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Talking To Strangers Malcolm Gladwell
Talking To Strangers Malcolm Gladwell
Key Insights
[#1: Ch. 3, #2: Ch. 4, #3: Ch. 5, #4: Ch. 6 and Ch. 7, #5: Ch. 2, #6: Ch. 8, #7:
Ch. 10, #8: Ch. 12]
Key Insight 1
People tend to trust one another by default.
For the most part, humans think of their peers as trustworthy. Tim Levine, a
psychologist, developed the Truth-Default Theory, which states that people
operate from the assumption that everyone else is honest. This tendency to
default to truth is a feature, not a flaw, of the social norms that help society
run smoothly. For people to have relationships and conduct business from day
to day, a baseline level of trust must be present.
There’s a general misconception that belief and doubt are mutually exclusive.
But belief is in fact often accompanied by doubt; it’s just that it takes an
extraordinary amount of doubt for belief to truly be shaken. For example, in
one of the most famous experiments in social psychology, the 1961 Milgram
obedience experiment, researchers asked participants to administer what
seemed like severe electrical shocks to actors who pretended to howl in pain.
The study was designed to examine compliance, so the shocks were fake and
the howls were theater. While many participants harbored strong doubts
about the study, very few made the leap to assuming the shocks were not real.
Key Insight 2
A small number of people do not naturally trust others.
The Holy Fool isn’t an aspirational figure because society can’t function if
everyone is skeptical. Humans haven’t evolved to be naturally doubtful of one
another because it’s not a good use of time and resources to overly scrutinize
other people. It is far more advantageous to assume that people are telling the
truth in most, if not all, instances.
Key Insight 3
The suppression of other people’s treachery is not necessarily the result of
conspiracy.
In both the Sandusky and Nassar examples, people who failed to act on
information about abuse gave the criminals the benefit of the doubt. This is
because people who are presented with two options, one of which seems likely
and one of which seems extremely difficult to imagine, are biased towards
believing the scenario that seems more likely. Interpreting information in this
way is not a crime or a conspiracy; it’s simply human nature.
Key Insight 4
How people look and behave doesn’t necessarily align with what they think
and feel.
It’s human nature to believe in transparency, the idea that the look on a
person’s face conveys accurate information about how the person feels. In the
field of psychology, there are classic facial expressions that people associate
with emotions like happiness or sadness. But this theory is reductive.
Transparency is a true enough phenomenon when actors on shows
like Friends convey emotion with their facial expressions. But in real life, the
link between how people look and act and how they think and feel isn’t
necessarily there. A facial expression does not necessarily provide a glimpse
into a person’s inner life.
In many Western cultures, the incorrect, yet persistent, belief in transparency
can lead people to badly assess others’ characters. But facial expressions can
be inauthentic or mismatched with the way a person feels inside. One example
is Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully convicted of her roommate’s murder
when she was studying abroad in Italy. Knox is an eccentric person who was
under extreme duress after the murder. To investigators and other onlookers,
Knox seemed inappropriately angry instead of suitably mournful. She was
wrongfully convicted because she failed to conform to investigators’ idea of
how an innocent person would behave.
Knox is one of many people in the criminal justice system who paid a high
price for failing to meet social expectations. Her situation raises the question
of whether legal systems are reliably capable of looking past stereotypes and
clichés to search for truth. A person’s nervousness might be interpreted by a
stranger as a lie. And conversely, a liar who looks a judge directly in the eye
might go free just for projecting an air of innocence.
Key Insight 5
Face-to-face interactions can be misleading when assessing another
person’s character.
Most people imagine that they can learn something about another person’s
character through face-to-face interaction. For example, judges like to see and
speak with the people they are sentencing, and are often more lenient towards
people who show an appropriate level of remorse. Late-stage job interviews
are usually conducted in person or via video chat. And yet, despite the
consensus that face-to-face meetings are so important, there’s no real evidence
that they aid our judgments in any way. In some cases, these interactions can
be wildly misleading.
Chamberlain had spent more time with Hitler than any other world leader, yet
their time together yielded no helpful insights. In sharp contrast,
Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill, never met with Hitler in person.
But from a distance, Churchill claimed to have formed a more accurate
impression of the Nazi leader.
