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Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
85 reviews
caiskel's review against another edition
This book is interesting although it is different than I expected after reading the summary. I enjoy learning about psychology and there were some interesting points made in the book that will stick with me. But boy. This book is dark. Graphic descriptions of terrible things. I just had to stop.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Suicide, Torture, and War
okiecozyreader's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
4.5
The audio for this is the way to go. Gladwell has actors and live footage reading scripts, which I would think has to make it more interesting to listen to.
This book starts with a court case of a black woman, Sandra Bland and a cop who interrogated her after a minor traffic infraction, sending her to jail where she committed suicide.
He says, in the introduction:
“There are bad cops. There are biased cops. Conservatives prefer the former interpretation, liberals the latter. In the end the two sides canceled each other out. Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things.
I don’t want to move on to other things.” P7
He goes back and forth between this case and several others. Hitler, Cuba, Larry Nasser, Amanda Knox, Chanel Miller, Sylvia Plath, and several case studies to try to understand why it is difficult to understand strangers. He uses ideas like the Friends Fallacy - that we try to gauge people by their facial expressions and we often get things wrong because people don’t often display how they feel. Instead, it takes more careful understanding of people to discern why they are acting the way they act.
—
“
But to start, I have two questions—two puzzles about strangers— “ intro
“Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? “ Ch 1
“…try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies?” Ch 3
Ch 2
“The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally . The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
“Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?”
Chapter 3
If I can convince you of one thing in this book: let it be this: Strangers are not easy.
Chapter 4
That’s the consequence of not defaulting to trust. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.”
Chapter 5
“But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency.”
We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we send a person like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers - without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
Chapter 6
Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we gain from cultural sources, such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in real life.
Transparency is a myth - an idea we’ve picked up from too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment,” or “eyes went wide with surprise.”
The unobservables create noise not signal.
Advantage that the judge has over the computer [by seeing the person] isn’t really an advantage
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…
Ch 8
“…we nearly always miss crucial clues in the moment.”
Chapter 9
“The right way to talk with strangers is with caution and humility.”
Chapter 10
“…poets have far and away the highest suicide rates - as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds…”
“We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
Ch 11
“Coupling teaches us the opposite. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the strangers 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.”
Ch 12
“How many drugs did the North Carolina highway patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 people…”
“Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and known, and we can’t.
To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense predation and deception - is worse.”
There is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies in its midst, or for investors to spot schemers or frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we do not know. But what is required is restraint and humility. …
“… makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires
care and attention.”
“Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”
This book starts with a court case of a black woman, Sandra Bland and a cop who interrogated her after a minor traffic infraction, sending her to jail where she committed suicide.
He says, in the introduction:
“There are bad cops. There are biased cops. Conservatives prefer the former interpretation, liberals the latter. In the end the two sides canceled each other out. Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things.
I don’t want to move on to other things.” P7
He goes back and forth between this case and several others. Hitler, Cuba, Larry Nasser, Amanda Knox, Chanel Miller, Sylvia Plath, and several case studies to try to understand why it is difficult to understand strangers. He uses ideas like the Friends Fallacy - that we try to gauge people by their facial expressions and we often get things wrong because people don’t often display how they feel. Instead, it takes more careful understanding of people to discern why they are acting the way they act.
—
“
But to start, I have two questions—two puzzles about strangers— “ intro
“Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? “ Ch 1
“…try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies?” Ch 3
Ch 2
“The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally . The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
“Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?”
Chapter 3
If I can convince you of one thing in this book: let it be this: Strangers are not easy.
Chapter 4
That’s the consequence of not defaulting to trust. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.”
Chapter 5
“But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency.”
We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we send a person like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers - without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
Chapter 6
Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we gain from cultural sources, such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in real life.
Transparency is a myth - an idea we’ve picked up from too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment,” or “eyes went wide with surprise.”
The unobservables create noise not signal.
Advantage that the judge has over the computer [by seeing the person] isn’t really an advantage
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…
Ch 8
“…we nearly always miss crucial clues in the moment.”
Chapter 9
“The right way to talk with strangers is with caution and humility.”
Chapter 10
“…poets have far and away the highest suicide rates - as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds…”
“We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
Ch 11
“Coupling teaches us the opposite. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the strangers 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.”
Ch 12
“How many drugs did the North Carolina highway patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 people…”
“Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and known, and we can’t.
To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense predation and deception - is worse.”
There is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies in its midst, or for investors to spot schemers or frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we do not know. But what is required is restraint and humility. …
“… makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires
care and attention.”
“Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”
Content Warnings
Moderate: Alcoholism, Rape, Suicide, Police brutality, and War
berksah's review against another edition
4.0
First Gladwell book. Nicely written and engaging, different from what I thought it would be. Many CWs, while not in his writing or ideas, but in examples and case studies
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Pedophilia, Racism, Rape, Self harm, Suicide, Torture, Police brutality, Suicide attempt, Murder, and Sexual harassment
mollyob's review against another edition
1.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, Torture, and Police brutality
Moderate: Racism, Islamophobia, and Murder
chloethonus's review against another edition
informative
sad
medium-paced
1.25
Misleading title and incredibly clumsy execution. I like Gladwell typically but this book just reads as being willfully incompetent. If the book started in the direction of "this language barrier upon the Spaniards meeting the Aztecs created a misunderstanding repeated even in common history" I could maybe understand it and would be interested in reading about miscommunications in history. But instead we get blaming people killed by the police as "not knowing how to talk to strangers", a man raping a woman as "misreading cues because he was drunk". I genuinely cannot believe any positive reviews are actually buying this pseudopsychology built on a foundation less stable than sand. Any jab at critical thinking makes these concepts of "bad things happen because we suck at social skills" deflate like a sad balloon. Cannot believe I actually wasted my time trying to search for any ounce of a good point.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Pedophilia, Rape, Violence, and Police brutality
Moderate: Racism, Sexual assault, Suicide, and Sexual harassment
mayukiiq's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Very thought-provoking and easy to follow. The “enhanced audiobook” was super enjoyable to listen to- complete with music, voice actors, etc., and just felt like an extended episode of Revisionist History.
*Sensitive topics discussed in detail, please be mindful of content warnings.
*Sensitive topics discussed in detail, please be mindful of content warnings.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Rape, Suicide, Torture, Police brutality, Suicide attempt, and Alcohol
annaroses's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Pedophilia, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, Violence, Police brutality, and Suicide attempt
pagguini123's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Child death, Gun violence, Hate crime, Mental illness, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, Police brutality, Murder, Sexual harassment, and Injury/Injury detail
kdenten's review against another edition
informative
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gun violence, Pedophilia, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Suicide, Torture, and Suicide attempt
Minor: Alcoholism, Drug use, Mental illness, Murder, and Alcohol
montyalmoro's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
2.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Hate crime, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Police brutality, Suicide attempt, Alcohol, and Sexual harassment