Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Talking to Strangers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Default to Truth
Limitations of Transparency
Coupling Theory and Context
Self vs. Stranger
Summary
Analysis
1. By its fifth season, Friends, a comedy about six friends living in downtown Manhattan, was slated to become one of the most popular television series of all time. Gladwell describes the seemingly convoluted plot of the episode “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey,” where tensions mount after Ross’s sister, Monica, starts dating Chandler, who is Ross’s best friend. The synopsis sounds complicated on paper, yet Gladwell asserts that on-screen, the plot of Friends is so simple that a person could follow it without hearing the sound.
The straightforwardness of an episode of Friends evokes the way we want our interactions with strangers to be, though it’s rarely that simple. As Gladwell has shown his study of Ana Belen Montes’s success at fooling the DIA for years, as well as the study of the ambiguous Penn State child sex abuse scandal, people and situations are harder to read, and their motivations are harder to understand, than anything that might happen in a sitcom.
Themes
2. To test his theory about Friends, Gladwell recruits Jennifer Fugate, a University of Massachusetts psychologist. Fugate is an expert in FACS (Facial Action Coding System). FACS assigns a number to each distinctive muscle movement the face can make to assess and score a person’s facial expressions. To illustrate his point, Gladwell provides a photograph of a man smiling with the corners of his lips pulled up into a “Pan-Am smile,” which appears polite but noticeably fake, much like the expression flight attendants use on their passengers.
FACS was developed by Swedish anatomist Carl-Herman Hjortsjö. It was further developed and published by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen in 1978. Today, it’s used in a variety of fields, from psychology to animation. Experts have also suggested that FACS can be used in the measurement of pain patients who cannot communicate verbally. The mechanics of FACS are compelling, but in light of everything Gladwell has presented regarding humanity’s inability to read strangers, he questions if it is oversimplistic to believe that we can assess a person’s emotions based on their outer facial expression.
Themes
Next, Gladwell presents a photograph of the same man boasting a “Duchenne smile,” or a “genuine smile.” This smile involves more muscles, particularly those around the eyes. Gladwell asks Fugate to analyze the expression Ross makes in the opening of the episode referenced in this chapter’s introduction. Fugate’s results, which focus on Ross’s furrowed brow and raised lip, match the emotion the viewer is meant to discern in Ross: a mixture of “anger and disgust.” Fugate analyzes a number of other expressions characters make throughout the episode, and each of her findings matches the emotions that the episode’s storyline requires of them. These findings confirm Gladwell’s opening theory: a person could discern the plot of an episode of Friends with no sound, since the actors’ facial expressions are what carry the plot.
Fugate’s analysis of Ross’s face proves Gladwell’s theory about Friends correct: the actors’ facial expressions can map their characters’ inner emotions and motivations reliably enough carry the plot. But all this proves is that actors who are trained to manipulate their faces to achieve a specific affect can do so on command. It does not prove that people can so reliably and predictably use facial expressions as a measure of inner reality or character.
Themes
Gladwell ruminates on the idea of transparency, which refers to the idea that a person’s exterior appearance matches their interior reality. Strangers complicate transparency, since it’s harder to read a person’s outer expressions and behaviors when we don’t know them personally.
For transparency to work, facial expressions, demeanor, and behavior would need to be universal: that is, every person in the world would need to have the same facial expression for sadness, anger, happiness, etc., and be able to identify that expression in others. Gladwell’s suggestion that it’s harder to make sense of strangers’ facial expressions implies that this is simply not the case.
Themes
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3. Gladwell explores the history of transparency, beginning with ideas Charles Darwin put forth in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). According to Darwin, quickly and efficiently conveying our emotions to others is critical to survival. Gladwell describes Darwin’s theory as “intuitive.” After all, children know to smile when they’re happy, and people around the world can identify how Ross and Rachel are feeling based on their facial expressions.
Needing to quickly and effectively understand the emotions of others has obvious evolutionary benefits. It’s advantageous to know when other people are exhibiting signs of hostility or violence, for instance. But in light of Mullainathan’s experiment in Chapter Two, where a computer program could more accurately determine which defendants were more likely to commit a crime if released on bail than a human judge, is an “intuitive” understanding of emotion something that actually exists?
