Talking to Strangers: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

1. Chapter Eight opens with a transcript from the trial of Brock Turner. The prosecutor asks a Stanford University graduate student, Peter Jonsson, to recall the events of January 18, 2015. That night, Jonsson and his friend, fellow graduate student Carl-Fredrik Arndt, observed a man atop a woman outside a fraternity house. When Jonsson realized that the woman was unconscious, he angrily called out for the man to stop. The man tried to flee the scene, but Jonsson and Arndt tackled him before he could escape. The man was Brock Turner, who later claimed to have met the young woman at a party, drunk and danced with her, and gone outside to lay down. The woman, known in legal proceedings as Emily Doe, was found partially undressed. When she awoke in the hospital a few hours later, she was shocked to hear that she might have been sexually assaulted.

2. The situation between Turner and Doe isn’t unique. Many college-aged people meet at parties and choose to go home together. Sometimes, things end badly. One in five American college students report being victims of sexual assault. Gladwell laments the complexity of these types of cases, noting the difficult nature of discerning whether one or both parties consented or objected to sexual activity.

Gladwell believes the transparency assumption adds yet another layer of complexity to sexual assault cases. He references a Washington Post poll that asked 1,000 college students to identify which actions imply a desire to engage in more sexual activity. “Takes off their own clothes” generated results of 47 percent Yes to 49 percent No. “Nods in agreement” generated results of 54 percent Yes to 40 percent No. In contrast, “engages in foreplay” elicited results of 22 percent Yes to 74 percent No. On this final question, there is a sharp divide between men’s and women’s responses, with considerably more men than women agreeing that foreplay is an invitation for additional sexual activity. Consent would be simple if college students agreed on what it meant, but these variable responses show that people have vastly different ideas about what constitutes consent and what does not. Additionally, Gladwell argues, alcohol exacerbates people’s abilities to register consent.

3. In his trial, Brock Turner admitted to consuming approximately five Rolling Rock beers and an unspecified amount of Fireball Whiskey before attending the fraternity party. He continued to drink after he arrived. Emily Doe’s friends also testified that they drank alcohol prior to and during the party. Doe attests to drinking several shots of whiskey before leaving her house. Upon arriving at the party, she and her friends drank from an unopened bottle of vodka they found in the basement. In trial, she testified to being “pretty much empty-minded” and “not articulating much” due to her level of intoxication.

Doe and Turner met around midnight and started dancing. They chatted, started kissing, and walked outside after Doe agreed to go back to Turner’s dorm room. Once outside, Turner alleges, he and Doe slipped and fell to the ground. They laughed about it, though, and resumed kissing. Turner alleges that he received Doe’s permission to “finger” her and that she said she liked it. According to legal scholar Lori Shaw, under California law, a person must be intoxicated enough to be physically incapable of exercising reasonable judgment in order to be deemed incapable of giving consent. This differs from simply having too much to drink. The question thus becomes: was Doe initially a willing sexual participant and then passed out afterward, or had she been physically incapacitated from the start?

Ultimately, the jury ruled against Turner because they found his story unbelievable. It didn’t make sense to them that Turner would flee when the graduate students confronted him if he was truly innocent. A photograph of Doe lying on the ground, clothes half off, near a dumpster, further convinced the jury of Turner’s guilt. He was charged with three felony counts of assault and a prison sentence of six months.  While the “who” and “what” of the Turner case are clear, Gladwell ruminates on the “why.” Why did an allegedly innocent encounter at a party go so wrong? Gladwell’s proposed answer has to do with a “lack of transparency,” which “makes the encounter between a man and a woman at a party a problematic event.”

4. In the mid-1950s, a Yale University anthropology graduate student named Dwight Heath traveled to Bolivia with his wife, Anna, and their baby to conduct field work for his dissertation about the Camba people. The Heaths immersed themselves in the Cambas’ culture. Every Saturday, the Heaths would attend drinking parties with “heavily ritualized” structures. Attendees would sit in a circle, people would play music, and a bottle of rum would be passed around the circle until people became too tired or intoxicated and passed out. Anna recalls one occasion where Dwight had been so intoxicated, apparently, that he had wrapped his arm around a searing hot lantern and failed to notice that he was burning his arm. Upon returning to New Haven, the Heaths analyzed the liquor they’d been drinking and discovered that it was 180 proof laboratory alcohol, a potent substance not fit for human consumption.

One would think that drinking alcohol of this strength every weekend would lead to increased violence and sexual aggression among the Camba, yet the Heaths observed none of this. Nor did they observe any alcoholism among the Camba. Dwight Heath published his findings in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol. Subsequent studies confirmed Heath’s findings: while alcohol sometimes resulted in increased violence, no definite link between alcohol and increased violence could be established. Studies conducted in other cultures garnered similar results. Ultimately, the Heaths’ work in Bolivia inspired a rethinking of our understanding of intoxication. It suggested that alcohol was less “an agent of disinhibition” than “an agent of myopia.”

5. Psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs were the first scientists to propose the “myopia theory," which dictates that alcohol heightens the drinker’s concern for immediate considerations and inhibits their concern for long-term issues. The myopia theory explains why alcohol has such varied effects dependent on one’s immediate surroundings. If a sad person drinks alone in a bar, they’ll feel sadder and more alone. However, if a sad person drinks while surrounded by friends at a football game, the atmosphere may boost their mood. In short, alcohol “crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.” This differs from the older disinhibition theory of alcohol, which suggested that drunkenness robbed a person of all inhibition. States Gladwell, “Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.”

6. Gladwell shifts focus to the case of a 25-year-old software designer named Brian Bree. In 2006, Bree and a woman known in court as “M” drank heavily all evening before returning to M’s apartment to have sex. Bree believed the sex was consensual, but M alleged that it was not. The case was brought to trial, and Bree was convicted of rape and sentenced to five years in jail, although the case was ultimately dismissed on appeal. In court, Bree testified to engaging in sexual contact that he assumed was consensual, though he never asked for M’s consent, figuring he could “infer” what she wanted based on her actions or lack of verbal refusal.

In contrast, M’s testimony described an unwanted sexual encounter. She reportedly called her best friend in tears at 5:00 that morning. Meanwhile, Bree remained so unaware of M’s “inner state” that he invited her out for lunch a few hours later as though nothing was awry. After serving several months of his sentence, the court dismissed Bree’s case, claiming that it was impossible to gauge whether or not consent had occurred and that neither party had behaved unlawfully in consuming excess amounts of alcohol. Gladwell laments the chaotic and unfamiliar atmosphere of today’s college-aged drinkers, who often “do[] so in the hypersexualized chaos of fraternity parties and bars.”

7. Gladwell breaks down what happens to our brains when we get drunk. The brain tissue absorbs alcohol, beginning in the frontal lobes, “dampen[ing]” cognitive function. It triggers the reward center of the brain, makes us feel euphoric, and inhibits our responsiveness to danger. When alcohol reaches the cerebellum, we become uncoordinated. “These are the predictable effects of getting drunk,” explains Gladwell. Blacking out occurs when a person’s blood-alcohol level reaches 0.15 and the hippocampus begins to shut down, thus inhibiting the brain’s ability to form new memories. In a true blackout state, a person won’t remember anything that happened while they were intoxicated.

The kind of drinking that leads to blackouts was virtually unheard of among college students in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, binge drinking is far more prevalent, and the consumption gap between men and women drinkers has narrowed. This latter trend puts women, in particular, at a greater risk of experiencing blackouts, since women metabolize alcohol differently than men.  

Gladwell states that blackouts put women “in a position of vulnerability.” Talking to strangers at parties “is not an error-free exercise in the best of times,” and alcohol only increases the chance for errors to arise. When a person blacks out, they “cede[] control of the situation.” In an article for Slate, critic Emily Yaffe stresses that while it is always the perpetrator and never the victim who is responsible for sexual assault, it does young women a disservice when society fails to stress the dangers of becoming intoxicated to the point that one “lose[s] the ability to be responsible for [one]self.” Furthermore, Gladwell argues, it’s difficult for the stranger an intoxicated woman is talking to to discern the woman’s level of drunkenness. He also argues that strangers are less aware of the nuances of an intoxicated person’s body language than the intoxicated person might think.

Emily Yaffe’s advice to women comes with a corresponding advice to men. Yaffe argues that men need to be cautioned that excess drinking can “drastically increase the chances that [they] will commit a sexual crime."  In the Washington Post study referenced earlier in chapter, students were asked to identify the measures they believed would be most effective in preventing sexual assault. The most common answers were “harsher punishment for aggressors, self-defense training for victims, and teaching men to respect women more.” Yet only 33 percent felt that drinking less would be effective, and only 15 percent identified stricter alcohol rules on campus as a way to reduce sexual assault.

8. Gladwell returns to the night of Emily Doe’s sexual assault. He emphasizes that she was blacked out, which is what reliably happens when a person drinks as much alcohol as Doe drank that night. Later, she has no memory of meeting Turner, nor anything that happened afterward. She testifies that she would never leave the party with another man, since she had a boyfriend. However, Gladwell claims, “it wasn’t the real Emily Doe who met Brock Turner,” but a blacked-out, compromised Doe.

While Turner claims to have remembered every stage of the night, this version of events was the one he prepared for trial. When he was first questioned by police, Turner alleged to remember much less and denied having run away from Doe after the graduate students confronted him. He also alleges to have “kind of blacked out.”

At the end of Turner’s trial, Emily Doe read aloud a letter addressed to Turner, detailing the emotional trauma she endures in the aftermath of her assault. While Doe lists alcohol as a contributing factor to the assault, she ultimately states that “Alcohol was not the one who stripped [her], fingered [her], [and] had [her] head dragging against the ground.”

Doe delivered a “scathing” response to Turner’s statement, in which he called for the implementation of an alcohol education program on campus. Doe argued that society should “show men how to respect women, not how to drink less.” Gladwell disagrees with this point, however, arguing that society should teach men to respect women and teach them to drink less. To Gladwell, the two lessons are connected. Alcohol radically complicated Turner’s already complicated feat of deciding what a stranger wanted from him.