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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.2

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.

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.