Talking to Strangers Summary and Review | Malcolm Gladwell

What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

1-Sentence-Summary: Talking To Strangers helps you better understand and accurately judge the people you don’t know while staying patient and tolerant with others.

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About Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is a British-born Canadian author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He started his writing career working for conservative publications. Then, he became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1996. Gladwell gained popularity with two particular New Yorker articles that year, ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘The Coolhunt.’ He is the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces Gladwell’s podcasts Revisionist History and Broken Record. Revisionist History reconsiders overlooked and misunderstood events from the past. Broken Record is a music podcast where Malcolm, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians from various genres. Gladwell has been included in the Time 100 Most Influential People list and was appointed to the Order of Canada on 30th June 2011. 

Introduction

Talking to Strangers looks at the ways we do harm by failing to understand one another. He investigates this problem through the child-abuse scandal involving Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath and the deceptions of financier Bernie Madoff.

“The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet… The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

– Malcolm Gladwell

Part One – Spies and Diplomats: Two Puzzles

Puzzle #1

The first story recalls the communist regime and a Cuban intelligence officer who was working all over the world spreading this ideology. This spy grew tired of Fidel Castro, though. He was working in Czechoslovakia at the time, undercover for the Cubans. But, he decided to jump ship and avoid his work. He escaped with his girlfriend in the trunk and drove to Germany, where the closest US embassy was.

He walked into the embassy and said he wanted to talk to the highest-ranking official there. Once he finally got a face to face meeting, he revealed how much the Cubans had injected themselves into the CIA’s international operations. He also revealed the double agents that were working for the CIA. He betrayed Fidel Castro but Castro actually managed to exploit this opportunity. He created a television program to be shown all around Cuba. This television program’s sole purpose was exposing how stupid the Americans were and how they so easily infiltrated the CIA’s operation. On this television show, they revealed several secrets on national TV as well as showing how they beat the US at their own game.

When the CIA looked back through all the records of these double agents and their regular reviews of agents, not a single red flag was detected. So, there was no suspicious activity from anyone inside the CIA, who was doing regular reports on the agents. These people were able to infiltrate the CIA, an ‘intelligence’ agency, with no trace.

Based on this example, Gladwell explains the first puzzle is:

Why can’t we tell when a stranger, right in front of us, is lying to our face?

Puzzle #2

Back in April 1938, just before WWII, there was considerable tension around the world, especially with Hitler and Germany. There was a risk that the Germans would invade the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia. So, Neville Chamberlain, England’s prime minister at the time, thought he should learn about Hitler.

Hitler was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938 before World War II started. Not many of the world’s major leaders knew anything about him. Neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Joseph Stalin had ever met him. Winston Churchill, who was the prime minister after Chamberlain, tried to meet him twice over tea. But, Hitler stood him up both times.

So, none of these major world leaders had met him and they were all a little bit suspicious of him. Neville Chamberlain thought a better approach was to go and make sure he met him face to face. After one of these meetings, he said to the press that he had established certain confidence that Hitler was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word. In fact, Chamberlain said that he felt like both of them fully understood what was on each other’s minds. Of course, Chamberlain was completely wrong about Hitler’s character. This is an example of how meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse equipped in understanding that stranger. 

In the short period Chamberlain spent with Hitler, he tried to understand where he’s coming from and what his motives are. However, he was completely off the mark. So, sometimes extra personal information does not help us better understand a stranger. 

This is the second puzzle:

How is it that meeting with a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than if we had not met them?

“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.” 

– Malcolm Gladwell

What the Two Puzzles Show

We’ve got these CIA officers who don’t know if their spies are on their side. We’ve got people struggling to assess a stranger’s honesty, character and intent. It’s a complete mess. If this is how some of the people at the top of the world with strangers, then the everyday person is going to struggle just as much. The conclusion Gladwell makes is that strangers are particularly difficult to understand.

Default to Truth

Gladwell illustrates the Truth-Default Theory (TDT) through a few studies. In the first study, scientists invited students to their lab and gave them a trivia test with a cash prize. They were given a partner to work with to answer some of the questions. Like with many of these studies, the partner was undercover. The undercover participant was tasked with persuading the other person into cheating.

Some people succumb to cheating on the test, but some are honest and don’t end up cheating. It wasn’t a test to see if people cheated or not. Instead, it was a test to see what they did later. Later they were asked if they cheated. The results showed a huge range of responses. Across this whole range, it was impossible to identify who had cheated and who had not.

Next, they extended the study. So, they had videos of 22 liars and 22 truth-tellers. This part of the study took another group who analyzed these videos and they made a decision whether the people on the video were lying or not. Interestingly, people correctly identified the liars only 54% of the time. So, the respondents’ accuracy was basically slightly better than a coin flip.

You’d think it might be pretty obvious to work out if somebody was lying or not. That said, what the researchers actually found was that people were really good at working out when someone was telling the truth. In contrast, they were really bad at working out when someone was lying. Less than 30% of people could identify if someone was lying.

Gladwell calls this effect the “Truth-default theory”. Essentially, we all default to the truth. Most of the time we think people are going to be telling us the truth. The only time that we think they might not be telling us the truth is if there’s some kind of trigger that prompts us to analyze what they’re doing.

Next, they showed the videos to some law enforcement agents. These people had over 15 years of interrogation experience. You’d expect them to perform much better than average.

The researchers found that in some cases they perform perfectly and in some they perform abysmally.

Matched Senders vs Mismatched Senders

Matched Senders are the people who look honest and are honest. Comparatively, Mismatched Senders might look honest but, in reality, they’re the complete opposite. What they’re showing isn’t what’s necessarily happening under the hood. The cases where it was matched,law enforcement agents got 100% correct. But, during the times when it was unmatched, they only got 20% correct.

