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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

willing to engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers—she

the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: 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.

the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error.

The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

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.