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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?

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.

To give you just one sense of the mastery of Mullainathan’s machine, it flagged 1 percent of all the defendants as “high risk.” These are the people the computer thought should never be released prior to trial. According to the machine’s calculations, well over half of the people in that high-risk group would commit another crime if let out on bail. When the human judges looked at that same group of bad apples, though, they didn’t identify them as dangerous at all. They released 48.5 percent of them!

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.

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.

For a more complete explanation, I encourage you to read Mullainathan’s paper.

The next three chapters of Talking to Strangers are devoted to the ideas of a psychologist named Tim Levine, who has thought as much about the problem of why we are deceived by strangers as anyone in social science.

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.

Nor did anyone else. Montes had a younger brother named Tito, who was an FBI agent. He had no idea. Her sister was also an FBI agent, who in fact played a key role in exposing a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. She had no idea. Montes’s boyfriend worked for the Pentagon as well. His specialty, believe it or not, was Latin American intelligence. His job was to go up against spies like his girlfriend. He had no idea.

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

Tim Levine’s answer is called the “Truth-Default Theory,” or TDT.

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.

Consider, for example, one of the most famous findings in all of psychology: Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment.

The reason the experiment is so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied. Sixty-five percent ended up administering the maximum dose to the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second World War—and the revelations about what German guards had been ordered to do in Nazi concentration camps—Milgram’s findings caused a sensation.

Over 40 percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd—something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren’t enough to trigger them out of truth-default. That is Levine’s point. 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.

Levine’s theories are laid out in his book, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2019). If you want to understand how deception works, there is no better place to start.

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.

But Graham Spanier is not Harry Markopolos. He opted for the likeliest explanation—that Sandusky was who he claimed to be. Does he regret not asking one more follow-up question, not quietly asking around? Of course he does. But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency.

Fugate is an expert in FACS, which stands for Facial Action Coding System.1 In FACS, every one of the forty-three distinctive muscle movements in the face is assigned a number, called an “action unit.”

In the FACS system, muscular movements are also given an intensity measure from A to E, with A being mildest and E strongest. All of Ross’s four muscle movements, in that moment, are Es.

The idea of transparency has a long history. In 1872, thirteen years after first presenting his famous treatise on evolution, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Smiling and frowning and wrinkling our noses in disgust, he argued, were things that every human being did as part of evolutionary adaptation. 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.

He spent the earliest part of his career testing the limits of transparency. Once he examined dozens of videotapes of judo fighters who had just won their matches to figure out when, exactly, they smiled. Was it at the moment of victory? Or did they win, then smile? Another time he watched videotapes of people masturbating to find out what their faces looked like at the moment of climax. Presumably an orgasm is a moment of true happiness. Is that happiness evident and observable in the moment? In both cases, it wasn’t—which didn’t make sense if our emotions are really a billboard for the heart. These studies made Crivelli a skeptic, so he and Jarillo decided to put Darwin to the test.

“In our culture, my face would be like, ‘I’m scared; I’m scared of you.’” Crivelli went on. “In their culture, that…is the face of somebody who’s trying to scare somebody else.…It’s the opposite [of what it means to us].”

Two German psychologists, Achim Schützwohl and Rainer Reisenzein, created this exact scenario and ran sixty people through it. On a scale of one to ten, those sixty rated their feelings of surprise, when they opened the door after their session with Kafka, at 8.14. They were stunned! And when asked, almost all of them were convinced that surprise was written all over their faces. But it wasn’t. Schützwohl and Reisenzein had a video camera in the corner, and they used it to code everyone’s expressions the same way Fugate had coded the Friends episode.

“No. They were doing this.” He made a noise with his tongue against his palate. “They were going click, click, click.”

Surprised people don’t necessarily look surprised. People who have emotional problems don’t always look like they have emotional problems.

Maybe when a woman shows up in a courtroom wearing a niqab, the correct response isn’t to dismiss her case—it’s to require that everyone wear a veil. For that matter, it is also worth asking whether you should meet the babysitter in person before you hire her, or whether your employer did the right thing in scheduling a face-to-face interview before making you a job offer.

We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. 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.

So what was Amanda Knox’s problem? She was mismatched. She’s the innocent person who acts guilty. She’s Nervous Nelly.

Knox had just been freed after spending four years in an Italian prison for the crime of not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered.

We’re all good at knowing when these kinds of people are misleading us or telling us the truth. We need help with mismatched strangers—the difficult cases. A trained interrogator ought to be adept at getting beneath the confusing signals of demeanor, at understanding that when Nervous Nelly overexplains and gets defensive, that’s who she is—someone who overexplains and gets defensive.

But Tim Levine’s research suggests that they aren’t random—that we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency.

Knox’s list of lovers wasn’t what it seemed, either. In an effort to intimidate her, the Italian police lied to Knox and told her she was HIV positive. Knox, afraid and alone in her cell, wrote a list of her past sexual partners to work out how this could possibly be true.

for his dissertation in Bolivia. He and his wife, Anna Heath, flew to Lima with their baby boy, then waited five hours while mechanics put boosters on the plane’s engines.

The Camba spoke a language that was a mixture of the local Indian languages and seventeenth-century Andalusian Spanish. “It was an

When the Heaths came back to New Haven, they had a bottle of the Camba’s rum analyzed and learned that it was 180 proof. It was laboratory alcohol—the concentration that scientists use to preserve tissue. No one drinks laboratory alcohol. This was the first of the astonishing findings of the Heaths’ research—and, predictably, no one believed it at first.

Here we have a community of people, in a poor and undeveloped part of the world, who hold drinking parties with 180-proof alcohol every weekend, from Saturday night until Monday morning. The Camba must have paid dearly for their excesses, right? Wrong.

But if the Camba’s drinking bouts had so few social side effects, and if the Mixe Indians of Mexico seem to be following a script even during their drunken brawls, then our perception of alcohol as a disinhibiting agent can’t be right.

Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. They think of it as an agent of myopia.

meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision.

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant.

that adding alcohol to the process of understanding another’s intentions makes a hard problem downright impossible.

The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning.

But under certain very particular circumstances—especially if you drink a lot of alcohol very quickly—something else happens. Alcohol hits the hippocampus—small,

the hippocampus starts to struggle.

At or around the 0.15 mark, the hippocampus shuts down and memories stop forming, but it is entirely possible that the frontal lobes, cerebellum, and amygdala of that same drinker—at the same time—can continue to function more or less normally. “You can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you’re drunk,” White said.