Talking to Strangers Notes
Genre📚
Nonfiction: Social Psychology
Quick Summary🗒
Gladwell explains how the social rules wired in our brains to help understand our friends betray us when talking to strangers. Outside of the many language and cultural barriers that already exist in our world, there are many psychological errors we make when communicating with the unknown. The book uses numerous case studies and social experiments to prove the true difficulty of talking to strangers. It then signifies the grave consequences that can come from these errors.
Who is this for? Aside from everyone🤷♂️🤷♀️
Those interested in psychology
Fans of nonfiction or Gladwell
Anyone seeking to understand communication better
Top 3 quotes💬
“The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility”
“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.”
“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.”
Notes📝
The book can essentially be broken down into Gladwell attempting to answer two puzzles:
Puzzle #1: “When we’re talking to strangers, why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”
Default to truth 🤫
Pretend I were to sit you down and play 100 video recordings of people telling a story. In these 100 interviews, 50 of the people are lying and the other 50 are being honest, how well would you be able to spot the liars?
Numerous studies on human deception have led to the general conclusion that most of everyone’s lie detector skills (even professionals) are terrible, being slightly better than guessing (around 54% accuracy). With these same studies, psychologists also realized a significant trend in that 54% accuracy: we are much better than chance at detecting people who were telling the truth over liars.
“We go through all those videos and guess true, true, true, which means we get most of the truthful interviews right and most of the liars wrong. We have a default to truth.”
What this theory means is, we are wired to naturally believe what strangers tell us. It is only when enough doubts build up over time that triggers us out of “default to truth” mode. A great example of this is how long it often takes for married couples to learn of a significant other’s affair. You are suspicious of your significant other cheating on you, so you ask them. When they deny it, you believe them. It is only after the countless unexplained absences and a suspicious motel bill turns up in the mail that triggers you out of “default to truth”. Rather than logically waiting to gather authenticity from a stranger, we operate like scientists; assuming truth and then slowly building up evidence against this hypothesis.
Yet modern society just would not function without “default to truth”. It requires for us to interact with strangers everyday, so if we became skeptics of every stranger we met, its hard to imagine what modern systems in the world could still operate.
“We ‘default to trust’ when we take a bus or an Uber, in the expectation that the driver – a stranger – is not scheming.”
We “default to trust” our café total is correct, in the expectation that the employee - a stranger - is not trying to rob everyone.
We “default to trust” when we sign our children up for summer camps, in the expectation that the counselor - a stranger - will not harm or abuse them.
There is also another side to “default to truth”: We tend to believe what is more likely to be the truth simply is the truth, even when the right answer was staring us right in the face.
Gladwell cites numerous real world athletic child abuse scandals throughout the novel. He suggests that most of these situations share a common lateness at which the predator was brought forward to the authorities. In many of these cases, the children’s parents were defaulting to truth; tragically taking months or even years of evidence for them to finally snap out of it. Believing the extremely low probability that out of all the coaches in world, their own son’s basketball coach was a predator, the parents simply ignored or wrote off most of the obvious signs. It was only once the truth was evident without a shadow of a doubt that they would come to realize their grave error. Therefore, “In those rare cases where trust ends in betrayal those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy.”
“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.”
Puzzle #2: “How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than NOT meeting them?”
The illusion of asymmetric insight🤥
A psychologist named Emily Pronen, ran a insightful two step study a couple of years ago. She gave participants a list of incomplete words with blanks, and then asked the strangers to fill in the blanks to make their own words.
E___T__ C___M_ __E_T
After the participants completed this task they were asked a crucial question: Whether they believed a relationship existed between the list of words they completed and their personality. When asked for example, if there was a difference between a person who made words such as glum, scare, attack, slit, and defeat or a person who has triumph, promotion and party. The general concession among the participants was that their own words shared no reflection of their identity.
In the next step of the study, each person was given another stranger's list of words and asked the same question. Except this time, most of the participants believed there was a strong correlation between the filled-in words and their author’s personality. They would see a stranger's list of words being score, win, and bulk, believing it to reveal a competitive personality. Keep in mind these were the exact same people who just said the words shared no reflection of themselves.
The study reveals half of the answer to puzzle #2: We judge strangers based off the smallest information; this making us talk when it would often be better to listen.
“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.”
Transparency and the “Friends Fallacy”🎭
“Transparency 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.”
Our society believes it’s crucial that we see people’s faces to understand their true intentions. We have job interviews, court hearings and press conferences to try and make sense of strangers. When we don’t know someone, we use their behavior and demeanor to try and understand the way they feel. Yet many of us tend to make assumptions about how to interpret a strangers behavior: We believe most people laugh when they are happy, cry when they are sad, and lower their eyebrows when they are angry. Gladwell calls these types of strangers as matched, because their behavior reflects what we commonly believe it to.