Themes
As another example of the weight society places on transparency, Gladwell cites an incident where a Michigan judge dismissed a Muslim woman’s case after she refused to remove her niqab so he could look her in the eyes. The judge argued that he needed to “see certain things about [her] demeanor […] in a court of law.” But is the judge really correct to assume that seeing the woman’s face would tell him anything about her personality or motivations? If the judge were correct, Gladwell argues, judges would be better at assessing defendants than computers—and we’ve already seen that this is not the case.
The Michigan judge thinking he needs to “see certain things about her] demeanor” reflects his overconfidence in his ability to ascertain anything about the woman based on how she looks and acts. As Gladwell has made abundantly clear over the past five chapters, however, people aren’t particularly good at assessing emotion. In fact, seeing strangers’ faces often has the opposite effect, diminishing our ability to assess people objectively.
Themes
4. There’s an archipelago called the Trobriands roughly 100 miles east of Papua New Guinea. The isolated tropical region is home to 40,000 people who practice a traditional lifestyle of farming and fishing. The region is virtually untouched by features of modern life. For this reason, social scientists go to the Trobriands to test hypotheses for universality. In other words, if an experiment elicits similar results in New York and the Trobriands, it’s indicative that those results are consistent across humankind.
Testing the replicability of a social or psychological experiment in somewhere like the Trobriands is a good measure of universality because it eliminates the presence of customs and social norms inherent in modern life that might skew results. If people in New York and the Trobriands respond similarly to the same study, it’s evidence that these responses come from some innate, human instinct rather than cultural conditioning, which shifts according to one’s surroundings.
Themes
In 2013, an anthropologist named Sergio Jarillo and a psychologist named Carlos Crivelli traveled to the Trobriands to study transparency’s limitations. They wanted to know if people across different cultures saw the same emotions in facial expressions. The scientists first presented six photos depicting different facial expressions to schoolchildren in Madrid and asked the children to match each photo to a specific emotion. The children aced the task. Next, Jarillo and Crivelli took the faces to the Trobrianders. Despite speaking a rich, emotionally nuanced language, the Tronbrianders struggled with matching the correct emotions to the correct faces. For instance, while 100 percent of the Spanish schoolchildren matched the smiling face to the “happy” emotional label, only 58 percent of Trobrianders managed to do so. Anger especially confused the Trobrianders, with 20 percent of them identifying the angry face as a happy face. These results suggest that transparency is not universal.
The findings of Jarillo and Crivelli’s study demonstrate that facial expressions vary across cultures. In other words, there is no universal expression for happiness or anger. These findings are important to Gladwell because they debunk the common myth that people’s facial expressions provide reliable, accurate insight into inner character or demeanor. It discredits the judge in Chapter Two who thinks he can tell whether a defendant will commit a crime if released on bail simply by looking at their face. After all, if facial expressions vary across cultures, there’s no reason to think they don’t vary within cultures, as well.
Themes
5. If transparency varies across cultures, does it also vary within cultures? Gladwell asks the reader to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they are led down a hallway into a dark room. There, they listen to a recording of a Franz Kafka story. At the end of the story, the reader must exit the room and walk down the hallway to take a memory test on what they have just heard. However, while the reader was listening to the story, the hallway changed: a team of workers took down the walls of the room and illuminated a bright bulb in the center. The reader’s best friend is now sitting in a chair, a grave expression on their face. Surely, Gladwell argues, this unexpected twist would cause a surprised expression to form on the reader’s face.
The experiment Gladwell describes is setting up the participant to respond with a particular emotion (surprise). If the participant responds to the altered hallway and grave-looking friend with surprise and a stereotypically surprised expression (i.e., mouth agape, wide eyes, and an audible gasp, perhaps), it will imply that there is a meaningful connection between cultural associations with facial expressions and genuine emotional responses. If the participant’s feeling of surprise is paired with some other facial expression, however, this finding would suggest that facial expressions are more varied and nuanced than one might initially expect them to be.
