Talking To Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell

Talking To Strangers - What We Should Know About The People We Don't Know

Interaction with strangers requires introspection as well as consideration of certain parameters for our own safety and theirs

The strategies we employ in our interactions with strangers are heavily flawed. As humans, we have a tendency to judge others based on standards to which we would not subject ourselves. We also rely on facial expressions to evaluate the personality or temperament of a stranger without giving due regard to context.

Context is everything!

In order to have a good interaction with a stranger, hostile or friendly, we need to make an accurate assessment of their context. Where are they from? What are their beliefs? What is their preferred language of communication?

While we may not be able to provide answers to these questions within the short time of meeting a stranger, it helps to know that there is so much about them we do not know. This allows us to caution ourselves and avoid the temptation of making judgments based on our own worldview.

We tend to express a default to truth and ignore all the signs that show that someone is lying to us. Until we have indisputable evidence staring back at us, we do not trust our instincts enough to act or verify what someone has said to us. What’s more interesting is that even those who are trained in the art of detecting lies e.g. policemen, CIA agents, ​etc. are not better at detecting it than the rest of us.

Apart from our tendency to believe others, there are other wrong assumptions we make. Let’s take alcohol for example. An old axiom says that “In wine, there is the ​truth”, but research has shown that alcohol is not an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation. The effect it has on brain tissue causes us to behave in ways we normally would not behave. Sadly, when a person does something wrong while intoxicated, it is their sober self that pays for these actions and feels the shame.

Thus, in Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell explores, with copious examples, different aspects of the wall that exists between us and the stranger. He makes us examine the grey areas that we have ignored for so long in the successful and failed (sometimes fatal) encounters with strangers. Then, he presents strategies that can help us correct these anomalies at the different levels in which they exist.

Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger

In July 2015, an unfortunate scenario played out between a young African American woman named Sandra Bland, and Brian Encinia, a 30-year-old police officer. Sandra was pulled over by Encinia as she made a right turn onto the highway that rings the Prairie View campus in Houston, Texas. She was from Chicago. Encinia was courteous — at least at first. He told her that she had failed to signal a lane change. He asked her questions. She answered them. Then Bland lit a cigarette, and Encinia asked her to put it out. An altercation that led to her forceful removal and arrest followed her refusal to put out the cigarette. Bland committed suicide 3 days after being jailed. It is important to analyze, critique, and figure out what really happened by the side of the highway that day in rural Texas. The traffic stop incident happened in the middle of a time when several reports of African Americans dying at the hands of white police officers had become common.

There are two factions. One side made the discussion about racism — looking down at the case from 10,000 feet. The other side examined each detail of the case with a magnifying glass. What was the police officer like? What did he do, precisely? One side saw a forest, but no trees. The other side saw trees and no forest. Each side was right, in its own way. Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.

Throughout the majority of human history, encounters — hostile or otherwise — were rarely between strangers. The people you met and fought often believed in the same God as you, built their buildings and organized their cities in the same way you did, fought their wars with the same weapons according to the same rules. But the 16th century’s bloodiest conflict fit none of those patterns. When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés met the Aztec ruler Montezuma II, neither side knew anything about the other at all. Their struggle to understand each other through multiple layers of translation led to a great misunderstanding that resulted in the death of Montezuma II at the hands of Cortés.

There are different aspects of the stranger problem that can be investigated using different case studies taken from the news. At Stanford University in northern California, a first-year student named Brock Turner meets a woman at a party, and by the end of the evening,​ he is in police custody. At Pennsylvania State University, the former assistant coach of the school’s football team, Jerry Sandusky, is found guilty of pedophilia, and the president of the school and two of his top aides are found to be complicit in his crimes. How did a spy spend years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon? How did the man who brought down hedge-fund manager, Bernie Madoff, pull it off? What about the false conviction of the American exchange student Amanda Knox, and the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath?

In all of these cases, the parties involved relied on a set of strategies to translate one another’s words and intentions. And in each case, something went very wrong. What were these strategies? Where did they come from? How do we correct them?

