Talking to Strangers
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Our interactions with strangers are important. We hire babysitters, decide whether someone should go to prison. We make big decisions based on these interactions.
We need to talk to strangers. But we are terrible at it.
There are several key elements we can learn to better understand and improve these situations.
🎨 Impressions
I would rate this the single most life-changing book I have read. It is outstanding. Mainly because, we don't fully appreciate that talking to strangers could go so disastrously wrong. This book takes an individual and societal perspective. So you can improve your individual interactions with strangers but also assess ideas about society as a whole. Many interesting, relevant, high-profile case studies and stories are used to demonstrate the arguments he makes. The first 50 pages is scene-setting and may make you a little confused - but push past this.
How I Discovered It
As a fan of Gladwell's work, this was naturally a book I wanted to read.
Who Should Read It?
If you think you are good a reading people, and place an over-bearing reliance on this, then his book will make you think again. Anyone interested in how with globalisation, our interactions with strangers have become more prevalent and significant.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.
Just like us, strangers are complex, so we should not pretend that we understand them and jump to conclusions.
We need to trust each other, this is how society functions. When we interact with strangers we default to truth, and although we may make mistakes, this is the right thing to do.
We have an idea on what the behaviour and demeanour of a stranger should be - but we are wrong far too often. We shouldn't make sense of them through this.
Strangers are fragile. We have to be comfortable with something short of the whole story and tread carefully.
When talking to strangers we need to understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating. Look at the stranger's world.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we are terrible at it.
Perfect strangers pretended to know who she was based on the expression on her face.
Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
📒 Summary + Notes
Intro
We all have countless interactions with strangers every day. Sometimes, these conversations can have a big impact on people. People decide whether to give a stranger a job, put them in prison, or let them be your kid's babysitter. These exchanges are fundamental to society – but are we any good at them?
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Talking to Strangers, explains how when we talk to strangers, we get it all wrong. Talking to strangers is about why we are so bad at the act of translation.
In many cases, the parties involved rely on a set of strategies to translate one another’s words and intentions. And often, it goes very wrong. In Talking to strangers Gladwell aims to understand the strategies, to analyse them, critique them, find out where they came from and find out how to fix them.
Easy to Understand
We believe that we can get inside the heart of others based on very limited information, and that we have many insights about them (but not vice versa) – this leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be patient.
Judges have lots of data in their hands when assessing the character of defendants. Neville Chamberlain never questioned the wisdom of Hitler's bold plan to avert war. If his intentions were not clear, it was his job as Prime Minister, to go to Germany and figure them out.
We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We appreciate that we are too complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If you convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: strangers are not easy.
Default to Truth
A study showed: We are much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who were telling the truth. But we are much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who were lying. We go through all those videos and we guess – true, true, true – which means we get most of the treatment of his truths rights and most of the lies wrong. We have a default the truth: our default assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.
There was an experiment with a teacher and student in an electric chair. Over 40% of the volunteers watching picked up on something odd – something that suggested the experiment is not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren’t enough to trigger them out of the default to truth.
We believe someone not because we have no doubts about them. It’s not about the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them. It is the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts.
Although there are incidents where we have defaulted to truth and there have been issues, defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is instead a fundamental human tendency.
The Larry Nassar scandal where child gymnasts were in Nassar's doctor's room with the parents: We accept the fact that the parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around their child. If every kid coach is thought to be a paedophile, then no parent would like the children leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth, even when the decision carries terrible risks, because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where truth ends in betrayal, those victimised by default the truth deserve a sympathy not a censure.
We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to the truth. We try to send good people who were doing their job to jail, and by doing this we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers, without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
Transparency
Transparency is the idea that people‘s behaviour and demeanour – the way that they represent themselves on the outside – provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel the inside. When we don’t know someone or don't communicate with them, we don’t have the time to understand properly, we believe that we can make sense of them through their behaviour and demeanour.
The idea of transparency has long been around. In 1872, 13 years after his first famous piece on evolution, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotional Man and Animals. Smiling and frowning and wrinkling, he argued, is part of the evolutionary adoption. This is because we could accurately and quickly communicate emotions to one another which was of such crucial importance to survive. He argued that the face developed into a kind of brilliant billboard for the heart. Darwin’s idea is deeply intuitive. Children everywhere smile when they are happy, frown when they are sad and giggle when they are amused.
Court of law requiring to see someone
The judge does not correspond with the parties in a court case by email or call them on a telephone. Judges believe it is crucial to look at the people that they are judging. A Muslim women in Michigan was the plaintiff in a lawsuit a few years ago, and she came to court wearing traditional clothing, a vail covering over her eyes. The judge asked her to take it off. She refused. So the judge dismissed the case. He didn’t think he could fairly adjudicate a disagreement between the two parties when he couldn’t see one of them. He told her: one of the things I need to do is when listening to the testimony is, I need to see your face, I need to see what’s going on. Unless you take it off, I can’t see your face, and I can’t tell whether you are telling me the truth or not, and I can’t see certain things about your demeanour and temperament that I need to see in a court of law.