We don’t need help with matched people. If there’s a liar who looks like a liar, most of us can work this out. However, if a liar does not look like a liar, we default to truth. For our society to operate, we need to feel we can trust everyone around us. If you’re a parent, you need to be able to trust that the football coach will look after your child after you drop them off for training.

Building on this point, though, Gladwell describes the Jerry Sandusky case. Sandusky was a football coach that had nude showers with 12-year-old boys. Gladwell also describes that Larry Nassar, who was the USA gymnastics doctor, would give young girls pelvic floor massages. In both of these circumstances, the sport coaches were abusing children. The reason they managed to get away with doing this for so long is that we default to truth. 

Malcolm Gladwell’s takeaway here is that such incidents happen. We all have this “Truth-default Theory.” So, rather than judging the parents or other professionals and claiming they should know better, we need to sympathize with them. We need to realize that any of us in the parents’ position would have trusted the coaches. 

Transparency

Gladwell also talks about how we struggle with transparency and people’s actions. He talks about this idea of transparency in people’s behavior and their demeanor. We assume these features provide an authentic window into the way they feel on the inside.

That said, we have all learned the ability to not let the emotions that you are feeling on the inside spread onto your face. 

Coupling

If we look at a person as an individual, we’re probably missing a lot of the story. Instead, we should be looking at them more broadly. Gladwell looks at the phenomenon of coupling through studies on suicide rates. In the years after WWII, many British homes began to use town gas to power their stoves and water heaters. This was manufactured from coal and was a mixture of many compounds, like hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide. This combination is poisonous enough to kill you.

During this time, it was not uncommon to find suicide victims with their heads covered in coats or blankets and with the tube from the gas tap underneath. The most well-known case was a poet named Sylvia Plath. She committed suicide in 1962 in the United Kingdom. There were 5,588 people who committed suicide that year, and 2,500 of those killed themselves using this same method.

That is 44% of suicides using this same method. In the 1960s, the British energy system underwent serious changes in how they procured their energy. They replaced these poisonous concoctions with natural gas, which isn’t able to kill people. Then, in the 1970s, they looked at the graph. It turns out that the decrease in suicides was equal to the decrease and the elimination of suicides from the lethal gas. So, this finding challenges the view that these people would have just found another way to kill themselves. Instead, there was a huge spike with the introduction of town gas and a huge drop when it was removed.

According to Gladwell, suicide is coupled with the physical environment around us. The individuals who commit suicide saw a problem and a way to fix it. When this fix was removed, people did not have a clear method of achieving the same result.

Another similar example to this Is the Golden Gate bridge. Since opening in 1937, more than 500 people have commit suicide by jumping off the bridge. That’s significantly more than any other place in the world. A psychologist called Richard Sidon discovered those individuals who had attempted to jump from the bridge between 1937 and 1971 but had been unexpectedly restrained or stopped at the last moment. He followed up with these people who had wanted to jump but had been stopped by someone. What he found was that only 25 of these people, less than 5%, had actually persisted in killing themselves by some other method.

So, overwhelmingly, people only wanted to jump off the bridge at that given moment. 95% of the people who wanted to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge but were stopped never pursued it later. These examples show that people are influenced by coupling phenomena. We are influenced by the context we exist in.

“The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.” – Malcolm Gladwell

The Case of Sandra Bland

One example of our inability to understand strangers having a negative impact is that of Sandra Bland. Sandra Bland was pulled over by Brian Encina after failing to signal a lane change. When prompted, Bland explained that she saw Encina quickly approaching her and simply changed lanes to get out of his way. Making her irritation to Encina quite clear, Encina asked “are you done?” which prompted further provocation from Bland. In an attempt to calm herself, Bland lit a cigarette. Encina asked Bland to put it out, but Bland refused, as she had every right to smoke. Encina then proceeded to pull her out of her call and called for backup. Bland was arrested on a felony charge.

Three days later, Bland died in police custody to an apparent suicide. If you look at Brian Encina’s record, you’ll see the number of times he pulled people over for traffic violations. Following the belief that traffic violations create an opportunity for more serious crimes, Encina often pulled people over for minor infractions. Does this make the streets safer? The author argues no. In fact, Sandra Bland was in a low crime area on the highway. So, this tactic most likely won’t work.

Encina believed he could assume the truth about Bland’s character. Gladwell explains that life isn’t an episode of Friends. While Bland may have appeared agitated, she was more likely stressed than hiding something criminal. Encina couldn’t read Bland and what he thought was transparency was a misunderstanding.

Encina made an assumption about a stranger, something that we do every day. So, it’s important to remember that we cannot understand strangers and we should stop assuming that we can. 

Final Summary and Review of Talking to Strangers

Trust your gut. We hear this phrase all the time when a person expresses his or her feelings and suspicions about another. When a woman feels unsafe at the shopping mall because she believes a man is following her, we tell her to trust her gut. When families are playing at the park with their children and see a suspicious person lurking around the playground, we tell them to trust their gut. Even when someone in a relationship feels that their partner is being unfaithful, we tell them to trust their gut. We feel initial instincts as humans, and we are constantly told to trust them. That said, Malcolm Gladwell has successfully proven that we as humans cannot understand strangers.

In fact, we are incredibly bad at understanding strangers. We have an intuition that, while helpful at times, also reflects prejudices and preconceptions about strangers that are most likely false. So, while we think we may know a person based on their reputation and manner, we don’t actually have the capability to truly understand the strangers walking among us, or even the people that live around us.

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Talking to Strangers Quotes

“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.” 

– Malcolm Gladwell

“Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.” 

– Malcolm Gladwell