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

by Malcolm Gladwell

And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments.

The citizens in the areas with beefed-up patrols didn’t feel any safer than the people in the areas with no patrols. They didn’t even seem to notice what had happened. “The results were all in one direction

In the end, 88 percent of the people visited said that they would use the hotline if they saw any guns. So how many calls came in—after 858 door-to-door visits over three months? Two. Both were about guns in another neighborhood. The problem, everyone soon realized, was not that the residents of District 144 didn’t want to help. They did. It was that they never left their houses.

And once they’ve stopped a motorist, police officers are allowed, under the law, to search the car, so long as they have reason to believe the motorist might be armed or dangerous.

Outside District 144, where police business was conducted as usual, crime remained as bad as ever. But inside 144? All of the new focused police work cut gun crimes—shootings, murders, woundings—in half.

He was as stunned as everyone else at what just two extra patrol cars had accomplished. “We usually focus on getting the bad guys after a crime. Maybe going after guns was too simplistic for us.”9

So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency? You get Sandra Bland.

The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

This seems like one of the big conclusions the book is built around.

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

Everyone in his world acted on the presumption that the motorists driving up and down the streets of their corner of Texas could be identified and categorized on the basis of the tone of their voice, fidgety movements, and fast-food wrappers.

Emily Pronin et al., “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 4 (2001): 639–56, APA PsychNET.