Gladwell defines transparency, the second of two key strategies people use to make sense of strangers, as “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.” Like default to truth, transparency is an assumption we make about other people in order to make sense of them—not a reflection of their actual character. While every strategy we use to make sense of other people is imperfect and leaves room for conflict and misunderstanding to develop, Gladwell is particularly critical of transparency: “When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly,” he explains, “we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.” The assumption of transparency is a social strategy that requires us to show little empathy or humility in our interactions with strangers. It is a one-sided engagement that enables us to manipulate a stranger to fulfill an expectation that reaffirms our worldview without making any inquiry into theirs. The problem with this strategy is that it ignores our ethical obligation as members of a diverse global community to move beyond our preconceptions and extend empathy toward those who are different from us. Ultimately, Gladwell regards the devastating encounter between Sandra Bland and Officer Encinia that begins and ends the book as a tragedy born of the limitations of transparency. When Bland lights her cigarette, Encinia’s assumption of transparency causes him to read the behavior as confrontational while remaining ignorant of the anxiety that has prompted her actions. In his closing remarks in the Afterword, Gladwell offers advice for dealing with these kinds of misunderstandings, urging us to “accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers” and strive, instead, to move forward with “restraint and humility.”
Related Themes from Other Texts
Limitations of Transparency ThemeTracker
Limitations of Transparency Quotes in Talking to Strangers
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.
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.
The difference between Markopolos and Renaissance, however, is that Renaissance trusted the system. Madoff was part of one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the entire financial market. If he was really just making things up, wouldn’t one of the many government watchdogs have caught him already? As Nat Simons, the Renaissance executive, said later, “You just assume that someone was paying attention.”
The fact that Nassar was doing something monstrous is exactly what makes the parents’ position so difficult.
When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.
The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. 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, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with one another about just how terrible at it we are.
We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes.
“There is no trace of me in the room where Meredith was murdered,” Knox says, at the end of the Amanda Knox documentary. “But you’re trying to find the answer in my eyes.…You’re looking at me. Why? These are my eyes. They’re not objective evidence.”
The lesson of myopia is really very simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger—to represent their own desires honestly and clearly—they cannot be blind drunk.
[W]e need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility. How many of the crises and controversies I have described would have been prevented had we taken those lessons to heart?
Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.
Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.
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 what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency? You get Sandra Bland.
To Encinia’s mind, Bland’s demeanor fits the profile of a potentially dangerous criminal. She’s agitated, jumpy, irritable, confrontational, volatile. He thinks she’s hiding something. This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched: when they do not behave the way we expect them to behave.
Brian Encinia’s goal was to go beyond the ticket. He had highly tuned curiosity ticklers. He knew all about the visual pat-down and the concealed interrogation. And when the situation looked as if it might slip out of his control, he stepped in, firmly. 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.
Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
