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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.

In the sixteenth century, there were close to seventy wars involving the nations and states of Europe.

If there was a pattern to the endless conflict, it was that battles overwhelmingly involved neighbors. You fought the person directly across the border, who had always been directly across your border. Or you fought someone inside your own borders: the Ottoman War of 1509 was between two brothers. Throughout the majority of human history, encounters—hostile or otherwise—were rarely between strangers. The people you met and fought often believed in the same God as you, built their buildings and organized their cities in the same way you did, fought their wars with the same weapons according to the same rules.

But the sixteenth century’s bloodiest conflict fit none of those patterns. When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés met the Aztec ruler Montezuma II, neither side knew anything about the other at all.

Cortés’s foray into Mexico ushered in the era of catastrophic colonial expansion. And it also introduced a new and distinctly modern pattern of social interaction. 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. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

The Mountain Climber was one of the most talented people at one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world. Yet he’d been witness three times to humiliating betrayal—first by Fidel Castro, then by the East Germans, and then, at CIA headquarters itself, by a lazy drunk. And if the CIA’s best can be misled so completely, so many times, then what of the rest of us? Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?

One of the odd things about the desperate hours of the late 1930s, as Hitler dragged the world toward war, was how few of the world’s leaders really knew the German leader.1 Hitler was a mystery. Franklin Roosevelt, the American president throughout Hitler’s rise, never met him. Nor did Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader. Winston Churchill, Chamberlain’s successor, came close while researching a book in Munich in 1932. He and Hitler twice made plans to meet for tea, but on both occasions Hitler stood him up.

Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler are widely regarded as one of the great follies of the Second World War. Chamberlain fell under Hitler’s spell. He was outmaneuvered at the bargaining table. He misread Hitler’s intentions, and failed to warn Hitler that if he reneged on his promises there would be serious consequences. History has not been kind to Neville Chamberlain.

But underneath those criticisms is a puzzle. Chamberlain flew back to Germany two more times. He sat with Hitler for hours. The two men talked, argued, ate together, walked around together. Chamberlain was the only Allied leader of that period to spend any significant time with Hitler. He made careful note of the man’s behavior. “Hitler’s appearance and manner when I saw him appeared to show that the storm signals were up,” Chamberlain told his sister Hilda after another of his visits to Germany. But then “he gave me the double handshake that he reserves for specially friendly demonstrations.” Back in London, he told his cabinet that he had seen in the Führer “no signs of insanity but many of excitement.” Hitler wasn’t crazy. He was rational, determined: “He had thought out what he wanted and he meant to get it and he would not brook opposition beyond a certain point.”

Chamberlain was acting on the same assumption that we all follow in our efforts to make sense of strangers. We believe that the information gathered from a personal interaction is uniquely valuable. You would never hire a babysitter for your children without meeting that person first. Companies don’t hire employees blind. They call them in and interview them closely, sometimes for hours at a stretch, on more than one occasion. They do what Chamberlain did: they look people in the eye, observe their demeanor and behavior, and draw conclusions. He gave me the double handshake. Yet a...

Is this because Chamberlain was naive? Perhaps. His experience in foreign affairs was minimal. One of his critics would later compare him to a priest entering a pub for the first time, blind to the dif...

The blindness of Chamberlain and Halifax and Henderson is not at all like Puzzle Number One, from the previous chapter. That was about the inability of otherwise intelligent and dedicated people to understand when they are being deceived. This is a situation where some people were deceived by Hitler and others were not. And the puzzle is that the group who were deceived are the ones you’d expect not to be, while those who saw the truth are the ones you’d think would be deceived.

