguably more correct "showed" it. Gladwell's influencees are 5,300/24,500 or 21.6 percent likely to think their influencer "proved" something.) Refining the searches, adding "according to Gladwell" versus "according to Pinker," and so on will change the numbers, but I doubt those corrections would significantly redress a 38-to-1 difference. And if you are worried that I have rigged the results by trying a lot of comparisons until I found this one, I give you my word that Steven Pinker was the first and only one I tried. And I fully understand that properly tracing and comparing influence would require much more work than this. As I said, it is just one suggestive data point—a story, if you will. (“Did you know that Malcolm Gladwell is 38 times more influential than Steven Pinker? I read it on Slate!”) And I am foregrounding this story’s evidentiary limitations, rather than ignoring them.

When someone with the reach and persuasive power of Malcolm Gladwell says that he is a storyteller who just uses research to "augment" the stories—who places the stories in the lead and the science in a supporting role, rather than the other way around—he's essentially placing his work in the category of inspirational books like The Secret. As Daniel Simons and I noted in a New York Times essay, such books tend to sprinkle in references and allusions to science as a rhetorical strategy. The titular “secret” of The Secret is in fact a purported scientific law—the “Law of Attraction.” Accessorizing your otherwise inconsistent or incoherent story-based argument with pieces of science is a profitable rhetorical strategy because references to science are crucial touchpoints that help readers maintain their default instinct to believe what they are being told. They help because when readers see "science" they can suppress any skepticism that might be bubbling up in response to the inconsistencies and contradictions. I believe that most of Gladwell’s readers think he is telling stories to bring alive what science has discovered, rather than using science to attach a false authority to the ideas he has distilled from the stories he chooses to tell.

A lot of insight in that last paragraph.