In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that one of the reasons our interactions with strangers go awry is because we fail to enter into the interaction as equals in the first place. While we consider ourselves to be nuanced and to contain multitudes, we often have a tendency to believe that strangers are straightforward and uncomplicated. This misguided assumption corrupts our interactions with strangers in multiple ways, causing us to simultaneously underestimate the complexity of strangers while overestimating our own ability to understand them. These complementary misunderstandings, in turn, create an environment primed for conflict. This fallacy plays out in Chapter One when Gladwell describes the confession of Florentino Aspillaga, a former Cuban spy who defected in 1987. Aspillaga shocked the CIA with his admission that nearly all U.S. secret agents posted in Cuba were double agents working for Cuban intelligence. Even an agency as dedicated to espionage as the CIA had trouble imagining that their Cuban counterparts would be just as cunning and dedicated to their craft. Gladwell presents further evidence of this fallacy in Chapter Two with a psychological study headed by Emily Pronin. Pronin asked participants to fill in the blanks of partially spelled words and then describe how their choices reflected on their personalities. Most participants didn’t consider the word completions to be “a measure of [their] personality.” However, when Pronin redirected the question and asked participants what they made of other people’s word completions, they more freely attributed word choice to personality traits. In both of these examples, people think of themselves as inscrutable, complex, and hard to predict while failing to extend that view to others. Talking to Strangers suggests that when we enter into interactions with strangers with the preconceived notion that we are fundamentally different from them, we establish an implicit “us vs. them” dynamic that dooms our hopes for finding mutual understanding.
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Self vs. Stranger ThemeTracker
Self vs. Stranger Quotes in Talking to Strangers
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 understanding each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.
“Yesterday afternoon I had a long talk with Herr Hitler,” he said. “I feel satisfied now that each of us fully understands what is in the mind of the other.”
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.
You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.
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.
If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.
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.”
[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.