Winston Churchill, for example, never believed for a moment that Hitler was anything more than a duplicitous thug. Churchill called Chamberlain’s visit “the stupidest thing that has ever been done.” But Hitler was someone he’d only ever read about. Duff Cooper, one of Chamberlain’s cabinet ministers, was equally clear-eyed. He listened with horror to Chamberlain’s account of his meeting with Hitler. Later, he would resign from Chamberlain’s government in protest. Did Cooper know Hitler? No. Only one person in the upper reaches of the British diplomatic service—Anthony Eden, who preceded Halifax as foreign secretary—had both met Hitler and saw the truth of him. But for everyone else? 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.

This could all be a coincidence, of course. Perhaps Chamberlain and his cohort, for whatever private reason, were determined to see the Hitler they wanted to see, regardless of the evidence of their eyes and ears. ...

In my second book, Blink, I told the story of how orchestras made much smarter recruiting decisions once they had prospective hires audition behind a screen. Taking information away from the hiring committee made for better judgments. But that was because the information gleaned from watching someone play is largely irrelevant. If you’re judging whether someone is a good violin player, knowing whether that person is big or small, handsome or homely, white or black isn’t going to help. In fact, it will probably only introduce biases that will make your job even harder.

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?

We have, in other words, CIA officers who cannot make sense of their spies, judges who cannot make sense of their defendants, and prime ministers who cannot make sense of their adversaries. We have people struggling with their first impressions of a stranger. We have people struggling when they have months to understand a stranger. We have people struggling when they meet with someone only once, and people struggling when they return to the stranger again and again. They struggle with assessing a stranger’s honesty. They struggle with a stranger’s character. They struggle with a stranger’s intent. It’s a mess.

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.

This is the problem at the heart of those first two puzzles. The officers on the Cuba desk of the CIA were sure they could evaluate the loyalty of their spies. Judges don’t throw up their hands at the prospect of assessing the character of defendants. They give themselves a minute or two, then authoritatively pass judgment. Neville Chamberlain never questioned the wisdom of his bold plan to avert war. If Hitler’s intentions were unclear, it was his job, as prime minister, to go to Germany and figure them out.

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 ...

In the classic spy novel, the secret agent is slippery and devious. We’re hoodwinked by the brilliance of the enemy. That was the way many CIA insiders explained away Florentino Aspillaga’s revelations: Castro is a genius. The agents were brilliant actors. In truth, however, the most dangerous spies are rarely diabolical. Aldrich Ames, maybe the most damaging traitor in American history, had mediocre performance reviews, a drinking problem, and didn’t even try to hide all the money he was getting from the Soviet Union for his spying.

Ana Montes was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested, the DIA found the codes she used to send her dispatches to Havana…in her purse. And in her apartment, she had a shortwave radio in a shoebox in her closet.

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

Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn’t.

Just about everyone is terrible: police officers, judges, therapists—even CIA officers running big spy networks overseas. Everyone. Why?4 Tim Levine’s answer is called the “Truth-Default Theory,” or TDT.

What he meant was this. If I tell you that your accuracy rate on Levine’s videos is right around 50 percent, the natural assumption is to think that you are just randomly guessing—that you have no idea what you are doing. But Park’s observation was that that’s not true. 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 go through all those videos, and we guess—“true, true, true”—which means we get most of the truthful interviews right, and most of the liars wrong. We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.

Levine says his own experiment is an almost perfect illustration of this phenomenon. He invites people to play a trivia game for money. Suddenly the instructor is called out of the room. And she just happens to leave the answers to the test in plain view on her desk? Levine says that, logically, the subjects should roll their eyes at this point. These are college students. They’re not stupid. They’ve signed up for a psychological experiment. They’re given a “partner,” whom they’ve never met, who is egging them on to cheat. You would think that they might be even a little suspicious that things are not as they seem. But no!

“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. They think it might be a setup because experiments are setups, right? But this ...

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. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. ...

This proposition sounds at first like the kind of hairsplitting that social scientists love to engage in. It is not. It’s a profound point that expla...

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.

I’m going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it’s crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. 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.

