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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

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Themes

Overconfidence in Judging Strangers

We misjudge strangers on a regular basis, but the bigger problem is perhaps that we are far too confident that our judgments are correct, in large part because we don’t usually realize how bad we are at making sense of strangers. We think we can tell who a person is by meeting them and studying them. We think strangers fit into our narrow stereotypes of how people are supposed to behave. We criticize others for being fooled by dishonest people, believing that we would never have made the same mistakes if we had been in their shoes.

Because we’re overconfident, we often don’t stop to consider alternative possibilities when dealing with a stranger, instead jumping to premature conclusions. Neville Chamberlain was sure that he fully understood Adolf Hitler’s intentions after meeting him a few times. It didn’t occur to Brian Encinia that maybe Sandra Bland was agitated not because she was hiding some sort of criminal activity, but because he himself had made her agitated by pulling her over for something so minor.

Our overconfidence also leads to the conviction that we can figure out the “truth” about a stranger if we just try hard enough. The CIA interrogators did not approach KSM with the thought that they might never learn his secrets. They approached him with the idea that if they just subjected him to enough waterboarding and sleep deprivation, they could sooner or later extract the truth from him.

This problem we have with confidently passing judgment on strangers is why Gladwell’s key suggestion in Talking to Strangers is to act with more humility. He repeatedly attempts to show us that we are not as good at making sense of strangers as we might think. We might believe that we are good at telling a truth from a lie, but even the CIA is terrible at it. We might believe that we are good at judging people’s characters, but the strategies we use to do so are based on myths. The antidote for our overconfidence is to “engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers” (13).

The Perceived Simplicity of Strangers

We all have complex lives. Just because we don’t know much about a person doesn’t mean that their life is any more straightforward than ours. Although we may know in our minds that this is the case, it does not always show in our actions. We often view strangers as if they are less complex and easier to understand than we are. This view is not spoken aloud, but it can nevertheless be seen in the implicit assumptions we make about strangers. People we don’t know are often flattened into one-dimensional beings. Suicidal people are just seen as suicidal people, as though Sylvia Plath’s self-destructiveness captured her entire essence as a person. Prostitutes are just seen as prostitutes, as though their work is the only thing about them that matters. We all too often reduce people to a single quality that we feel defines them, but in doing so, we erase the rest of who they are as an individual.

The assumption of transparency is also, at its core, an assumption of strangers’ simplicity. What is going on inside of a person is complex, and it can’t be determined just by looking someone in the eyes or listening to their tone of voice. We nevertheless use this idea of transparency to try to figure out who people really are and then place them in categories—honest or dishonest, good or bad, normal or strange. We again distill strangers into someone far simpler than they really are.

Many of us would agree that we are capable of hiding our emotions, and we are capable of lying to others when we choose to, yet we often take for granted that strangers are inept at these things. The CIA assumed that it could deceive the Cuban intelligence agency by having an extensive network of spies operating inside the country, but it didn’t realize that the Cubans could deceive the CIA to just as great an extent. The police in Perugia assumed that Amanda Knox’s unusual behavior was a clear sign of her guilt, but they didn’t stop to wonder why a murderer would not try to act normal. We routinely underestimate strangers whether we realize it or not.

The Paradox of Talking to Strangers

In today’s world, we are constantly brought into contact with people we don’t know, including people of very diverse cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives. It’s highly important for us to be able to make sense of strangers, yet we’re awful at it. We struggle to assess their honesty, their character, their emotions, and their intentions. This dichotomy is what Gladwell refers to as “the paradox of talking to strangers” (166).

As flawed as our strategies are, we can’t simply get rid of them. They may not help us much with figuring people out—they may even actively mislead us at times, making us believe we understand a person when we don’t—but these strategies nevertheless play a vital role in maintaining social cohesion. We need to default to truth, because a world in which everyone mistrusts each other is one that none of us would want to live in. We need to continue meeting people and looking them in the face, even if we end up misinterpreting them, because a world with faceless, dehumanized interactions is not one any of us would want to live in either. Gladwell’s conclusion is that we should not abandon our strategies but rather become more aware of how imperfect they are.

Intolerance of Difference

Every society has social norms. They are the unwritten rules about how people should and should not behave in a given situation. In Talking to Strangers, there are repeated instances in which people scold or are skeptical of those whose behavior goes against the dominant social norms. When our interpretation of someone’s behavior fails to match up with the person’s actual emotions and intentions, this is what Gladwell refers to as a “mismatch.”

We routinely encounter people who are different from us, but we are not always tolerant of those differences. When people don’t conform to our narrow expectations of how they ought to act, we tend to believe the worst about them. People questioned the testimony given by Michael McQueary and Jerry Sandusky’s victims because they didn’t act the way we imagine witnesses and victims are supposed to act. The police questioned Amanda Knox’s and Sandra Bland’s innocence because their actions seemed suspicious.

Not only do we thus oversimplify people whom we perceive to be different from us, but we penalize them for being different as well. They are disbelieved, chastised, misunderstood, and shunned. Our intolerance has resulted in “a world that systematically discriminates” against people who deviate from the norm (186).