What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1, Chapter 6

Part 2, Chapters 7-13

Part 3, Chapters 14-19

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Writing as Adventure

In the Preface, Gladwell refers to his essays as “adventures” (xv)—in other words, pieces that do not so much persuade readers to adopt his view as encourage them to explore other minds and come to their own conclusions on what they find there. His final command in the Preface is for the reader to “enjoy [I]” (xv), an instruction that supports the adventuring spirit in inviting the reader to delight in his storytelling and adopt a playful rather than doctrinaire spirit.

One dominant feature of adventure writing is digression from pure argument and immersion in the people and locations the writer encounters along the way. Gladwell’s interviewees are not abstract ciphers who present themselves merely by their opinion but characters who emerge as concretely as those in a novel. For example, Rob Popeil, kitchen-gadget impresario, is described as “a handsome man, thick through the chest and shoulders, with a leonine head and striking, oversize features” (5). The description, with its reference to Popeil’s amplitude and resemblance to a lion, an animal known as the king of the beasts, implicitly alludes to how physical presence aids Popeil’s endeavor as a salesman and accounts for his astonishing success in persuading people to buy what they never knew they wanted. Such focus on his physicality emphasizes the particular over the general, as Gladwell encourages the reader to think about this specific man’s rendition of the American dream.

Spaces also take center stage in Gladwell’s writing and provide the function of contextualizing where ideas and events take place. For example, grandiose investment banker Victor Niederhoffer’s home is described as having “a squash court and a tennis court and a swimming pool and a colossal, faux-alpine mansion in which virtually every square inch of space was covered with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American folk art” (51). The repetition of the word “court” demonstrates Niederhoffer’s excess, while the faux-alpine style of the house and the collector’s penchant for historic American folk art allude to his cultivation of a specific taste. This is important to Gladwell’s essay because Nassim Taleb, its protagonist, was inspired to begin his career in finance owing to his admiration of Niederhoffer’s taste and lifestyle, and he designed a home similarly full of historic artifacts himself when he acquired wealth. While such elements are not the main thrust of Gladwell’s argument, they contribute to his mission of helping the reader enter other heads and understand the motivations of those involved.

Another way that Gladwell facilitates entry into other perspectives is by giving free rein to his interviewees’ speech, which in its seemingly unedited form gives us a sense of who they are and how they feel about a topic. For example, when movement expert Karen Bradley watched Cesar Millan’s interactions with badly behaved dogs, she enthused: “He’s dancing […] Look at that. It’s gorgeous. It’s such a gorgeous little dance” (137). His inclusion of her gushing repetition of the words “gorgeous” and “dance” parallels the rhythm of Millan’s movements and conveys that she is emotionally carried away by his synchronicity with the dogs. She acts as another witness who testifies to Millan’s power and contributes to Gladwell’s overall perspective on the importance of nonverbal communication in human-animal interactions.

A different feature of adventure is the necessity of projecting authority about a topic about which the writer may have sustained knowledge gaps. Reviewer Steve Pinker disparaged this tendency in Gladwell’s work, calling him “the eclectic detective” and even coining the term “igon value problem” to show up the latter’s ignorance on certain topics (Pinker). However, Gladwell defends his voyages into areas of the unknown, claiming that novices who immerse themselves in an environment have an advantage over experts because they can provide a fresh perspective and are not “self-conscious about what they say […] because they have position and privilege to protect” (xiv). He adds that “self-consciousness is the enemy of ‘interestingness’” and that he wants to dwell in the realm of what is stimulating rather than strictly accurate (xiv). Gladwell’s hot-take dips into unfamiliar topics paved the way for the journalism trend of the 2010s and 2020s to—like the essays in What the Dog Saw—unite seemingly unrelated topics and, after leading the reader vividly through them, draw conclusions from their comparison.

The Gap Between Information and Interpretation

The gap between the facts that technology and imaging can tell us and our ability to interpret this data is a key component throughout the essays. In spheres as diverse as foreign policy, intelligence, employment selection, and medicine, Gladwell shows how our increasing ability to accumulate data does not necessarily help us make better decisions.

As Gladwell writes, “The central challenge of intelligence gathering has always been the problem of ‘noise’: the fact that useless information is vastly more plentiful than useful information” (252). Identifying the useful from the superfluous is a further challenge and one that requires expertise. In recent years, in both intelligence and medical imaging, advanced imaging has been employed to diagnose targets; however, experts have often struggled to interpret what they are seeing. For example, in the case of identifying military targets in warfare, experts have been uncertain about where to point the camera and so cannot benefit from its increased sight. Similarly, the use of imaging to diagnose cancerous breast lumps has often led to confusion and panic, as the individuality of these lumps, in addition to their placement in denser or looser types of breast tissue, affects how they appear and how experts diagnose them. Gladwell points out that while sight is the seemingly more objective sense, one humans have prioritized since the Enlightenment, the primitive sense of touch can be more useful. He offers a more holistic perspective in encouraging the use of alternative techniques to complement the overabundance of data:

[T]here is no denying the basic lesson of the [trials conducted]: that a skilled pair of fingertips can find out an extraordinary amount about the health of a breast, and that we should not automatically value what we see in a picture over what we learn from our other senses (209).

The finger, as old as humanity itself, is equipped with the advanced technology of hundreds of sensors per centimeter, which no scientific instrument can even approach. Thus, this more basic sense, which can be employed in the self-examinations women do at home, may help cut through the noise of multiple ambiguous images.