I thought, Well, maybe she’s been seeing a married guy…and she didn’t want to tell me. Or maybe she’s a lesbian or something and she was hooking up with a girlfriend that she doesn’t want us to know [about], and she’s worried about that. I started thinking about all these other possibilities and I sort of accepted it, just enough so that I wouldn’t keep going crazy. I accepted it.

Ana Montes wasn’t a master spy. She didn’t need to be. In a world where our lie detector is set to the “off” position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all. He did what Truth-Default Theory would predict any of us would do: he operated from the assumption that Ana Montes was telling the truth, and—almost without realizing it—worked to square everything she said with that assumption. We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high. Carmichael was nowhere near that point.

The simple truth, Levine argues, is that lie detection does not—cannot—work the way we expect it to work. In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time. You ask your husband if he is having an affair, and he says no, and you believe him. Your default is that he is telling the truth. And whatever little inconsistencies you spot in his story, you explain away. But three months later you happen to notice an unusual hotel charge on his credit-ca...

This is the explanation for the first of the puzzles, why the Cubans were able to pull the wool over the CIA’s eyes for so long. That story is not an indictment of the agency’s competence. It just reflects the fact that CIA officers are—like the rest of us—h...

In November 2003, Nat Simons, a portfolio manager for the Long Island–based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, wrote a worried email to several of his colleagues. Through a complicated set of financial arrangements, Renaissance found itself with a stake in a fund run by an investor in New York named Bernard Madoff, and Madoff made Simons uneasy.

If you worked in the financial world in New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, chances are you’d heard of Bernard Madoff. He worked out of an elegant office tower in Midtown Manhattan called the Lipstick Building. He served on the boards of a number of important financial-industry associations. He moved between the monied circles of the Hamptons and Palm Beach. He had an imperious manner and a flowing mane of white hair. He was reclusive, secretive. And that last fact was what made Simons uneasy. He’d heard rumors. Someone he trusted, he wrote in the group email, “told us in confidence that he believes that Madoff will have a serious problem within a year.”

He went on: “Throw in that his brother-in-law is his auditor and his son is also high up in the organization, and you have the risk of some nasty all...

The next day Henry Laufer, one of the firm’s senior executives, wrote back. He agreed. Renaissance, he added, had “independent evidence” that something was amiss with Madoff. Then Renaissance’s risk manager, Paul Broder—the person responsible for making sure the fund didn’t put its money anywhere dangerous—weighed in with a long, detailed analysis of the trading strategy that Madoff claimed to be using. “None of it seems to add up,” he concluded. The three of them decided to conduct their own in-house investigation. Their suspicions deepened. “I came to the conclusion that we didn’t understand what he was doing,” Broder would say later. “We ...

So did Renaissance sell off its stake in Madoff? Not quite. They cut their stake in half. They hedged their bets. Five years later, after Madoff had been exposed as a fraud—the mastermind of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history—federal investigators sat down with Nat Simons and asked him to explain why. “I never, as the manager, entertained the thought that it was truly fraudulent,” Simons said. He was willing to admit that he didn’t understand what Madoff was up to, and that Madoff smelled a little funny...

Lamore took his doubts to his boss, Robert Sollazzo, who had doubts too. But not enough doubts. As the SEC postmortem on the Madoff case concluded, “Sollazzo did not find that Madoff’s claim to be trading on ‘gut feel’ was ‘necessarily…ridiculous.’” The SEC defaulted to truth, and the fraud continued. Across Wall Street, in fact, countless people who had had dealings with Madoff thought that something didn’t quite add up about him. Several investment banks steered clear of him. Even the real-estate broker who rented him his office space thought he was a bit off. But no one did anything about it, or jumped to the conclusion that he was history’s greatest con man. In the Madoff case, everyone defaulted to truth—everyone, that is, except one person.

Harry Markopolos, alone among the people who had doubts about Bernie Madoff, did not default to truth. He saw a stranger for who that stranger really was. Midway through the hearing, one of the congressmen asked Markopolos if he would come to Washington and run the SEC. In the aftermath of one of the worst financial scandals in history, the feeling was that Harry Markopolos was someone we could all learn from. Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free. Or is it? Here we come to the second, crucial component of Tim Levine’s ideas about deception and truth-default.