The illusion of asymmetric insight makes us convince ourselves that we know others better than they know us and that we have insights about them that they lack

A team of psychologists led by Emily Pronin conducted a study; they gave a group of people an exercise on a word completion task. Pronin had them fill in the blank spaces. Then she asked them the same question: What do you think your choices say about you? The respondents took the same position. They believed they’re just words and not a determinant of their personalities. Pronin gave the group other people’s words. These were perfect strangers. She asked the same question. And this time Pronin’s panel completely changed their minds. The same people who claimed that the exercise had no meaning were now passing judgment on strangers based on their word completion exercises. None of them seemed remotely aware that they had been caught in a contradiction. Pronin described this phenomenon as the “illusion of asymmetric insight.”

Florentino Aspillaga was a Cuban spy par excellence who grew disenchanted with Fidel Castro because of his arrogance and narcissism. By the time of his posting to Bratislava in 1986, he had decided to betray Cuba. You would expect this defection to really sting but what really sent shockwaves was what Aspillaga revealed to the CIA. Practically, the entire U.S. roster of secret agents inside Cuba were all working for Havana, spoon-feeding the CIA information cooked up by the Cubans themselves. If the CIA’s best can be misled so completely, so many times, then what of the rest of us?

One of the odd things about the desperate hours of the late 1930s, as Hitler dragged the world toward war, was how few of the world’s leaders really knew the German leader. Hitler was a mystery. Franklin Roosevelt, the American president throughout Hitler’s rise, never met him. Nor did Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader. Winston Churchill came close while researching a book in Munich in 1932. He and Hitler twice made plans to meet for tea, but on both occasions Hitler stood him up. Yet, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s predecessor, met Hitler repeatedly in the period leading to the war with the sole aim of avoiding the war. Despite the staggering evidence staring back at Chamberlain, he chose to believe that Hitler had agreed to peace. Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler are widely regarded as one of the great follies of the Second World War.

Chamberlain was acting on the same assumption that we all follow in our efforts to make sense of strangers. We believe that the information gathered from ​personal interaction is uniquely valuable. You would never hire a babysitter for your children without meeting that person first. Companies don’t hire employees blind. They call them in, and interview them closely, sometimes for hours at a stretch, on more than one occasion. They do what Chamberlain did: they look people in the eye, observe their demeanor and behavior, and draw conclusions. Yet all that extra information Chamberlain gathered from his personal interactions with Hitler didn’t help him see Hitler more clearly. It did the opposite.

Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them? The answer to these puzzling questions reveals something about us. 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. Newsflash! The stranger is not easy.

Over the course of evolution, humans never developed accurate skills to detect deception

The Defense Intelligence Agency — DIA — is the third arm of the foreign intelligence triumvirate in the U.S. government, along with the CIA and the National Security Agency. Ana Beles Montes worked for the DIA and won several laurels and recommendations from her superiors. Her nickname inside the intelligence community was the “Queen of Cuba.”

On February 24, 1996, two of the airplanes of the Hermanos al Rescate — Brothers to the Rescue — were shot down by Cuban pilots because they had been helping Cubans escape the regime of Fidel Castro. After a thorough investigation by Reg Brown, a military counterintelligence analyst, the evidence pointed to Montes as the Cuban spy who leaked the information about the movement of the airplanes. Brown, after struggling with this realization for weeks, reported his findings to a DIA counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael.

Carmichael interviewed Montes, double-checked her alibi and concluded that there was no way she could have been a Cuban spy. In truth, from the day she’d joined the DIA, Montes had been a Cuban spy. Right before she was arrested, the DIA found the codes she used to send her dispatches to Havana…in her purse. And in her apartment, she had a shortwave radio in a shoebox in her closet.

The most dangerous spies are rarely diabolical. The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us. We have a default to truth that something undeniably true has to happen for us to change our position or views.

