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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.

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.

But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency.