Talking to strangers

Author: Malcom Gladwell

Publisher : Penguin

Pages: 388

This book by Malcom Gladwell was recommended to me by a friend whose first reaction , when I told her that I was finally going to read it was, “ Talking to strangers will be a treat.” And I can’t agree more. This is a widely acclaimed book and I am lamenting over the fact that I have been too late in reading this. Also, this book comes from a genre that I have never reviewed before, so reviewing a book on human psychology is a challenge in itself . Nonetheless, challenge well accepted.

The book mimics a roller coaster, that’s slow at the beginning , with case studies of people having obscure names and it does take efforts to read and understand what the author is actually trying to convey. He starts with a case study of a black women Sandra Bland who gets on with a fight with a traffic police officer , ends up getting arrested and finally takes her life in prison. Steadily, the author through case studies, tries to explain what goes wrong in dealing with strangers and why are we so bad at understanding the people we know so little about .

His first postulate is - Truth Default Theory or the TDT. According to this, we are programmed to default to truth. In simple terms, we assume that the other person is generally speaking the truth. This is because the red flags of our mind are not raised enough to doubt the veracity of the claims that the other person is making. One or two instances of lie aren’t enough for us to not trust the person. You might feel that your partner is cheating on you but unless you get repeated evidences of that, you are sure to brush away one or two instances of doubts as you being overly possessive or an anxious personality. This he tries to explain with the case of the American spy agent Ana Montes who, though was working for the Cubans couldn’t be nabbed until too late because whatever she spoke in her enquiry was taken be true. Maybe she wasn’t speaking the truth. But in absence of enough evidences , our brain tends to take the other person’s words on face value. 

But there’s other side to it too. What if we start distrusting everyone we meet and greet? That, the author highlights would be even more disastrous. Being in a  constant state of paranoia and anxiety is not how humans have been designed. Hence he concludes that if we aren’t defaulting to truth we are only being human. To quote him “ the requirement of humanity means we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error.”

His second postulate is - Transparency. In his chapter “FRIENDS fallacy” , he argues that even if you view the famed television series FRIENDS without audio, you can still understand it. That’s because the characters are “transparent.” Meaning the dialogues and expressions of characters of the series are in congruence. But in real life that is not the case so. We might have templates for how people make faces when they are angry or smiling or crying and we tend to apply these templates across the specturm. He counters this as well. He cites how computers could detect better criminals than judges who relied more on facial expressions of the accused because , in his words, “life is not FRIENDS.” People , according, to the author are “mismatched.” Many times their expressions and words aren’t in congruence. And this is why humans are bad lie detectors. We not only default to truth, but also to the idea of transparency.

A particularly relevant case study on the issue of transparency occurs when we are drunk. Here he gives the “myopic theory.” It says we are not able to think of the long term consequences of our actions when we are drunk. While we are sober, the conflicts and contradictions within our behaviour are what prevent us from doing certain things that might be harmful for us in the long term. Alcohol, he says, does not bring out our true self. It rather alters our behaviour. As it is through “FRIENDS fallacy” we come to conclusion that people are not transparent. Mixing alcohol with that makes predicting human behaviour almost impossible and we get it wrong most of the times. This, he tries to prove through his case study of a sexual misadventure at the Stanford University wherein lack of transparency in a situation of intoxication leads to a man getting convinced that the girl had consented for sex, but eventually that turns out not to be the case. He also highlights how women are biologically more prone vis-a-vis men to getting intoxicated with the same amount of alcohol and how approaching strangers at parties may seem harmless, but state of intoxication coupled with problem of TDT and transparency increases women’s vulnerability to be sexually assaulted. 

His third postulate about understanding strangers is about “coupling.” Peoples’ actions are always coupled to their context. He takes the case study of suicides in UK that happened because of UK’s reliance on town gas ( it contained carbon monoxide) for heating purposes in homes. It eventually became as an easy means to suicide. He further gives the example of lack of boundary wall on the golden gate bridge in San Francisco as an easy means to jump off and suicide. He postulates that “suicide is coupled.” It is easy for us to judge strangers as “if he/she is suicidal he would eventually find a way to end his/her life.” But that’s taking too simplistic view, usually not taking into account the context in which the stranger is operating. He gives data as how the suicide rates in UK declined when it shifted from Towngas to natural gas for heating purposes. Another example that he gives is of sex workers. He writes that people are sex workers in a particular area. If they move to another area, we cannot assume that they would still be sex worker just because they are sex worker. At a particular location they know the people there, like who would call or not call the police . There they know other sex workers operating in the same area with whom they are comfortable. They are sex workers in a particular context, linked to a particular location. He cites the “Kansas city experiment.” Wherein it was concluded that crimes are coupled to a particular place( a sex worker is reluctant to move to another area) and only at those locations were police patrols increased that led to decrease in crime rates. In other cities where this idea of coupling was not followed, randomly increasing police patrols did not lead to decrease in crime.

After discussing the three postulates extensively through different examples, the author comes back to Sandra bland and connects the dots in one single case—> TDT, transparency and the idea of coupling. And how all three were at play when Bland was negotiating with the Traffic police officer. How both misunderstood each other and how such misunderstanding eventually culminated in one of them taking her own life. This book has been a refreshing read for  me, since I usually prefer reading books on international affairs. It opened a corner of my brain that might have been closed up till now. And it definitely changes the view you start looking at the world.