Themes
This very scenario was tested by two German psychologists, Achim Schützwohl and Rainer Reisenzein. When asked to describe how they looked upon seeing the changed hallway, each subject assumed they had made a surprised expression. However, this was rarely the case. Video footage showed that only five percent of subjects made a surprised expression. These findings suggest that transparency is a construct we have learned from watching TV or reading books, where stereotypical expressions, such as a dropped jaw and wide eyes, correspond reliably to specific emotions. In real life, this correlation simply doesn’t exist.
Schützwohl and Reisenzein’s findings suggest only a weak connection between cultural ideas about what surprise looks like and what surprise actually looks like on human faces. The idea that people are transparent—that we can read a person’s face and know what they are thinking—is manufactured and unreliable.
Themes
Believing in the myth of transparency is more compromising when dealing with strangers than with friends. When we get to know people, we learn to read their unique, personal emotional expressions. Gladwell recalls an incident that occurred at his family’s vacation cottage. His father was in the shower when he heard Gladwell’s mother scream and ran to assist her. Gladwell’s father found a large man holding a knife to Gladwell’s mother’s throat. Gladwell’s father sternly and loudly told the man to leave. To the assailant, Gladwell’s father’s expression might have seemed threatening. To someone who knew Gladwell’s father, however, it would have been clear that his face registered fear. Gladwell concludes that seeing strangers forces us to “substitute an idea—a stereotype—for a direct experience.”
While over time we can learn how specific people will modify their facial expressions and body language to respond to specific emotional stimuli, there’s no manual that can help us how to discern fear from happiness from hostility universally. People are not transparent, and it takes time and attention to learn how to discern their inner mood from their outer demeanor. This creates a real problem when one considers how widespread the myth of transparency is in American culture, from the judge who believes looking at a defendant gives them a better sense of their character to the administrator who believes they can tell the difference between their employee’s “horseplay” and sexual abuse.
Themes
6. The limitations of transparency explain the second puzzle Gladwell presented in Chapter Two: why are computers better judges of character than judges? The answer to this puzzle is that seeing a defendant in person gives the judge no advantage over the computer because facial expressions are a flawed way of assessing character. Gladwell cites a famous case in which a Texas man named Patrick Dale Walker was charged after putting a gun to his girlfriend’s head. The judge lowered Walker’s bail from $1 million to $25,000 after Walker spent some time in jail to “cool off.” To Walker’s judge, Walker seemed “mild-mannered” and calm, and he didn’t have a record, either. He was also class valedictorian and showed remorse for his actions. The judge thought Walker was transparent. However, while out on bail four months later, Walker shot and killed his girlfriend. Walker’s case confirms Team Mullainathan’s findings that “the unobservables,” or exterior attributes that the computer cannot see, “create noise, not signal.”
Walker’s judge mistook his “mild-mannered” demeanor for evidence that Walker was essentially mild-mannered as a person and unlikely to harm his girlfriend if released on bail. The judge’s error resulted in devastating consequences. Gladwell includes this example to suggest that our overconfidence in our ability to ascertain truths about a stranger based on appearances alone regularly leads to mistakes, missteps, and, in rare cases, irreversible harm. Gladwell’s remark that “the unobservables,” exterior traits a computer cannot see “create noise, not signal” refers to the way emotional expressions “create noise” that distracts humans from seeing the truth about strangers. In reality, a facial expression we imagine to be a “signal” of a stranger’s inner character is little more than “noise,” the stereotypical, cultural associations we have with facial expressions that prevent us from understanding what people are really telling us with their unique, nuanced behaviors.
Themes
While the shortcomings of transparency can lead to devastating consequences, Gladwell maintains that society can’t very well eliminate personal interactions entirely. States Gladwell, “the transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem.” While our methods for dealing with these problems are imperfect, they are also “socially necessary.” The “paradox of talking to strangers,” Gladwell argues, is that “we need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it.”
The ”paradox of talking to strangers” is what has, thus far, prevented Gladwell from offering any conclusive advice about how to improve our interactions with strangers. While there are flaws in the way we interact with strangers (i.e., we tend to trust them blindly, and we think we are better judges of character than we really are) there’s no real way to exist in society without engaging with unfamiliar people.
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