According to Tim Levine, Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama, what we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. The occasional deception, then, is simply the cost of doing business. Over the course of his career, Tim Levine has conducted hundreds of versions of the same simple experiment. He invites students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test. If they answered the questions correctly, they win a cash prize.

The point of Levine’s research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You’d think we’d be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn’t. In one iteration of his experiment, Levine divided his tapes in half: 22 liars and 22 truth-tellers. On average, the people he had watch all forty-four videos correctly identified the liars 56% of the time. Levine’s answer is called the “Truth-Default Theory,” or TDT.

To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a “trigger.” A trigger is not the same as a suspicion or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away. ​

Part of what it means to get to know someone is to come to understand how idiosyncratic their emotional expressions can be

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.

We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight countries around the world, 63% of those asked said the cue they mostly used to spot a liar was “gaze aversion.”

Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match — whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look. When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we’re flummoxed. In other words, human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.

Many of those who study alcohol now consider it an agent of myopia rather than an agent of disinhibition

The myopia theory was first suggested by psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs, and what they meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates, in their words, “a state of short-sightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of the ​experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.” Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away.

Lots of people drink when they are feeling down because they think it will chase their troubles away. That’s inhibition-thinking: alcohol will unlock my good mood. But that’s plainly not what happens. Sometimes alcohol cheers us up. But, for example, at other times, an anxious person drinks and they just get more anxious.

Myopia theory has an answer to that puzzle: it depends on what the anxious, drunk person is doing. If he’s at a football game surrounded by rabid fans, the excitement and drama going on around him will temporarily crowd out his pressing worldly concerns. The game is front and center. His worries are not. But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.

This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self — without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, “In vino veritas”: “In wine there is the ​truth.” But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self. Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.

What happens to us when we get drunk is a function of the particular path the alcohol takes as it seeps through our brain tissue

The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning. The first drink “dampens” activity in that region. It makes us a little dumber, less capable of handling competing complicated considerations. It hits the reward centers of the brain, the areas that govern euphoria and gives them a little jolt. It finds its way into the amygdala. The amygdala’s job is to tell us how to react to the world around us. Are we being threatened? Should we be afraid? Alcohol turns the amygdala down a notch. The combination of those three effects is where myopia comes from.​

We don’t have the brainpower to handle more complex, long-term considerations. We’re distracted by the unexpected pleasure of the alcohol. Our neurological burglar alarm is turned off. We become altered versions of ourselves, beholden to the moment. Alcohol also finds its way to your cerebellum, at the very back of the brain, which is involved in balance and coordination. That’s why you start to stumble and stagger when intoxicated. These are the predictable effects of getting drunk.

But under certain very particular circumstances — especially if you drink a lot of alcohol very quickly — something else happens. Alcohol hits the hippocampus — small, sausage-like regions on each side of the brain that are responsible for forming memories about our lives. At a blood-alcohol level of roughly 0.08 — the legal level of intoxication — the hippocampus starts to struggle.​

Aaron White, at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington, DC, is one of the world’s leading experts on blackouts, and he says that there is no particular logic to which bits get remembered and which don’t. At the next level — roughly around a blood-alcohol level of 0.15 — the hippocampus simply shuts down entirely.

Men and women do not black out at the same time. If an American male of average weight has 8 drinks over 4 hours — which would make him a moderate drinker at a typical frat party — he would end up with a blood-alcohol reading of 0.107. That’s too drunk to drive, but well below the 0.15 level typically associated with blackouts. If a woman of average weight has 8 drinks over 4 hours, by contrast, she’s at a blood alcohol level of 0.173. She’s blacked out.

Students think it’s a really good idea if men respect women more. But the issue is not how men behave around women when they are sober. It is how they behave around women when they are drunk, and have been transformed by alcohol into a person who makes sense of the world around them very differently. Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them.

The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility because what we want to learn about them is fragile

In March 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was captured by the CIA. He was one of the most senior Al Qaeda officials ever captured. He was a hard core guy and was nicknamed “Mukhtar” which means “The Brain.”

