What the Dog Saw

Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Pp. xv, 410.

Gladwell’s fourth book, What the Dog Saw, is an interesting collection of stories that highlight a number of ideas Gladwell has touched upon or expanded in his previous books. Broken down into themes, Gladwell explores various subtleties and seemingly contradictory truths hidden in advertising, finance, intelligence, the way the world evaluates humans, and stereotypes.

The chapters that focus on the way perception and stereotype are used, abused, and evaluated may be the strongest in the book. Chief among them is “Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy”. In looking at the services FBI profilers provide for local law enforcement, Gladwell argues that the historical memory of the profilers contributions is vastly different than their actual value. In analyzing criminal profilers the way he does Gladwell succeeds in not only promoting an alternative line of thought about the subject, but in evaluating the usefulness of its traditional interpretation.

Alternatively, a piece like “Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy” shows how non-traditional thinking about a system, in this case the financial market, can reinforce the existence of the system entirely.

It seems obvious from Gladwell’s earlier books that he finds the former result more intriguing and more important. (This is especially obvious in Outliers, where he expands on ideas presented here in their original article form. The best example would be “The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?”) And while Gladwell’s work regularly challenges established norms his reliance on sociological and psychological research will vex those who find the accepted truth of the conclusions problematic.

Regardless of each reader’s acceptance of Gladwell’s arguments it’s impossible to finish the book without reconsidering what you ‘know’ about the topics he presents. And in the long run that is Gladwell’s ultimate goal, which he achieves brilliantly. Unlike The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, What the Dog Saw presents Gladwell’s ideas in their original, shorter formats as New Yorker pieces. The result is an absence of the loose connections and not quite believable hypothetical leaps that are riddled throughout his earlier works. Overall, What the Dog Saw is a rousing, readable success. It’s up to your brain to take it further.