Do you think the judge was right? We wouldn’t spend as much time as we do looking at peoples faces if we didn’t think there was something valuable to be learned. Enough as we read that “his eyes widened in shock“ or “her face fell in disappointment“, and we accept without question that faces really do fall and eyes really do widen in response to the feelings of shock and disappointment. Thousands of years of evolution has turned a series of facial expressions into the expression of shock and anger. We believe someone’s demeanour is a window into their soul. Judges in bail hearings are much worse at predicting who will re-offend than a computer, which has a window into no-one.
Transparency is a myth – an idea we have picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels with the heroes “jaw dropping with astonishment.”
When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea – a stereotype. And that stereotype is wrong far to often.
The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default to truth problem, that they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal justice system and the hiring process for a selection of babysitters to be human. But because of this human element, we need to be happy to tolerate a huge amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we are terrible at it – and we’re rarely always honest with one another about how terrible at it we are.
Levine argues that this is the assumption of transparency in action. We tend to judge peoples honesty based on their demeanour. Well spoken, confident people with a firm handshake you are friendly and engaging and believable. Nervous, stammering, uncomfortable people who have windy, convoluted explanations are not. But, this is nonsense. Liars don’t look away. Levine finds out the people who are guessing liars get it right when they match our stubborn belief of what a liar acts like. If someone is blushing or nervous and they are lying we get it right.
This is distressing because we don’t need law enforcement experts to help us with matched strangers. We’re all good at knowing when these kind of people are misleading us and when they are telling the truth. We need help with mismatched strangers – the difficult cases. Somebody with confusing signals of demeanour, understanding that we are nervous because that’s who they are – somebody who over explains and gets defensive.
It’s a legal system constitutionally incapable of delivering justice to the mismatch? Why do judges underperform to the computer. We still send perfectly harmless people to prison just because they don’t look right? We all accept the flaws and inaccuracies of institutional judgement when we believe that those mistakes are random. But Tim Levin’s research shows that they are not random – that we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate are ridiculous ideas about transparency.
Amanda Knox case: “Her eyes didn’t seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved“ one of her friends said. Amanda Knox had years of this – perfect strangers pretended to know who she was based on the expression on her face. Knox said "there is no trace of me in the room where the murder happened. But you’re trying to find the answer in my eyes, you’re looking at me. Why? These are my eyes, they are not objective evidence."
The Environment is Important
Alcohol is a powerful drug. It dis-inhibits us. It breaks down the set of constraints that holds our behaviour in check. That’s why it doesn’t seem surprising that drunkenness is so overwhelming linked with things such as violence, car accidents and sexual assault.
Some say, alcohol will unlock my good mood. That’s plainly not what happens. Sometimes alcohol cheers up. But other times, when an anxious person drinks they get more anxious. Myopia theory has an answer to that puzzle: it depends on where the anxious, drunk person is. If they are at a football game surrounded by avid fans, the excitement and drama going on around them will temporarily crowd out his pressing worldly concerns. The game is front and centre. His worries are not. But the same man sat in a quiet corner of the bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It grows out of everything except the most immediate experiences.
They are Complex
CIA agent said: trying to get information out of someone you are seriously depriving is sort of like trying to get a better signal out of the radio that you are smashing with a sledgehammer. It makes no sense at all.
The harder we work on getting the stranger to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become. Chamberlain would’ve been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should’ve stayed at home. Long Police searches often yield not clarity, but confusion: stories that changed; allegations that surfaced and then disappeared.
Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our list is not robust. The truth about a stranger is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. That follows a secondary cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.
Coupling
Coupling is the idea that behaviour is linked to very specific circumstances.
The first set of mistakes we make with strangers – the default truth and the illusion of transparency – is to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those issues we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.
And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confined to a stranger.
Coupling teaches us not to look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.
Summary
We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they do not know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties expressly to meet strangers: that’s part of the thrill of romantic discovery. Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost, or sacrifice, insert the familiar and known, and we can’t. What should we do? We should start by no longer penalising one another for default to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger – even if you were in the room – that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are university president and you do not jump to the worst case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. So assuming the best about another is a trait that is created to benefit society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated is tragic. But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defence against predation and deception - it’s worse.
We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers. There is a cost of forcing people to talk: what if in the act of coercing a prisoner to open up, he damaged his memories and made what he had to say less reliable? Whilst, there is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies, or for investors to see if a scheme is fraudulent, or for any of the rest of us to peer inside the mind of those we do not know. What is required of us is restraint and humility.
Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
