Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

by Malcolm Gladwell

Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.

We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things. I don’t want to move on to other things.

Throughout the majority of human history, encounters—hostile or otherwise—were rarely between strangers.

Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.

feels like this could be applied to MAGA

Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.

Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.

We all accept the flaws and inaccuracies of institutional judgment when we believe that those mistakes are random.

Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.2

When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes.

“Persons learn about drunkenness what their societies import to them,

Show men how to respect women, not how to drink less.

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.

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 confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

That distorts who she is: it says her identity was tied up entirely in her self-destructiveness.

A very conservative estimate is that banning handguns would save 10,000 lives a year, just from thwarted suicides. That’s a lot of people.

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.

If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn’t because Brian Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do.

A police officer approaches a civilian on the flimsiest of pretexts, looking for a needle in a haystack—with the result that so many innocent people are caught up in the wave of suspicion that trust between police and community is obliterated.

So it was that Brian Encinia ended up in a place he should never have been, stopping someone who should never have been stopped, drawing conclusions that should never have been drawn. The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Let us make it our goal, then, to simplify the responsibilities of the police.