Harry Markopolos is wiry and energetic. He’s well into middle age, but looks much younger. He’s compelling and likable, a talker—although he tells awkward jokes that sometimes stop conversation. He describes himself as obsessive: the sort to wipe down his keyboard with disinfectant after he opens his computer. He is what’s known on Wall Street as a quant, a numbers guy. “For me, math is truth,” he says. When he analyzes an investment opportunity or a company, he prefers not to meet any of the principals personally; he doesn’t want to make the Neville Chamberlain error. I want to hear and see what they’re saying remotely through their public appearances, through their financial statements, and then I want to analyze that information mathematically using these simple techniques.…I want to find the truth. I don’t want to have a favorable opinion of somebody who glad-hands me, because that could only negatively affect my case.

The standard immigrant-entrepreneur story is about the redemptive power of grit and ingenuity. To hear Markopolos tell it, his early experiences in the family business taught him instead how dark and dangerous the world was: I saw a lot of theft in the Arthur Treacher’s. And so I became fraud-aware at a formative age, in my teens and early twenties. And I saw what people are capable of doing, because when you run a business, five to six percent of your revenues are going to be lost to theft. That’s the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ statistics. I didn’t know the statistics when I was a young ’un. That organization didn’t exist. But I saw it. I saw our chicken and shrimp sprout legs and walk out the back door on a regular basis. They would throw cases of that stuff in the back of their cars. That was the employees.

When Harry Markopolos was in business school, one of his professors gave him an A. But Markopolos double-checked the formula the professor used to calculate grades and realized that there had been a mistake. He had actually earned an A-minus. He went to the professor and complained. In his first job out of business school, he worked for a brokerage selling over-the-counter stocks, and one of the rules of that marketplace is that the broker must report any trade within ninety seconds. Markopolos discovered that his new employer was waiting longer than ninety seconds. He reported his own bosses to the regulators. Nobody likes a tattletale, we learn as children, understanding that sometimes pursuing what seems fair and moral comes with an unacceptable social cost. If Markopolos was ever told that as a child, he certainly didn’t listen.

Markopolos first heard about Madoff in the late 1980s. The hedge fund he worked for had noticed Madoff’s spectacular returns, and they wanted Markopolos to copy Madoff’s strategy. Markopolos tried. But he couldn’t figure out what Madoff’s strategy was. Madoff claimed to be making his money based on heavy trading of a financial instrument known as a derivative. But there was simply no trace of Madoff in those markets. “I was trading huge amounts of derivatives ...

So I called the people that I knew on the trading desks: “Are you trading with Madoff?” They all said no. Well, if you are trading derivatives, you pretty much have to go to the largest five banks to trade the size that he was trading. If the largest five banks don’t know your trades and are not seeing your business, then you have to be a Ponzi sc...

Markopolos was precisely where the people at Renaissance would be several years later. He had done the math, and he had doubts. Madoff’s business didn’t make sense. The difference between Markopolos and Renaissance, however, is that Renaissance trusted the system. Madoff was part of one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the entire financial market. If he was really just making things up, wouldn’t one of the many government watchdogs have caught h...

The people at Renaissance are brilliant. Yet in one crucial respect, they were exactly like the students in Levine’s experiment who watched the instructor leave, spotted the envelope with the answers lying conspicuously on the desk, but couldn’t quite make the leap to believe that it was all a setup. But not Markopolos. He was armed with all the same facts but none of the faith in the system. To him, dishonesty and stupidity are everywhere. “People have too much faith in large organizations,” he said. “They trust the accounting firms, which you should never trust because they’re incompetent. On a best day they’re incompetent, on a bad day they’re crooked, and aiding and abetting the fraud, looking the other way.”