Talking to Strangers

I just finished reading this book by Malcolm Gladwell on my kindle. This is another book that he wrote in the wake of white cops in the US shooting black people and racial profiling that happened to be prevalent during that period.

A short interesting read and I managed to finish it in 3 days. Glad that I was finally able to complete a book from cover to cover. I have so many half read books in my kindle, which is rather depressing to see.

A quick summary so that I will remember his key points.

Never assume that strangers are straightforward or that they are easy to figure out. A good lesson for anyone. What you see in a person can always be deceiving.

There is a “default to truth” principle, which is a built in bias in humans. This principle is essential for all human interactions and for normal societal functioning. We all assume that what we see and hear is the truth unless there is a strong trigger event that causes us to change that view. He gives a number of historical examples to show that we generally believe what we see and hear when dealing with strangers and it usually is a high trigger point to reverse this default principle.

Although he takes the position that this default to truth principle applies even with strangers, I was not sure that this is entirely correct. Even the examples he cited were interactions not between total strangers. They may not have met before, for example, Hitler and Chamberlain, but they knew of them by reputation and would have some idea of the type of person they were dealing with. So I am of the view that with people we know or whom we know off, we will generally assume that what they tell us is true.

But I don’t agree with him that this default to truth principle will apply as a default mode when dealing with a complete stranger, at least for myself. I will assume that for people I know well either through my own dealings with them or through reputation, what they say is generally true. But I will not apply this default position when I meet a stranger. My other biases may kick in to determine if I do or do not believe the stranger.

There is then a transparency illusion. What we see externally may not be an accurate reflection of the stranger’s inner state or personality or views. And therein lies the danger. Some people think they are very good at reading others by just a glance. This is false. Not everyone is transparent and even then there are shades of transparency. We may be able to fathom some things but not everything. We make more mistakes when we make determinations based on what we see and hear from a stranger as opposed to when we rely on hard documentary evidence before us.

This is a big problem when you have people like interviewers, police or judges who make decisions based on what they see and hear from the person in front of them, a stranger they have never seen before. Our own biases, such as their appearance, attractiveness, how they dress, the colour of their skin or even nationality may cause us to come to false conclusions about a person. We are much better off looking at documentary evidence rather than try to read a person.

Finally there is the coupling effect. This says that people’s behaviour is often tied to a specific context or environment. Unless you understand how the environment or context affects them, we won’t be able to understand their behaviour or how to react to them.

I found some of the points in this book useful. Fortunately he doesn’t offer any general principle for dealing with strangers. In any event, that would have been impossible. So I accept the default to truth principle applies when dealing with people I know or know off. I don’t accept its full application to a total stranger. I accept that we are generally not good at making value judgments based on what we simply see and hear. It is much better to go on pure documentary evidence or a combination of both. As for myself, I have to learn how to deal with strangers. The difficulty would be to overcome my own sense of hubris of good I am at judging people and my own biases.