Talking to Strangers

Author:: Malcolm Gladwell Full Title:: Talking to Strangers Tags:#media/book

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* highlights from 2021-02-08

* Why write a book about a traffic stop gone awry? Because the debate spawned by that string of cases was deeply unsatisfying. One side made the discussion about racism—looking down at the case from ten thousand feet. The other side examined each detail of each case with a magnifying glass. What was the police officer like? What did he do, precisely? One side saw a forest, but no trees. The other side saw trees and no forest. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=110))
* Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. ([Location 169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=169))
* Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=306))
* The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours. ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=409))
* What is my feeling about this man before me? ([Location 459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=459))
* It had a fraction of the information available to the judge—and it did a much better job at making bail decisions. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=461))
* Taking information away from the hiring committee made for better judgments. But that was because the information gleaned from watching someone play is largely irrelevant. ([Location 463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=463))
* But when it comes to a bail decision, the extra information the judge has sounds like it should be really useful. ([Location 466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=466))
* Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them? ([Location 487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=487))
* They struggle with assessing a stranger’s honesty. They struggle with a stranger’s character. They struggle with a stranger’s intent. ([Location 507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=507))
* “illusion of asymmetric insight.” ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=556))
* The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. ([Location 557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=557))
* 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. ([Location 563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=563))
* The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us. ([Location 761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=761))
* We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. ([Location 815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=815))
* To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a “trigger.” A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. 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. ([Location 823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=823))
* But here’s the crucial detail. Milgram’s subjects weren’t hopelessly gullible. They had doubts—lots of doubts! ([Location 859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=859))
* 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. ([Location 877](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=877))
* lie detection does not—cannot—work the way we expect it to work. In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time. ([Location 956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=956))
* The standard immigrant-entrepreneur story is about the redemptive power of grit and ingenuity. To hear Markopolos tell it, his early experiences in the family business taught him instead how dark and dangerous the world was: ([Location 1074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1074))
* He was armed with all the same facts but none of the faith in the system. To him, dishonesty and stupidity are everywhere. “People have too much faith in large organizations,” he said. “They trust the accounting firms, which you should never trust because they’re incompetent. On a best day they’re incompetent, on a bad day they’re crooked, and aiding and abetting the fraud, looking the other way.” ([Location 1104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1104))
* The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted. ([Location 1118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1118))
* What sets the Holy Fool apart is a different sense of the possibility of deception. In real life, Tim Levine reminds us, lies are rare. And those lies that are told are told by a very small subset of people. That’s why it doesn’t matter so much that we are terrible at detecting lies in real life. Under the circumstances, in fact, defaulting to truth makes logical sense. ([Location 1126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1126))
* The Holy Fool is someone who doesn’t think this way. The statistics say that the liar and the con man are rare. But to the Holy Fool, they are everywhere. ([Location 1135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1135))
* What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. Sure, we get deceived once in a while. That is just the cost of doing business. ([Location 1142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1142))
* Some people had doubts about Sandusky. But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion. ([Location 1332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1332))
* And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure. ([Location 1576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1576))
* 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. ([Location 1694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1694))
* “The participants in all conditions grossly overestimated their surprise expressivity,” Schützwohl wrote. Why? They “inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event from…folk-psychological beliefs about emotion-face associations.” Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we glean from cultural sources such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in real life. ([Location 1798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1798))
* the “frightened” face, for whatever reason, was simply not part of his repertoire. In crisis, he turned deadly calm. But if you didn’t know him, what would you have thought? Would you have concluded that he was cold? Unfeeling? When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea—a stereotype—for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often. ([Location 1811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1811))
* Whatever these unobserved variables are that cause judges to deviate from the predictions—whether internal states, such as mood, or specific features of the case that are salient and over-weighted, such as the defendant’s appearance—they are not a source of private information so much as a source of mis-prediction. The unobservables create noise, not signal. ([Location 1834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1834))
* But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it—and, ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1849))
* Why? What happens at the moment someone tells a lie that specifically derails us? ([Location 1914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1914))
* When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we’re flummoxed. Nervous Nelly is mismatched. She looks like she’s lying, but she’s not. She’s just nervous! In other words, human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched. ([Location 1954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=1954))
* “I have to remind you that her behavior was completely inexplicable. Totally irrational. There’s no doubt of this.” ([Location 2029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2029))
* Are we sending perfectly harmless people to prison while they await trial simply because they don’t look right? We all accept the flaws and inaccuracies of institutional judgment when we believe that those mistakes are random. But Tim Levine’s research suggests that they aren’t random—that we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency. ([Location 2049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2049))
* But this is transparency failure on steroids. When one college student meets another—even in cases where both have the best of intentions—the task of inferring sexual intent from behavior is essentially a coin flip. As legal scholar Lori Shaw asks, “How can we expect students to respect boundaries when no consensus exists as to what they are?” ([Location 2179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2179))
* Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away. ([Location 2336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2336))
* One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. ([Location 2345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2345))
* When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes. This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.” But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations ([Location 2352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2352))
* The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self. ([Location 2357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2357))
* Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation. ([Location 2366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=2366))
* The assumption that people would simply switch to another method is called displacement. Displacement assumes that when people think of doing something as serious as committing suicide, they are very hard to stop. ([Location 3029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3029))
* Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions. ([Location 3038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3038))
* 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. ([Location 3105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3105))
* Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime. It’s a model that says that people are so highly motivated to commit crime, nothing else really matters.” Yet if criminals were like Dracula, driven by an insatiable desire to create mayhem, they should have been roaming throughout the 72nd. ([Location 3129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3129))
* “Like most other people, my studies were about people. I said, maybe we ought to be more concerned with places.” ([Location 3136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3136))
* 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. So ([Location 3462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3462))
* But Brian Encinia is the new breed of police officer. And we have decided that we would rather our leaders and guardians pursue their doubts than dismiss them. ([Location 3634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3634))
* Brian Encinia believed in transparency—that people’s demeanor is a reliable guide to their emotions and character. This is something we teach one another. More precisely, it is something we teach police officers. ([Location 3641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3641))
* If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn’t because Brian Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do. ([Location 3715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07NDKVWZW&location=3715))