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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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

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.

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

We’re truth-biased. For what turn out to be good reasons, we give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that the people we’re talking to are being honest.

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.