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

by Malcolm Gladwell

If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.

Their decision to commit suicide is coupled to that particular bridge.

Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only at that given moment.

The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors 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.

Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts.

Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

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.

They started doing far more haystack searches. They instructed their police officers to disregard their natural inclination to default to truth—and start imagining the worst:

Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?

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