In the sphere of employment selection, noise appears in distracting factors in the data collected about candidates prior to performance. Gladwell shows how in areas as diverse as teaching, business, and even the selection of college quarterbacks for the NFL, previous acclaims have little to do with how one will perform on the job. For example, the best college graduates, who have shown their propensity to be good students, do not necessarily make good teachers; similarly, quarterbacks who thrived at the college level often underperform in the NFL, when the terms of the game change. While Gladwell acknowledges that there will always be a gap between previous indicators of success and actual performance, he demonstrates that we can structure our selection processes to gather more useful data about prospective employees. Structured interviews that have the same format for all interviewees, for example, can better predict workplace performance than informal conversations because they place the candidate in diverse settings, thereby eroding the human bias that people will behave the same in every context. Moreover, questions can be scripted so that the candidate cannot automatically guess the answer that will make the employer happy and will instead be put in a position to let someone down, regardless of how they answer. In a roleplay of such an interview, human-resources consultant Justin Menkes forces Gladwell to choose between two crucial responsibilities with the same imminent deadline. When Gladwell answers that he would choose the task that he would do best, explaining to his boss, “It’s better that I do one well than both poorly” (389), and then delegate the other responsibility, Menkes immediately ascertains that Gladwell’s preference of doing the task he’s better at rather than the one that would be useful to the company makes him a self-centered “solo practitioner” rather than a team player (390). Thus, the question reveals that Gladwell’s personality takes precedence over the strategy of being obsequious to an interviewer to get the job.

Exploring Failure

Although Gladwell is interested in success and genius to the extent that he wrote a book on the topic (Outliers: The Story of Success), he is also aware of the importance of exploring the conditions of failure—such as when the dreams of capable people do not materialize and they underperform, or when disasters such as September 11 or the Challenger explosion happen, seemingly out of nowhere.

The promise of the American dream is that if one works hard enough and grits their way through obstacles, they will eventually achieve their goal. However, this was not the case for Jim Wigon, inventor of World’s Best ketchup, who sought to challenge Heinz’s monopoly on the ketchup market by producing a high-quality variant featuring hand-chopped basil and maple rather than corn syrup. Though he followed Grey Poupon’s successful model of elevating the product to appeal to a more sophisticated taste, his product failed to match Heinz’s because ketchup itself is an outlier, not subject to the same rules as other condiments—an example Gladwell uses to remind his audience that the American dream is a myth and that real success—as Taleb hypothesized—is subject to a number of variables, including tastes, whims, and luck.

Another type of failure that Gladwell examines is that of choking, the process of overthinking and second-guessing oneself that staves off the success of many capable, qualified people. While panic—the overwhelm that causes one to forget the basic principles of one’s craft—mainly affects novices, choking can affect experts. However, Gladwell’s study shows that it particularly impacts underdogs, who, though highly trained and intelligent, often lack the confidence that people like them can achieve. This was the case with Jana Novotna, set to beat Steffi Graf in the 1993 Wimbledon tennis final before her first mistake of serving the ball directly into the net set her off on a disastrous trajectory that cost her the match. Gladwell wonders what happened in Novotna’s mind: “Did she remember that she had never won a major tournament before? Did she look across the net and see Steffi Graf—Steffi Graf!—the greatest player of her generation?” (264). While Gladwell’s hypothesis uses short interrogatives that are resonant of panic, it also evokes a type of imposter syndrome that disproportionally affects those who have not historically received as much systemic support, such as sports underdogs and women. Choking, in Gladwell’s view, forces us to pay attention to the context as well as to the performer. By placing Novotna in a scene and envisioning her thought process he offers the reader an opportunity to exercise their compassion and expand their understanding of the phenomenon, changing the conversation about how assessments should be made.

He draws attention to Novotna’s other symptoms, which seemed to be “the slow, cautious deliberation of a beginner”; she had moved from the implicit, intuitive thinking of a professional to the explicit thinking of a novice learning her craft (266). This is more like choking than panicking, and it affects people in all spheres of life. For example, those who have not traditionally benefited from academic privileges, such as women and people of color are more likely to underperform in tests that explicitly are framed as a measure of their intellectual abilities, whereas abstract lab tests “with no relevance to ability” enable them to shine (275). Research has shown that the case of being aware of one’s status and how one’s demographic is stereotypically expected to perform in a test, lessens performance because of over rather than underthinking, “carefulness and second-guessing” because of the expectation that someone like them will mess up (277).

Finally, Gladwell examines failure in the form of disaster and the postmortems that try to determine what evidence would have provided clues of impending catastrophe. As discussed in The Gap Between Information and Interpretation, the noise that arises from abundant data can be misleading, both running up to a disaster and in our evaluation of it. However, Gladwell shows how experts retrospectively piece together evidence that was missed to reach conclusions that seem satisfying in the moment but are not necessarily relevant in the long term. For example, Gladwell expresses skepticism about the efficacy of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center—which George Bush created to unite the FBI and CIA after experts concluded that their disconnect led to missed evidence prior to the attack—noting that it might be an advantage that “the FBI doesn’t think like the CIA” and that the merging of the bodies might counteract the type of independent processes and innovative insights that they produced apart (259). Gladwell concludes, “There is no such thing as a perfect intelligence system, and every seeming improvement involves a trade-off” (260). Thus, overall, failure is not preventable, and there is no change in strategy that can reliably stave it off. However, Gladwell believes, if we are curious about how and why things fail, we may be able to minimize certain types of failure, such as choking, and to innovate in the way of success.