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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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?

Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.”

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.

I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

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

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

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. 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.

We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high.

“People have too much faith in large organizations,”

over the course of evolution, human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behaviors of those around you.

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

absolute power corrupts absolutely,”

I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default to truth?

Pan-Am smile—the kind of smile a flight attendant gives you when he or she is trying to be polite.

Duchenne smile. It’s what a genuine smile looks like.

Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.

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.

We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.

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.

Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said.

when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

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.