Matched strangers follow the transparency model. They fold their arms when they are bored or laugh when they are happy. Friends is a perfect example of a show where everyone is perfectly matched. The typical Friends episode has pages of complex emotions and hundreds of interactions between the characters written into that episode's script. Yet, it is nearly impossible to find a person who watches a Friends episode and is confused about what happened at the end.
“The actors in Friends make sure that every emotion their character is supposed to feel in their heart is expressed emotionally on their face. That’s why you can watch the scene with the sound turned off and still follow along.”
Still, Gladwell outlines that matched strangers are only half the equation. He explains the other type of strangers are the mismatched. Mismatched strangers don’t follow the transparency model, and behave differently from how we would traditionally expect. They shout confidently when they are scared or act neutral when they are sad. They are just as common as matched strangers, that’s why it often takes really knowing a person to learn how to read the kinks of their personality.
“Surprised people don’t’ necessarily look surprised, people who have emotional problems don’t always look like they have emotional problems”
Mismatched strangers show that contrary to most popular tv shows and movies, “transparency is a myth”. Everyone in the world has widely different facial expressions and reactions that display their emotions, that's why misreading a stranger’s intentions is a common error. If everyone in the world behaved as the actors do in Friends, depicting all of their inner thoughts on their face, most of the confusion and mystery surrounding strangers would be dissolved.
The transparency of Alcohol 🍺
At it’s core, the consumption of alcohol causes a “myopia” affect on the brain, “narrowing our mental and emotional fields of vision…[creating] a state of short sightedness”
When under the influence, what becomes important to us is only what is immediately present. Just as a person with vision myopia (short sightedness) can only focus and see what is directly in front of them while the background blurs. Intoxicated people often only consider what is promptly happening in the moment to dictate their actions. Future effects or consequences are often disregarded.
In spite of the “myopia theory”, the general belief about the affects of Alcohol on the mind are different. Many people claim it reveals the “real you”, stripping away your social awareness, and displaying your genuine selfish desires. This simply isn’t true. Our social awareness and the acknowledgement of the repercussions that can come from our actions are what make up who we are. An obvious example of this is with parenting. Parents make decisions all the time based on what is best for their children and their future. No smart parent would ever choose to watch tv over feeding their toddler. Unless of course if they were under the effects of alcohol, only sharing regard to their immediate selfish needs.
“When Alcohol peels away those longer term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self.”
What all this results in, is an extremely “non-transparent” stranger. Making the already difficult task of reading someone else’s intentions through actions twice as hard. Depending on their BAC (Blood Alcohol Content), a drunk stranger could be reflecting small amounts of their genuine selves, or they could transform into a completely different person. Gladwell expands on how this “Myopia” can especially have dire consequences when two strangers misunderstand each others consent or approval to make sexual advances.
Every year there are countless sexual assault cases reported on college campus’s around the world. Yet, most of these tragic cases roughly all share a common story: Two strangers meet at a bar or party while having consumed an excess amount of Alcohol. They maybe talk for a little, and then one stranger proceeds to make sexual advances on the other, this ending in someone not consenting or being conscious of what happened. It’s very possible the “myopia affect” could have made a stranger decide to be unresisting of another stranger’s advancements when they definitely would have been resisting if sober. Or it’s also entirely possible that one stranger made advancements that they definitely wouldn’t have made if sober. The sad truth is that when both strangers were intoxicated, it becomes incredibly difficult to piece together a depiction of what actually happened. This is especially true when the victim or the perpetrator also has no memory of the events.
Alcohol, when consumed in large amounts, finds its way into the hippocampus; effectively halting the formation of new memories and distorting concurrent ones. This however, does not impair an individuals ability to perform tasks and function relatively normal. It’s possible to do very complicated things while in a blackout, there are countless stories of people ending up in different states or countries with no memory of how they arrived. As regard to many of these assault cases, the victims may have appeared fully conscious at the party/bar, yet the next morning they cannot recall any details from the night.
“The Hippocampus doesn’t seem to be selective about what it records. You might have the most traumatic evening of your life and what you remember is brushing your teeth.”
Thus, in a lot of these situations the victims may have been suffering from the "Myopia” of alcohol, while simultaneously being unable to remember their assault. It’s evident that this drug makes the already tangled line of consent impossible to draw. It puts the transparency issue on steroids, causing people to not act themselves and stripping away their memories of an event. That's not to say that the aggressors are not culpable in these scenarios. Let it be clear that sexual perpetrators are always guilty for their crimes. Yet, it is also very likely that college drinking and party culture plays a large part in causing a majority of these tragic cases.
Coupling 🔗
“Default to truth and the illusion of transparency have 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 on.
