Talking to Strangers: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

1. On August 28, 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, met with his advisor to discuss the crisis of Adolf Hitler’s threat to invade the Sudetenland, a German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, which likely would lead to a world war.  Complicating matters was the fact that in the late 1930s, Hitler’s intentions—and Hitler himself—remained largely unknown to most of the world’s leaders. Furthermore, hardly any world leaders had been able to meet the man in person.

Chamberlain was determined to learn more about the elusive Hitler and determine if he could be trusted or reasoned with. On September 14, Chamberlain sent a letter to Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to request a meeting with Hitler. Hitler agreed to meet, and polls across Great Britain showed that 70 percent of the country believed the meeting would help avoid a war. 

Chamberlain arrived in Munich on September 15 and met Hitler at his retreat outside Berchtesgaden. Hitler voiced his enthusiasm to seize the Sudetenland but made it clear that this was all he wanted. Chamberlain returned to England, satisfied with the meeting and confident that he could trust the man’s word. He would return to Germany to negotiate with Hitler two more times. 

2. History sees Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler as having been completely botched by Chamberlain’s misreading of him. How such a misreading could happen is a mystery, since Chamberlain insists that he kept meticulous track of Hitler’s mannerisms and found him to be “rational, determined,” and trustworthy. Gladwell argues that in believing he could trust Hitler, Chamberlain fell victim to the common misunderstanding that we can trust the information we glean from personal interactions with strangers.

While one might blame Chamberlain’s misreading of Hitler on his naivete and inexperience in foreign affairs, Gladwell counters this with the argument that Hitler deceived many other foreign officials as well. Lord Halifax, an aristocrat who would become Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, fell prey to Hitler’s deception, too. And Halifax had ample political experience, having successfully negotiated with Mahatma Ghandi as Viceroy of India. Halifax travelled to Berlin in 1937 to meet with Hitler. Their meeting began on an odd note, with Halifax mistaking Hitler for a footman. In the five days Halifax spent in Germany, he also met with two of Hitler’s top ministers, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. When Halifax returned to England, he was satisfied with the relationships he developed in Germany and confidently believed that Hitler had no intentions of going to war. 

One interesting feature of Hitler’s deception, argues Gladwell, is that not everybody fell for his tricks. Rather counterintuitively, Hitler seemed to fool people who engaged with him closely. In contrast, those who had no relationship with him remained unconvinced. Winston Churchill might have deemed Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler “the stupidest thing that has ever been done,” yet Churchill never met Hitler in person. Duff Cooper, one of Chamberlain’s cabinet ministers, immediately saw through Hitler’s performance when Chamberlain relayed the details of their meeting to him afterward. Yet Cooper, like Churchill, never met Hitler in person. Gladwell uses this counterintuitive pattern to conclude that the people who judged Hitler most accurately were the people who knew him least well, and the people whom Hitler fooled were the people who should have known him best. Furthermore, argues Gladwell, such a pattern exists beyond Hitler.

3. Gladwell shifts focus to Solomon, a New York state judge. He describes a scene in which Solomon sits in his courtroom and observes a series of cases involving defendants arrested over the past 24 hours on suspicion of committing a crime. As each defendant approaches the stand, it’s Solomon’s task to determine if a perfect stranger is deserving of freedom or not. Cases with kids are the hardest, admits Solomon, and they’re even harder when he can see the accused’s mother sitting in the gallery. Gladwell compares Solomon’s predicament to that which Neville Chamberlain faced with Hitler in 1938: figuring out how to make sense of a stranger.

One of Solomon’s cases involved an older, Spanish-speaking man accused of assaulting his girlfriend’s six-year-old grandson. If Solomon set the man’s bail high, he would go straight to prison—despite his pleas of innocence. Furthermore, the man’s record was virtually unblemished, and he had an ex-wife and 15-year-old son he was supporting. Solomon also considered how unreliable young children can be as witnesses. Faced with an incredibly difficult decision, the best Solomon could do was look the man in the eye and try to determine what kind of person he was. But, asks Gladwell, is such a strategy truly productive?

4. To answer this question, Gladwell consults a study conducted between 2008 and 2013 by a Harvard economist named Sendhil Mullainathan. Mullainathan and his research team assembled the records for over 500,000 defendants tried in New York State and found that the state had released just over 400,000 of them. Next, Mullainathan programmed an AI system to analyze the same records and curate its own list of which 400,000 people it deemed most worthy of release. In the end, Mullainathan found that the computer’s list of people was 25 percent less likely to commit a crime if released on bail than were the people that human judges deemed safe for release. In fact, human judges released 50 percent of the 1 percent of defendants the computer considered highly likely to commit a crime if released on bail.

How can human judges be so wrong? And how could a computer, which has no access to anything uttered in the courtroom during the arraignment trials, judge the defendants more accurately? Gladwell cites a case study he explored in his second book, Blink, in which orchestras made better recruiting decisions when hiring committees assessed applicants’ auditions from behind a screen. The practice prohibited the committee from forming biases based on applicants’ appearance or race, for example.

There are more factors to consider in making a bail decision, however. For instance, a judge can factor mental illness into their decision, refusing bail for defendants whose illness might cause them to commit future crimes before their trial can take place. While some information contained in the defendant’s records—such as previous hospitalizations—can provide insight into potential mental instability, however, Solomon argues that one can only ascertain other clues, such as a defendant’s inability to make eye contact, in person. All this leads Gladwell to present Puzzle Number Two, which asks why meeting a stranger makes humans worse at judging their character than not meeting them at all. 

5. Neville Chamberlain’s final visit with Hitler occurred in September 1938. After Hitler verbally agreed to limit his conquests to the Sudetenland, Chamberlain asked him to sign an agreement attesting to this claim. Hitler enthusiastically signed the paper, and Chamberlain returned to England satisfied that Hitler would honor his promise. Yet, in March 1939, Hitler invaded all of Czechoslovakia.  Less than six months later, he invaded Poland, which led to World War II.

Gladwell describes a psychological study, led by Emily Pronin, which asked its subjects to do a word completion task.  When Pronin asked the subjects to comment on what the words they formed said about their personalities, one subject objected to such arbitrary decisions having anything to do with who they were as a person, and many other subjects agreed. However, when Pronin gave the subjects other people’s words, the subjects enthusiastically offered their judgment about what these completions said about the personalities of complete strangers. For instance, one subject surmised that another person’s failure to complete B_ _K with “BOOK” was an indication that they didn’t read much. None of the subjects seemed to realize that they had been tricked into applying a double standard to the way the word completions revealed truths about themselves versus complete strangers.

Pronin calls this double standard the “illusion of asymmetrical insight,” and attributes it to the fallacy that we think we know other people better than they know themselves. Gladwell believes the illusion of asymmetrical insight is the problem at the core of the CIA’s inability to identify the Cuban double agents, Chamberlain’s inability to discern Hitler’s deception, and judges’ inability to determine whether a defendant should receive bail. Each case involves a grave overestimation of our ability to know things about a stranger. The purpose of the remainder of this book, explains Gladwell, will be to convince the reader of the fact that “Strangers are not easy.”