Key Insight 6
There is no consensus regarding the rules of consent, which complicates
sexual encounters between strangers. Alcohol exacerbates the problem.
Alcohol has long been mistaken as a substance that strips away people’s
inhibitions. There’s a misguided notion in society that alcohol reveals the true
nature of the drinker. It’s more accurate to think of alcohol as a catalyst for
transformation. People who drink too much become strangers even to
themselves, and often behave in ways they aren’t able to remember later.
Alcohol also changes drinkers’ mental perspectives, emphasizing short-term
desires and dampening long-term considerations.
The criminal case against Brock Turner, the 19-year-old Stanford student who
was convicted of sexually assaulting a female classmate, illustrates how
difficult it is for police officers and judges to reconstruct and interpret
problematic sexual encounters between people under the influence of alcohol.
In the hours leading up to the attack, Turner’s accuser was blackout drunk,
meaning she was conscious but unable to form memories. In the absence of
that information, the judge relied instead on assumptions of transparency;
Turner’s behavior in the courtroom was an attitude of honesty and remorse,
and so he was judged with lenience.
Key Insight 7
Behaviors are often coupled to a specific context.
Coupling is a theory that the way in which people behave is conditional upon
their surroundings and circumstances. One example is suicide. People falsely
assume that a suicidal person will, if thwarted in a first attempt, simply try
another method. This theory of method-switching is known as displacement.
But displacement theory is false; most people who try to commit suicide are
coupled to a specific method of choice.
A similar example involves the Golden Gate Bridge, which connects San
Francisco to Marin County, California. City planners resisted installing a
suicide prevention barrier because they falsely assumed that suicidal people
would simply seek out some other means. But the records of people who had
been restrained before they were able to jump from the bridge showed that
very few of them went on to commit suicide in another way. Their suicidal
behavior had been coupled to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Key Insight 8
American police have been trained to be suspicious of strangers, a systemic
failure that led to the death of Sandra Bland.
Important People
Malcolm Gladwell, the author, is a staff writer for the New Yorker.
Sandra Bland was an African American woman who committed suicide after
being wrongfully incarcerated.
Brian Encinia is a former Texas state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland.
Amanda Knox was part of a sensational murder trial involving the 2007 death
of her roommate. She was wrongfully imprisoned in Italy before she was freed
in 2011.
Brock Turner is a young man who was convicted of sexual assault when he was
a student at Stanford University.
Ana Montes was a spy for Cuba. She worked for the US Defense Intelligence
Agency.
Author’s Style
Talking to Strangers follows Malcolm Gladwell’s well-established style of
anecdote-heavy storytelling combined with basic descriptions of some of the
most famous experiments from the history of social psychology. But the story
he tells about strangers is not as tightly woven as some of his other bestsellers,
including The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005). Gladwell’s examples are
unusually sensational, including famous news stories like Amanda Knox’s
conviction for murder and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. He begins and ends
the book with a long look at the final days of Sandra Bland. At times,
Gladwell’s examples seem disconnected; the concept of “strangers” that
Gladwell uses to connect the stories of people like Madoff, Hitler, and Bland is
tenuous at best.
The book has 12 chapters divided into five parts. Gladwell quotes materials
like court transcripts and uses quotations from original interviews that he
conducted himself. The text also includes one interactive exercise to
demonstrate a concept to the reader. The book ends with a Notes section that
lists Gladwell’s sources.
Author’s Perspective
Malcolm Gladwell wrote Talking to Strangers over the course of three years.
During that time, he claims to have conducted numerous interviews and read
many books and articles, only a fraction of which he listed as sources. Gladwell
writes, as always, through a lens of social psychology, particularly emphasizing
the theories of psychologist Tim Levine.
Gladwell frames the book with a discussion of Sandra Bland’s arrest and
death, and invokes the Black Lives Matter movement in his introduction. Yet
he spends little time examining the movement through the lens of race.
Similarly, there’s little to no discussion of gender, class, or power dynamics in
Gladwell’s analysis of the sexual assaults committed by Larry Nassar, Jerry
Sandusky, and Brock Turner. Gladwell’s shallow treatment of these trending
news topics, backed with outdated research from social psychology, seems
hastily assembled.