James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were specialists in enhanced interrogation techniques who were sent to extract information from KSM after the normal interrogation techniques had failed. However, we have a situation where a terrorist wants to hold on to his secrets, and an interrogator who is willing to go to almost any lengths to pry them free. This is the most extreme version of the talking-to-strangers’ problem.

Mitchell and Jessen could use only walling and sleep deprivation to get him to talk because, incredibly, waterboarding did not work on him. Somehow KSM was able to open his sinuses, and the water that flowed into his nose would simply flow out his mouth. Mitchell and Jessen gave KSM the full treatment for three weeks. Finally, he stopped resisting. But KSM’s hard-won compliance didn’t mean his case was now open-and-shut.

The point of the interrogation was to get the subject to talk — to crack open the subject’s memory and access whatever was inside. But what if the process of securing compliance proved so stressful to the interviewee that it affected what he or she could actually remember?

KSM made his first public confession on the afternoon of March 10, 2007, just over four years after he was captured by the CIA in Islamabad, Pakistan. KSM’s extraordinary confession was a triumph for Mitchell and Jessen. The man who had come to them in 2003, angry and defiant, was now willingly laying his past bare. But KSM’s cooperation left a crucial question unanswered: was what he said true? Was KSM confessing to all those crimes just to get Mitchell and Jessen to stop? By some accounts, Mitchell and Jessen had disrupted and denied KSM’s sleep for a week. After all that abuse, did KSM know what his real memories were anymore?

The fact that strangers are hard to understand doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. But the harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become. The CIA had reason to believe that Al Qaeda was planning a second round of attacks after 9/11, possibly involving nuclear weapons. He had to get KSM to talk. But the harder he worked to get KSM to talk, the more he compromised the quality of their communication.

Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about KSM or Hitler or Brian Encinia among other strangers mentioned earlier is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crum​ple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we 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.

Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions

If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.

The assumption that people would simply switch to another method is called displacement. Displacement assumes that when people think of doing something as serious as committing suicide, they are very hard to stop. Blocking one option isn’t going to make much of a difference.

So which is it — displacement or coupling? If suicide follows the path of displacement — if the suicidal are so determined that when you block one method, they will simply try another — then suicide rates should have remained pretty steady over time, fluctuating only with major social events. If suicide is coupled, on the other hand, then it should vary with the availability of particular methods of committing suicide. As stats have shown, the latter is true. Suicide is coupled. Like suicide, crime is also tied to very specific places and contexts.

The first set of mistakes we make with strangers — the default to truth and the illusion of transparency — has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors,​ we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

Conclusion

Talking to Strangers requires wisdom and introspection. Wisdom enables us to correctly apply what we know about the stranger in our interaction with them. Introspection is useful for the removal of sentiments and prejudice in our judgment of strangers. Whether we are on a blind date or serving as jurors in a court of law, we must actively guide against the tendency to judge others based on their facial expressions, tone of their voice, physical appearances, and skin color. Our assessment can be terribly wrong because we have not considered all the parameters necessary to make an ​accurate judgment on the situation.

Context is another key ingredient in dealing with strangers. For example, judging actions carried out by an individual when they were drunk requires us to consider the context of drunkenness. Most of the time, we assume that alcohol simply reveals what is hidden in people. Truth is, alcohol transforms people into who they are not. Hence, they act in ways they wouldn’t have if they were sober. Containing crime and stemming the tide of suicide also requires a change of context. When we make it difficult for people to gain access to things normally used to commit suicide, there will be a sharp drop in suicide rates. When law enforcement agents identify areas where crime is concentrated and have a more military presence in these areas, crime rates will reduce. To have a safer, less sentimental and fair world, we need to identify the loopholes in our dealings with strangers and plug them post-haste​.

In my first year of college, I met a young man who would eventually become my best friend despite the fact that I thought he was garrulous and repulsive when we first met. As I learned more about him, the initial impression changed gradually. Make an effort to learn more about someone who left a bad first impression. You’d be surprised by what you find.