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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

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.

if we were willing to engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers—she would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.

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.

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

The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

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,

We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

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

We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.

were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.

The statistics say that the liar and the con man are rare. But to the Holy Fool, they are everywhere.

I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore.

Sexual-abuse cases are complicated, wrapped in layers of shame and denial and clouded memories,

those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.

An estimated one in five American female college students say that they have been the victim of sexual assault.

what they meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates, in their words, “a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.”

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.

In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.”

And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population.

A very conservative estimate is that banning handguns would save 10,000 lives a year, just from thwarted suicides.

And what happened? Outside District 144, where police business was conducted as usual, crime remained as bad as ever. But inside 144? All of the new focused police work cut gun crimes—shootings, murders, woundings—in half.

The first Kansas City experiment said that preventive patrol was useless, that having more police cars driving around made no difference. The second Kansas City experiment amended that position. Actually, extra patrol cars did make a difference—so

The lesson the law-enforcement community took from Kansas City was that preventive patrol worked if it was more aggressive. But the part they missed was that aggressive patrol was supposed to be confined to places where crime was concentrated.

One of Weisburd’s former students, Barak Ariel, went so far as to test resistance to the coupling idea in the Derry region of Northern Ireland. Law-enforcement officers in Derry are asked to identify specific troubled areas of their beats that they think are going to require additional police presence. Their predictions are called “waymarkers.” Ariel wondered: how closely do the police officers’ waymarkers match up with the hot spots where crime actually happens in Derry? I think you can guess. “The majority of streets included in ‘Waymarkers’ were neither ‘hot’ nor ‘harmful,’ resulting in a false positive rate of over 97 percent,” Ariel concluded. This means that 97 percent of the blocks identified by police officers as being dangerous and violent were not dangerous and violent at all. The officers who drew these waymarkers were not sitting behind a desk, remote from the direct experience of the streets. This was their turf. These were crimes they investigated and criminals they arrested. Yet somehow they could not see a fundamental pattern in the location of the strangers they were arresting.

(Tree air fresheners are known as the “felony forest.”)