Overview

Throughout most of history, prior to colonial expansion, people’s worlds were

surprisingly small and local. From daily errands to sensational wars, life was a
series of encounters between people who knew one another. Then something
shifted. From the Age of Exploration onward, encounters with strangers
became a routine part of life. As people from different parts of the world
communicated through translators, subtleties of meaning were lost and
misunderstandings were frequent. Similar problems of interpersonal
communication persist today, even among people who speak the same
language. It’s often challenging to understand people who are from different
backgrounds. And it’s difficult to avoid making assumptions about how
strangers perceive the world.

Sometimes misunderstandings between people are due to lies, which can be

very difficult for humans to detect. Some lies are difficult to perceive because
the liar seems truthful. Other times, the person lies badly, and earns the trust
of others anyway. It’s not that everyone is gullible. It’s just that it’s human
nature to trust that most people are telling the truth. In addition to that
problem, people imagine themselves to be good judges of character. In fact,
most are not.

Misunderstanding strangers can be terribly costly. It can increase

vulnerability to sexual assault. It can cause people to lose their life savings.
Misunderstandings can send innocent people to jail, or even rob people of
their lives. So it’s incumbent upon everyone to work hard to understand other
people’s perspectives.

Between strangers, the truth is always fragile. If it is pursued carelessly, as

when an interrogator tortures a terrorist for information, the truth can be
damaged to the point where it becomes harmful. Part of the work of
understanding strangers is grasping that, fundamentally, it’s impossible to
know the full truth about another person. Accepting our own limits as
communicators is a prerequisite to real understanding.

Key Insights

1. People tend to trust one another by default.

2. A small number of people do not naturally trust others.
3. The suppression of other people’s treachery is not necessarily the result of
conspiracy.
 4. How people look and behave doesn’t necessarily align with what they
think and feel.
5. Face-to-face interactions can be misleading when assessing another
person’s character.
6. There is no consensus regarding the rules of consent, which complicates
sexual encounters between strangers. Alcohol exacerbates the problem.
7. Behaviors are often coupled to a specific context.
8. American police have been trained to be suspicious of strangers, a
systemic failure that led to the death of Sandra Bland.

Key Insight References

[#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.

Truth-Default Theory states that a specific triggering event is required for a

person’s belief to truly bend and break. A trigger has to be more definitive
than a doubt, because doubts can be rationalized and explained away. For
example, it takes stunning, undeniable evidence for most people to recognize
treachery by an investor who is swindling people’s money, or a doctor who is
sexually abusing patients. Human nature makes it difficult to spot even the
most blatant of lies. For instance, the deception of Ana Montes, a Cuban spy
who worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency, wasn’t detected by her
colleagues for years. They doubted her for many years before their disbelief
was triggered to the degree that she was finally prosecuted. Montes wasn’t a
particularly good spy, but her actions remained undetected for so long because
her colleagues defaulted to assuming she was honest.

Key Insight 2
A small number of people do not naturally trust others.

Some people are naturally skeptical of others. Harry Markopolos, the

whistleblower who identified Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme years ahead of
authorities, is one such person. As a white-collar fraud investigator,
Markopolos saw through Madoff’s deception when others ignored their own
reservations and doubts. For example, several investors and analysts at a
hedge fund called Renaissance thought that Madoff’s returns seemed
suspicious. But they never truly believed that Madoff was committing fraud.
They defaulted to assuming that he was telling the truth because Madoff was
operating in such a highly regulated sector that it seemed fraud was extremely
unlikely.

Markopolos can be understood as a kind of Holy Fool, an archetype that can

be traced back to old Russian folklore. In those stories, outcast figures
acknowledge truths that other characters may not be able to recognize or
discuss freely. For example, a child in a story might naively voice an important
truth that adults can’t or won’t acknowledge for political reasons, like the boy
who points out the emperor is naked in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The
Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the contemporary world, Holy Fools can spot liars
and cons because they think critically and express skepticism, even if it makes
them look silly in other people’s eyes. But this willingness to stand apart can
make it difficult for Holy Fools to form trusting relationships with other
people. This archetype fits Markopolos, whose paranoia has been a
debilitating obstacle in his life.

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 many famous criminal trials, prosecutors present the truth of what

happened as a simple, unambiguous narrative. A good example is the trial of
pedophile Jerry Sandusky, who raped dozens of boys during the years he was
involved with the Pennsylvania State University football program as a former
coach turned philanthropist. Michael McQueary, the assistant coach who
reported an incident he witnessed between Sandusky and a boy 10 years
before Sandusky was officially investigated, was portrayed by the media and
by trial lawyers as part of a university-wide conspiracy to cover Sandusky’s
tracks. In fact McQueary was unsure about what, exactly, he had witnessed, an
ambivalence he conveyed to everyone to whom he described the incident. Also,
as McQueary’s story went up the chain of command at Penn State, the sexual
nature of what he witnessed was minimized, causing the investigation to be
delayed for years. Some of the university’s administrators were later fired or
convicted for their mishandling of the situation. But numerous other adults,
including parents and counselors, had independently been told of Sandusky’s
behaviors firsthand, by the boys he abused. However, they were reluctant to
believe the truth, that such a powerful and respected man could be guilty of
child abuse, in part because humans find it difficult to identify lies by people
they have deemed to be of good character.