Coupling is, “the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.” This final concept Gladwell covers is similar to the “Illusion of asymmetric insight”, whereas it exposes how easily we judge strangers. He introduces this idea of “Coupling”, stating that most of everyone has triggers for different behaviors which are only set off in very certain circumstances and locations.
“My father read Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” to me and brothers when we were children. And at the very end when Sydney Carton dies in Charles Darnay’s place my father wept. My father was not a weeper. He was not someone who’s emotions bubbled over in every emotionally meaningful moment. He did not cry in sad movies, he didn’t cry when his children left for college…in order to cry he needed his children on the sofa listening and he needed one of history’s most sentimental novelists. Take away any of those two factors and no one would ever be able to see his tears. That’s coupling.”
The problem with coupling comes when a stranger is acting a certain way because of a trigger, and you may assume that is how they always are. You may notice your waitress, Katy, is frowning as she bewilderingly takes your order, and simply assume she is rude and uncaring about her job. After all, she simply threw the menu on the table when you came in, and she definitely rolled her eyes when you asked for a simple drink refill. Yet in reality, this assumption is further from the truth. Katy has just won best employee of the month for the third time, her co-workers are always looking up to her as she is regularly seen smiling and genuinely enjoys her work. But today, Katy received the news that her 6 year old daughter was diagnosed with Leukemia. She is not only extremely glum, but also stressed to bits over how she will cover any of the hospital bills on top of her son’s schooling. And here you are ready to leave a negative review and a small tip, because you simply don’t know her.
“Coupling teach us the opposite, don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the strangers world.”
If we choose to forget that strangers have their set of issues and real life situations then we simply deduce them to being side characters in our own story. Coupling makes us see strangers in their “full ambiguity and complexity.” It allows us to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and while doing this we become generally less close minded.
Review🤔
This book covered many groundbreaking psychological concepts which reshaped the way I now look at many social interactions. The concepts are backed by a variety of interesting historical examples and studies. Each chapter follows a similar format: Gladwell describes a case study, relates it to a psychological experiment, then finishing by connecting both the study and example(s) to a general rule or assumption that we make when talking to strangers. I experienced an “ah ha! Moment” at the end of every chapter as this format ingeniously contextualizes and links each idea with its representation. It stripped down advanced, academic psychology vocabulary into easily processed reading material. As the novel progresses, the different theories became compounded on to one another and paint a clear picture of how difficult it is to effectively understand others.
“Talking to strangers is an immensely valuable work in a modern society where we are forced to interact with the unknown everyday.”
The book uses a real life story of an escalated police pull-over as the primary example of the consequences that can result from miscommunication. It starts out as an ordinary situation where an officer pulls over a driver, and then proceeds to write her a traffic citation. At the start of the novel, Gladwell only cites the dialogue from the bodycam of the police officer. What follows is a tense two minute dispute between the driver and officer, which escalates into a forceful arrest. The interchange initially appears impossible to decipher, seeming as complex as it is stressful. The story is later revisited at the end of the novel, and all of the psychological concepts are impeccably used to contextualize the situation. It’s truly mind blowing how every single theory in the book becomes incorporated into the analysis. The case ends up going from a possible police brutality study to an unfortunate event where two strangers simply didn’t effectively communicate. Gladwell does this “detangling” of complicating scenarios many times throughout the novel, tackling difficult topics such as sexual assault cases on college campus’s and child abuse in athletics.
Overall, this is one of my favorite non-fiction works and an easy recommendation to anyone who is slightly interested in this type of stuff. Aside from the absorbing ideas, it applied a valuable lens to my life allowing me to better communicate and understand others. I found every concept to be highly involving as they are all applicable to everyday life.
Criticism🧐
The only small complaint I have is with the start of the novel. I found the first historical example Gladwell uses (the Cuban spies) to be the least engaging compared to the other examples throughout the book. It’s not bad or even boring, I would just recommend for readers to stick through the first couple pages as soon after the novel picks up.
Reading Difficulty level: 2/5😌
If you have never read a nonfiction novel, all of Gladwell’s collection are an excellent starting point. The writing is easy to follow as he popularizes complex psychological concepts into easy and relatable ideas. The novel is also a fairly short read.
Book vs Audiobook📖/🎧
Although I usually recommend the physical book version for non-fiction novels, having listened to the audiobook, I would highly recommend the audible format for this novel. Aside from the usual fantastic narration, Gladwell goes above and beyond by treating the audiobook as a sort of podcast. Rather than simply quoting the studies or examples cited, the real life audio recordings of the people are inserted into the narration. For the examples in which the audio recordings were not available, there are actors which reenact the dialogue. The book even has a fitting theme song that plays at the end of every chapter. All of these elements come together to enhance the listening experience by adding personality into the novel, making it more engaging than it maybe is on paperback.
Final Score out of 10⭐️
9/10: Amazing novel. Would read again and recommend to everyone.
