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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

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?

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 one exception was Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. He met Hitler in 1937. He loved him. He compared him to Joan of Arc.

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

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.

Accurately and quickly communicating our emotions to one another was of such crucial importance to the survival of the human species, he argued, that the face had developed into a kind of billboard for the heart.

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

She was mismatched. She’s the innocent person who acts guilty.

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

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

Poets die young.

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

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

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.

five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime?

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

Americans commit suicide every year, half of whom do so by shooting themselves. Handguns are the suicide method of choice in the United States—and

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.

If you stand on the bridge long enough, you can expect to see someone try to jump off.

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.

The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. 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.

Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Brian Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart.

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

stranger.

There is significant evidence that African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to traffic stops than white Americans, meaning the

particular indignity of the false positive is not equally distributed across all citizens. It is concentrated on those citizens who already suffer from other indignities.

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.