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

“In all of these cases, the parties involved relied on a set of strategies to translate one another’s words and intentions. And in each case, something went very wrong. In Talking to Strangers, I want to understand those strategies—analyze them, critique them, figure out where they came from, find out how to fix them.” 

At the end of the introductory chapter, Gladwell explains how he will go about addressing the question of what goes wrong in our interactions with strangers. He sets out to analyze whether the strategies we use to make sense of people are actually useful. Just as one must be careful of differences when translating from one language to another, similar problems can occur when “translating” (i.e., interpreting) another person’s behavior.

“The Mountain Climber was one of the most talented people at one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world. Yet he’d been witness three times to humiliating betrayal—first by Fidel Castro, then by the East Germans, and then, at CIA headquarters itself, by a lazy drunk. And if the CIA’s best can be misled so completely, so many times, then what of the rest of us?” 

Gladwell illustrates his first “puzzle” (why we’re bad at telling when people are lying to us) with stories about how CIA spies were deceived again and again. Here, Gladwell shows why he chose to use anecdotes about the CIA to make this point. Most of us would assume that the CIA is filled with people who are very good at detecting deception, but even they were repeatedly fooled by double agents. It stands to reason that the rest of us are certainly not any better at telling when people are lying. Thus, Gladwell drives home the point that this is an issue that affects humans in general, regardless of their background or training.

“We believe that the information gathered from a personal interaction is uniquely valuable. You would never hire a babysitter for your children without meeting that person first. Companies don’t hire employees blind. They call them in and interview them closely, sometimes for hours at a stretch, on more than one occasion. They do what Chamberlain did: they look people in the eye, observe their demeanor and behavior, and draw conclusions.” 

Chapter 2 explores how Chamberlain was deceived into believing Hitler was an honest man after meeting him, but Gladwell takes a moment to reference more normal, everyday situations that we can all relate to. We may be inclined to believe that we never would have been misled by Hitler—yet day after day, we do the exact same thing that Chamberlain did. Chamberlain confidently felt that Hitler was a man who could be trusted, and we confidently feel that the babysitter we hired can also be trusted.

“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.” 

The overconfidence we feel in our judgments of strangers is a recurring theme throughout the book. Part of this overconfidence comes from oversimplifying strangers yet paradoxically recognizing our own complexity. In this quote, Gladwell repeatedly emphasizes the us-versus-them mentality that underlies this division by contrasting how we view ourselves on the one hand, and how we view the stranger on the other hand.

“We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.” 

Gladwell explains one of the key concepts in the book, truth-default theory. Most of us give people the benefit of the doubt until there’s so much evidence that they’re lying that we can’t ignore it. In contrast to the calculating behavior of a scientist, default-to-truth is not something we do so much because it’s logical, but because it’s a social necessity.

“Because we trust implicitly, spies go undetected, criminals roam free, and lives are damaged. But Levine’s point is that the price of giving up on that strategy is much higher. If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos, there would be no fraud on Wall Street—but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street.” 

Many people would be inclined to say that default-to-truth is a problematic strategy in making sense of strangers, but Gladwell tries to convince the reader otherwise. Harry Markopolos may have been right about Bernie Madoff, but he was also paranoid. Gladwell repeatedly points to Markopolos as an example of why we don’t want a world in which we constantly question each other’s honesty. It would come at a hefty price, namely our ability to have a modern, functioning society.

“When scandals like this break, one of our first inclinations is to accuse those in charge of covering for the criminal—of protecting him, or deliberately turning a blind eye, or putting their institutional or financial interests ahead of the truth. We look for a conspiracy behind the silence. But the Nassar case reminds us how inadequate that interpretation is. Many of Nassar’s chief defenders were the parents of his patients. They weren’t engaged in some kind of conspiracy of silence to protect larger institutional or financial interests. These were their children.” 

Although default-to-truth is something nearly all of us do on a daily basis, we tend to be less than understanding when other people trust the wrong person. Gladwell believes that there is not always a conspiracy behind scandals like the Sandusky and Nassar cases. He emphasizes that that many of the parents of Nassar’s victims started out defending him—and no parent who loves their child would stand idly by if they knew their child was being abused. They didn’t defend Nassar because they had something to gain or lose, but because we have a very strong tendency to default to more innocent explanations for a person’s behavior.

“When we try to send people like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers—without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.” 

People accused Spanier of covering up Sandusky’s crimes, but Gladwell believes that he simply did what most of us would have done in his shoes—he defaulted to truth. If we blame people in positions of power for not acting upon even the slightest of warning signs, then we are asking them to be suspicious of everyone around them. We should stop and “consider the consequences”—no one wants a boss who would fire them at the first sign of a problem, no one wants a teacher who always accuses students of cheating, and no one wants a government that treats all citizens like criminals.

“When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.” 

Gladwell introduces the second strategy we use to make sense of strangers. We assume that reading someone’s face or body language can serve as a shortcut to finding out who they really are. Getting to know someone means, in part, getting to know how that individual expresses their thoughts and emotions. When we don’t know a person, we have little to rely on except our misguided expectations for how people normally express their inner selves.

“Transparency is a myth—an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s ‘jaw dropped with astonishment’ or ‘eyes went wide with surprise.’” 

This remark comes after Gladwell discusses the findings of a study that found people weren’t fully aware of their own facial expressions. Unlike actors on TV, people do not wear their emotions as easily decipherable expressions. Popular media has a powerful influence on us. It teaches us stereotypes of what surprise, happiness, or anger supposedly look like, but those stereotypes often don’t translate to reality.

“The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.” 

Gladwell earlier concluded that although default-to-truth is a far from perfect strategy, society would be far worse if we got rid of it. He reaches the same conclusion with regard to the second strategy, the assumption of transparency. We are inevitably going to try to interpret a person’s facial expressions and overall demeanor when we meet them, but we can’t simply stop meeting people. Abandoning face-to-face interactions would run the risk of dehumanizing people. Our strategies may be “deeply flawed,” but getting rid of them is even more risky. 

“That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it—and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with one another about just how terrible at it we are.” 

Gladwell shows throughout the book that we misjudge strangers on a regular basis—even those who are supposed to be good at reading other people, such as spies or judges. A big part of the problem, as he notes here, is not just that we are terrible at making sense of strangers, but also that we fail to admit just how bad we are. This failure leads us to confidently assume that we have judged people correctly when we haven’t.

“We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t.” 

Here, it becomes apparent that default-to-truth is not a blanket approach that we apply equally in every situation. While we have a general tendency to assume that people are honest, we are less inclined to do so if we think someone looks and acts like a liar. Our interpretations of someone’s demeanor can thus override default-to-truth.

“Why can’t someone be angry in response to a murder, rather than sad? If you were Amanda Knox’s friend, none of this would surprise you. […] But with strangers, we’re intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.” 

Gladwell remarks that we are “intolerant” when a stranger‘s behavior deviates from the norm. Such a deviation can serve as a basis for assuming the worst about a person. Knox did not express grief in the way people thought it should be expressed, and so people assumed she was guilty. This ultimately led to her being imprisoned for murder.

“From Bernard Madoff to Amanda Knox, we do not do well with the mismatched.” 

While “matched” people behave in ways that conform to our expectations, we are highly prone to misread “mismatched” people. Knox was an innocent person who acted in ways people thought only a guilty person would act. Madoff was a con artist but came across as a genuine and honest person. Gladwell’s key point in this chapter is that we are particularly inept at making sense of the mismatched.

“The lesson of myopia is really very simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger—to represent their own desires honestly and clearly—they cannot be blind drunk.” 

Alcohol-induced myopia makes it harder for people to focus on any long-term considerations. We become different people who do not fully consider the consequences our actions could have. Because alcohol changes how we see ourselves and everything around us, Gladwell believes that it is a major complicating factor in situations that require openness and honesty.

“And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.” 

Oftentimes people try very hard to learn the “truth” about another person. Gladwell illustrates this point in Chapter 9 by exploring the strategies used by CIA interrogators to extract the truth out of one of their detainees—after years of interrogation, they ended up with a confession that may or may not be true. He uses this story to make the point that no matter how much we try, there will always be things we don’t know about our fellow human beings. We need to be humble enough to accept that.

“Some of them may have children in nearby schools, and grocery stores where they shop, and friends they like to be close to, and parents they need to look in on—and as a result have all kinds of reasons not to move their business. Their job, at that moment, is sex work. But they are mothers and daughters and friends and citizens first. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.” 

We often see strangers as one-dimensional or possessing only a single defining quality about them. People have different occupations, genders, races, ethnicities, sexualities, religions, nationalities, and numerous other qualities, but none of those dimensions captures the entirety of a person’s identity. Prostitutes are not just prostitutes but multidimensional people with complex lives.

“Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.” 

Gladwell ends Chapter 10 with a succinct takeaway. People’s behavior and actions are affected by the environment that surrounds them. If we ignore such contextual factors, we oversimplify strangers and “jump to conclusions.” We need to consider the entire world of a stranger to understand more about who they are and why they act the way they do.

“There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.” 

While Gladwell endeavors to convince the reader of the importance of contextual factors, he observes that coupling is a notion that is not easy to grasp. We are tempted to believe that being suicidal was an ingrained part of who Sylvia Plath was. We are tempted to believe that if the police cracked down on crime in one place, it would simply migrate to a different place. Recognizing the importance of coupling means recognizing that the decisions we make do not occur in a vacuum.

“What is Sandra Bland? She is also mismatched. She looks to Encinia’s eye like a criminal. But she’s not. She’s just upset. In the aftermath of her death, it was revealed that she had had ten previous encounters with police over the course of her adult life, including five traffic stops, which had left her with almost $8,000 in outstanding fines. She had tried to commit suicide the year before, after the loss of a baby. She had numerous cut marks running up and down one of her arms.” 

In his encounter with Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia leapt to conclusions. He saw her agitated behavior as a sure sign of something nefarious, but the reality was far more benign. She had had bad experiences with the police in the past, so she was probably on edge when Encinia pulled her over. She had suffered multiple traumatic events and was just beginning to pull her life together. This quote serves as a potent reminder that we don’t know what is going on in a stranger’s life when we interact with them.

“He’s terrified of her. And being terrified of a perfectly innocent stranger holding a cigarette is the price you pay for not defaulting to truth.” 

In Gladwell’s view, Encinia was so convinced that Bland was a criminal that he was terrified of her. This story serves as an example of why defaulting to truth is, ultimately, a good thing. Encinia did not default to truth, and as a result he jumped to the worst possible conclusions. Instead of seeing an irritated woman smoking a cigarette, he saw a dangerous and unpredictable criminal.

“So it was that Brian Encinia ended up in a place he should never have been, stopping someone who should never have been stopped, drawing conclusions that should never have been drawn. The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.” 

The events and decisions leading up to Sandra Bland’s death consisted of one mistake after another. Encinia’s bosses should never have employed a stop-and-search policy in a low-crime area. Encinia himself should never have pulled over Bland for something so inconsequential, nor should he have concluded that she was a criminal based on the tiniest of clues. Bland’s death was not the result of a single encounter gone wrong but the result of widespread societal problems.