Cutting the big boys down to size

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell (Allen Lane, £16.99)

About a third of the way into his new book, Malcolm Gladwell describes the “cognitive reflection test”, a set of three questions which determine a person’s ability to “understand when something is more complex than it appears”. Among the high scorers in one batch of results, we learn, 64 per cent preferred, or claimed to prefer, the New Yorker to People magazine. Given that Gladwell’s journalism —including the essay on underdogs repurposed here — appears in the former magazine, you could argue that he has been delivering his revelations about hidden complexity to an audience that doesn’t need them.

That’s one way to explain the anti-Gladwell sentiment that has developed in the five years since his last book, Outliers, now routinely dismissed as an exercise in peddling the obvious. Clearly, his lessons about the “counterintuitive” have little to teach readers who learned long ago to train or ignore their intuition. But there exists a sort of reader — I consider myself one — who would do badly in a cognitive reflection test but still believes they prefer the New Yorker to People.

We represent 33 per cent of what Gladwell calls the “low CRT group” — a large enough contingent to guarantee the success of his new book, a study of pluck and obstinacy and resourcefulness that also functions, like all of his work, as a synthesis of recent research in various academic disciplines, and a guide to making better choices.

He starts from the presumption that we need to revise our understanding of the David and Goliath story. With help from articles published in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts, International Symposium on Ballistics, and the Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association, he shows that Goliath’s apparent advantages also bore disadvantages —that, for instance, his size might well have been the product of acromelagy, a disorder that would given him poor eyesight along with a hulking frame.

If Goliath’s size was also his undoing, David’s strength lay in the apparent disadvantage that, being a shepherd, he knew little about the rituals of hand-to-hand combat. A central lesson about overcoming odds is that “conventions are made to be broken” — clapped-out thinking but also notions of fair play.

The rest of the book is devoted to identifying examples of ingenuity defeating force, impudence undermining power, in, among other locations, modern-day Brooklyn, Sixties Alabama, and Vichy France. Gladwell’s Goliaths aren’t just mighty warriors and superior basketball teams but “disability, misfortune, and oppression”, with the majority of chapters structured as double narratives, so that a young woman’s decision to choose Brown University over the University of Maryland (an error) is contrasted with the Impressionists’ decision to reject the Salon in favour of exhibiting independently (a breakthrough).

Gladwell occasionally struggles to allow his stories to speak for themselves (“The Mennonites believe in the inverted-U curve,” he alleges) but, for the most part, the data and jargon, the talk of “relative deprivation” and “affective forecasting”, are there to enable his books’ essential human interest — to help explain, in this case, why Londoners felt elated during the Blitz, say, or how a duplicitous dyslexic became the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

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