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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

rapt

glad-hands

He said the one fact he keeps in mind whenever he goes to the doctor’s office is that forty cents of every health-care dollar goes to either fraud or waste.

In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the “Holy Fool.” The Holy Fool is a social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the truth.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous children’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the king walks down the street in what he has been told is a magical outfit. No one says a word except a small boy, who cries out, “Look at the king! He’s not wearing anything at all!” The little boy is a Holy Fool.

If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos, there would be no fraud on Wall Street—but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street.fn1

garrulous,

And why do we think that if someone puts on a sad face, casts their eyes down, and lowers their head, then some kind of sea change has taken place in their heart? Life is not Friends. Seeing Walker didn’t help the judge. It hurt him. It allowed him to explain away the simple fact that Walker had put a gun to his girlfriend’s head and failed to kill her only because the gun misfired. Four months later, while out on bail, Walker shot his girlfriend to death.

Guede was a shady character who had been hanging around the house in the Italian city of Perugia, where Kercher, a college student, was living during a year abroad. Guede had a criminal history. He admitted to being in Kercher’s house the night of her murder—and could give only the most implausible reasons for why. The crime scene was covered in his DNA. After her body was discovered, he immediately fled Italy for Germany.

Levine argues that this is the assumption of transparency in action. 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.

The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look. Blushing Sally matches. She acts like our stereotype of how a liar acts. And she also happens to be lying.

Matched people conform with our expectations. Their intentions are consistent with their behavior. The mismatched are confusing and unpredictable:

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.

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

Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.fn2,

This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety.

In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.”

They used the myopia of alcohol to temporarily create a different world for themselves. They gave themselves strict rules: one bottle at a time, an organized series of toasts, all seated around the circle, only on the weekends, never alone. They drank only within a structure, and the structure of those drinking circles in the Bolivian interior was a world of soft music and quiet conversation: order, friendship, predictability, and ritual.

The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning. The first drink “dampens” activity in that region. It makes us a little dumber, less capable of handling competing complicated considerations. It hits the reward centers of the brain, the areas that govern euphoria, and gives them a little jolt. It finds its way into the amygdala.

Alcohol also finds its way to your cerebellum, at the very back of the brain, which is involved in balance and coordination. That’s why you start to stumble and stagger when intoxicated.

Alcohol hits the hippocampus—small, sausage-like regions on each side of the brain that are responsible for forming memories about our lives. At a blood-alcohol level of roughly 0.08—the legal level of intoxication—the hippocampus starts to struggle. When you wake up the morning after a cocktail party and remember meeting someone but cannot for the life of you remember their name or the story they told you, that’s because the two shots of whiskey you drank in quick succession reached your hippocampus.

“What that means is you might, as a female, go to a party and you might remember having a drink downstairs, but you don’t remember getting raped. But then you do remember getting in the taxi.”

Mitchell and Jessen met in Spokane, Washington, where they were both staff psychologists for the Air Force’s SERE program—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. All branches of the U.S. military have their own versions of SERE, which involves teaching key personnel what to do in the event that they fall into enemy hands.

One particularly effective technique developed at SERE was “walling.” You wrap a towel around someone’s neck to support their head, then bang them up against a specially constructed wall.

In Mitchell’s experience, men and women react very differently to this scenario. The men tend to fold. The women don’t.

They put me in a fifty-five-gallon drum that was buried in the ground, put a lid on it, covered it up with dirt. At the top of the drum, protruding through the lid, was a hose spewing cold water …. Unbeknownst to me because of the way they positioned me, the drain holes were at the very top, at the level of my nose.

This is where the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program came from.

So Mitchell and Jessen made a list, at the top of which was sleep deprivation, walling, and waterboarding.

As a precautionary step, he and Jessen tried it out on themselves first, each waterboarding the other—two sessions in total for each of them, using the most aggressive protocol, the forty-second continuous pour.

Waterboarding was the technique of last resort. They used a hospital gurney, tilted at 45 degrees. The Justice Department allowed them to pour at twenty- to forty-second intervals, separated by three breaths, for a total of twenty minutes.

And KSM was a hard-core guy. Mitchell and Jessen could use only walling and sleep deprivation to get him to talk because, incredibly, waterboarding did not work on him.

Morgan realized that it was the uncertainty of their situation that was unsettling to them.

He goes, “They don’t even remember me, and I’m the guy who was yelling at them thirty minutes ago.”

He wanted them to identify the commandant—the man in charge. “Out of the fifty-two students, twenty of them picked this doctor

By some accounts, Mitchell and Jessen had disrupted and denied KSM’s sleep for a week. After all that abuse, did KSM know what his real memories were anymore? In his book Why Torture Doesn’t Work, neuroscientist Shane O’Mara writes that extended sleep deprivation “might induce some form of surface compliance”—but only at the cost of “long-term structural remodeling of the brain systems that support the very functions that the interrogator wishes to have access to.”

But the harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become. Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all.

She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the oven, and took her own life.

few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.fn1,

“[Town] gas had unique advantages as a lethal method,” criminologist Ronald Clarke wrote in his classic 1988 essay laying out the first sustained argument in favor of coupling:

Or consider the inexplicable saga of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.13 Since it opened in 1937, it has been the site of more than 1,500 suicides. No other place in the world has seen as many people take their lives in that period.

“What I found was, quite quickly, that after we got to know the area, we spent all our time on one or two streets,” he says. “It was the bad neighborhood of town, [but] most of the streets didn’t have any crime.”

call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime.