Book notes: Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

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

Synopsis:

“Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the number-one New York Times best seller Outliers, reinvents the audiobook in this immersive production of Talking to Strangers, a powerful examination of our interactions with people we don’t know. 

How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn’t true? 

While tackling these questions, Malcolm Gladwell was not solely writing a book for the page. He was also producing for the ear. In the audiobook version of Talking to Strangers, you’ll hear the voices of people he interviewed – scientists, criminologists, military psychologists. Court transcripts are brought to life with re-enactments. You actually hear the contentious arrest of Sandra Bland by the side of the road in Texas. As Gladwell revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, and the suicide of Sylvia Plath, you hear directly from many of the players in these real-life tragedies. There’s even a theme song – Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout”. 

Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.” -Audible

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Opening thoughts:

I’ve read a handful of other Malcolm Gladwell books and they’re always very eye-opening and informative. He’s a great storyteller and I do like his writing style, so I’m pretty excited to start reading it. I think my good friend who also listens to audio books saw this come out recently and recommended it to me. I believe she’s also reading it so it’ll be fun to recap with her afterward.

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Key notes:

• Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at translation with strangers of different backgrounds and perspectives

Part One: Spies and Diplomats – Two puzzles

CHAPTER 1: Fidel Castro’s Revenge

• Puzzle #1: why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?

Chapter 2: Getting to Know the Fuhrer

• Puzzle #2: how is it we can be worse off after meeting a stranger than not meeting them?
• Strangers are not easy
  • They are just as complex and enigmatic as ourselves 

Part Two: Default to Trust

Chapter 3: The Queen of Cuba

• Why are we so bad at detecting lies?
  • One researcher says Truth Default Theory (TDT)
    • We have a default to truth, our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest
    • A study showed that we believe people because we do not have enough evidence to not believe them

Chapter 4: The Holy Fool

• The holy fool, or whistleblowers in modern times, are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institutions, and in many cases the support of their peers, in the service of exposing fraud and deceit 
• When we default to truth, we go with the odds which is actually logical
  • Trying to find fraud and deceit also takes a lot of energy and isn’t efficient
• The statistics say the liar and the con man are rare, but to the holy fool, they are everywhere
  • We need holy fools in society from time to time
    • They perform a valuable role, that’s why we romanticize them
  • We never evolved or developed in ability to filter out liars because there’s no advantage to scrutinizing the behavior of those around you
  • The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful
• Efficient communication and defaulting to trust has huge benefits that aren’t worth the trade-off

Chapter 5: Case Study – The Boy in the Shower

Reader’s note: This section was all about how a coach who was highly respected in his community and who had a reputation for hanging out around young boys eventually was discovered to have had inappropriate sexual relationships with minors.

The problem was that too many people defaulted to the belief that such an accusation of the man couldn’t have been true. Therefore, he was not exposed until many years after the fact.

Part Three: Transparency

Chapter 6: the friends fallacy

• FACS = Facial Action Coding System
• The actors’ performance in FRIENDS are transparent
  • This is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor, the way they represent themselves on the outside, provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside 
• When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea, a stereotype, for direct experience
  • That stereotype is wrong all too often
• The paradox of talking to strangers: we need to talk to them, but we are terrible at it

Chapter 7: A Short Explanation of the Amanda Knox case

Reader’s note: The Amanda Knox case was about a woman who was accused and convicted of a murder she did not commit. Years later the conviction would be overturned, but the big issue was that people believed her casual behavior was a clear and definitive sign that she was guilty.

• The assumption of transparency: we tend to judge people’s honestly based on their demeanor

Chapter 8: Case Study – The Fraternity Party

• New study show that alcohol might not be an agent of inhibition but an agent of myopia
  • Alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision
  • It creates a state of short sightedness in which superficially understood immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion. It makes short term considerations more significant and long term ones fade away 
• Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment
  • It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences 
  • When you’re drunk, your understanding of your true self changes
• When alcohol hits your hippocampus, there is no criteria for what it records or what it doesn’t. It’s pretty random
• The simple lesson of myopia: 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
• People learn about drunkenness from the culture and society around them

Part Four: Lessons

Chapter 9: KSM – What Happens When the Stranger is a Terrorist

• The harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become

Reader’s note: This section was about U.S. military intelligence trying to use information extraction techniques on KSM, a widely-known terrorist against America. They eventually realized that all of their sophisticated techniques produced less than reliable information.

Part Five: Coupling – Pairie View Texas

Chapter 10: Sylvia Plath

• Displacement assumes that people who want to do something as serious as committing suicide, they are very hard to stop
  • Blocking one option won’t make much of a difference because the assumption is they’ll switch to another method 
• Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions 
  • The law of crime concentration: crime is tied to very specific places and contexts 
• Consider the context of where and when you encounter a stranger because they powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is
  • Coupling forces us to view the stranger in their full complexity ambiguity

Chapter 11: case study – the Kansas City experiments

Reader’s note: This section was about how Kansas City police department experiments on how policing affected crime. The lesson was that increased policing was only more effective when concentrated in the high crime areas, not simply just increasing policing over the entire city.

Chapter 12: Sandra bland

• The death of Sandra bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers
• What should we do?
  • We can start by no longer penalizing each other for defaulting to truth
• To assume the best about one another is the trait that has created modern society
  • Those occasions that violate our trusting nature are tragic, but the alternative to abandon trust as a defense against deception is a worse alternative
• We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers
• It is hard to understand strangers and peer into their mind, but what is required of us is restraint and humility

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Main ideas / Themes:

• Truth Default Theory = We have a default to truth, our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. This gives us an a lot of benefits that aren’t worth the trade-off of always being scrutinizing
• The paradox of talking to strangers: we need to talk to them, but we are terrible at it
• Unlike with TV show actors, a person’s demeanor and outward behavior are not a clear sign of what they are feeling on the inside
• Drunk behavior caused by myopia is strongly influenced by culture and society around you. It creates short-sightedness that puts you at the mercy of your environment
• Displacement assumes that people who want to do something as serious as committing suicide, they are very hard to stop
• Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions 

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Closing thoughts:

This was a great book that was very enjoyable to listen to from start to finish. As my friend so accurately stated, listening to a Malcolm Gladwell book is like listening to someone unraveling the truth about the universe, haha. Seriously though, his narrative style is so compelling, it’s like listening to the drama and plot of a movie unfold.

The ideas in the book are pretty solid. Some of the concepts feel like “common sense,” but others are very insightful. For example, I really enjoyed how the book challenges the idea of more policing = less crime. He also challenged the idea that we can really get good at reading people’s true intentions. In reality, we’re bad at reading people because we tend to default to truth. However, Gladwell says that this isn’t a bad thing! This is an advantage that humans have evolved, and the alternative would produce worse results.

Another eye-opening idea was how coupling and displacement play a part in how we make decisions. The author says that we too often assume displacement is the answer to why something happens when it’s really coupling. People act according to their contexts, and therefore we should not prematurely judge people.

Overall, great book. There are a few good concepts that we can take away, but unfortunately not a good amount of solid action items.

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One Takeaway / Putting into practice:

The biggest takeaway for me in this book (though not necessarily an entirely new concept) is definitely:

• Understanding that people’s behavior are more closely linked to the context of where and when we encounter them

This is something I should always remember when I’m meeting people for the first time, and before I make premature judgments about people. I should always consider the context and try to understand where they are coming from.

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Nutshell:

Our natural tendency to truth and presumption we can accurately assess what someone is thinking without understanding context can lead to many issues issues in interacting with others.

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Similar books:

• Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards
• The Like Switch by Jack Schafer
• Influence by Robert Cialdini
• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

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Rating:

3.5/5

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