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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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, 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.

The king hath note of all that they intend, By interception Which they dream not of. Or, to put it a bit more plainly: The Queen of Cuba takes note of all that the U.S. intends, by means that all around her do not dream of.

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

We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who are telling the truth. But we’re much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying.

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

“Sometimes, they catch that the instructor leaving the room might be a setup,” Levine says. “The thing they almost never catch is that their partners are fake.…So they think that there might be hidden agendas.

To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a “trigger.” A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.

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.

The right question is: 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.

But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time.

Your default is that he is telling the truth. And whatever little inconsistencies you spot in his story, you explain away.

Madoff smelled a little funny. But he wasn’t willing to believe that he was an out-and-out liar. Simons had doubts, but not enough doubts. He defaulted to truth.

The Holy Fool is a social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the truth.

The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution—and, in many cases, the support of their peers—in the service of exposing fraud and deceit.

What sets the Holy Fool apart is a different sense of the possibility of deception.

Carmichael went with the odds: that’s what we do when we default to truth.

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

But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.

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

Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside.

It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When

Part of what it means to get to know someone is to come to understand how idiosyncratic their emotional expressions can be.

When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea—a stereotype—for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.

But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them.

We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t.

When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we’re flummoxed.

But not Hitler. He’s the dishonest person who acts honest.

“This is the slight sort of offness that rouses muttered suspicion and gossip, the slight sort of offness that courses through our daily lives and governs who we choose to affiliate ourselves with and who we choose to distance ourselves from.”

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.”

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away.

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

You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.”

All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations.

When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self.

The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning. The first drink “dampens” activity in that region. It makes us a little dumber, less capable of handling competing complicated considerations.

It hits the reward centers of the brain, the areas that govern euphoria, and gives them a little jolt. It finds its way into the amygdala.

Alcohol turns the amygdala down a notch.

Alcohol also finds its way to your cerebellum, at the very back of the brain, which is involved in balance and coordination. That’s why you start to stumble and stagger when intoxicated.

Alcohol hits the hippocampus—small, sausage-like regions on each side of the brain that are responsible for forming memories about our lives. At a blood-alcohol level of roughly 0.08—the legal level of intoxication—the hippocampus starts to struggle.

Myopia resolves high conflict: it removes the higher-order constraints on our behavior.

Hitler at all. He should have stayed home and read Mein Kampf.

The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet.

And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits.

We will never ...

whole truth. We have to be satisfied with somethi...

The right way to talk to strangers is with cauti...

The alternative possibility is that suicide is a behavior coupled to a particular context.

Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.