Another stark example is the criminal trial of Larry Nassar, a doctor at

Michigan State University who sexually abused countless girls and women in
the gymnastics program. The parents of the girls who were molested did not
conspire to cover up Nassar’s crimes. Some parents had received ambiguous
reports from their daughters about Nassar’s abuse. But these reports did not
raise enough doubts in their minds to question Nassar’s standing as a
physician. It simply didn’t occur to these parents that he was a child molester.

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.

A notorious example regards the judgment of Neville Chamberlain, who was

the prime minister of the United Kingdom in the dawn of World War II.
Leading up to the war, Chamberlain met face-to-face with Adolf Hitler several
times. It was considered a daring act of diplomacy because so few leaders had
met with Hitler, but Chamberlain strongly felt that he could only form an
impression of Hitler’s intentions if they met in person. The two leaders met on
three separate occasions in Germany. After the first and subsequent meetings,
Chamberlain reassured his country and all of Europe that Hitler had promised
to seize no more territory than the Sudetenland, which according to Hitler was
an ethnically German part of Czechoslovakia that rightfully belonged to
Germany. But Chamberlain’s assessment of Hitler’s character as a man of his
word was wrong.

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.

Despite psychological research and historical examples to the contrary, the

backwards notion that in-person meetings allow an individual to understand
another person’s character persists as a truism. As a society, it’s necessary to
reevaluate the way in which we gather information about other people.

Key Insight 6
There is no consensus regarding the rules of consent, which complicates
sexual encounters between strangers. Alcohol exacerbates the problem.

In theory, sexual relationships are navigated by terms of consent, but there’s

no broad understanding of what the unspoken rules are. It’s very easy for
people who have just met to misunderstand cues and signals during a sexual
encounter. Words and behaviors that may be interpreted as consent vary from
individual to individual—a situation that worsens considerably when both
parties have been drinking alcohol.

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 good example of the coupling theory in action involves the modernization of

British gas industry in the 1960s. Before the industry switched to a cleaner
kind of gas, a common suicide method for women in the UK was carbon
monoxide poisoning, which was conveniently available via kitchen ovens.
Famously, the poet Sylvia Plath killed herself in this way. Soon after Plath’s
death, access to carbon monoxide poisoning dropped sharply across the
country when gas companies switched to a different form of gas that couldn’t
be used for suicide. Women’s suicide rate dropped because their deaths had
been coupled to the availability of gas; instead of looking for another method,
fewer women committed suicide.

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.

Coupling is a phenomenon that extends beyond suicidal behaviors. One

example is criminality. Researchers have found that crime is coupled, or even
anchored, to very specific places. For example, in a given neighborhood, one
block might have a thriving trade in prostitution, while the surrounding blocks
do not. Policing the high-prostitution block will not displace the crime to
another block; it will disrupt the crime altogether.

Key Insight 8
American police have been trained to be suspicious of strangers, a systemic
failure that led to the death of Sandra Bland.

In the summer of 2015, Sandra Bland, an African American woman from

Illinois, was pulled over in Waller County by Brian Encinia, a Texas police
officer, for her failure to signal a lane change. The encounter went sour when
Bland lit a cigarette and ignored Encinia’s request to put it out. The incident,
which escalated because Encinia mistakenly believed Bland to be dangerous,
can be understood as a failure of communication between two strangers.
Bland was argumentative and uneasy because she had received expensive
tickets from police officers in the past. Encinia’s failure to understand why his
actions upset Bland ultimately led to her death in a jail cell three days later.
Her arrest could have been avoided altogether if Encinia had chosen to
deescalate the situation. But Encinia’s failure wasn’t necessarily personal; it
was a systemic failure. As a police officer, he had been trained to be naturally
suspicious of strangers.
Much of Encinia’s police work involved pulling over people for minor traffic
infractions and then observing whether or not the driver behaved suspiciously.
This method of policing was developed in Kansas City in the early 1990s. At
the time, a young criminologist, Lawrence Sherman, solved an epidemic of
violence in the city by asking police officers to search as many cars as possible
for guns by pulling drivers over for minor traffic violations. But the reason
Sherman’s method was successful was because it was highly targeted to a
small district; the method was coupled not just to Kansas City, but to specific,
small areas within Kansas City where gun violence was a big problem.

Sherman’s program succeeded in reducing violence in Kansas City, but it has

had terrible consequences for many regions throughout the United States that
attempted to replicate the model. Police departments across the nation
adopted Sherman’s methods and applied them to areas where they could not
be useful. In 2019, US police officers made approximately 20 million traffic
stops. And these police engaged with drivers from a baseline of suspicion,
instead of trust—a fundamentally antisocial perspective that leads to violent
encounters like the one that Brian Encinia had with 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.

Tim Levine is a social psychologist.

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.

Bernie Madoff orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history. He was

convicted of fraud in 2009.

Brock Turner is a young man who was convicted of sexual assault when he was
a student at Stanford University.

Jerry Sandusky is a convicted pedophile.

Larry Nassar is a convicted child molester.

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.