My Thoughts on: Talking to Strangers

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Title: Talking to Strangers – what we should know about the people we don’t know

Pages: 346

I recommend this book if you: frequently think about how the world works. You like to think against the grain and will consider even unpopular ideas in your synthesis. You get a kick out of novel anecdotes.

Key takeaways: People are lousy lie-detectors and poor judges of others because:

1.      Default to Truth: they assume others are honest short of SUFFICIENT contradictory evidence and “sufficient” is a hell of a lot.

2.      Transparency: they falsely believe they can accurately extrapolate strangers’ behaviours and idiosyncrasies (yet ironically cry sacrilege when this is done onto them).

3.      Coupling Theory: they fail to consider the salience of HOW something is done to it being done at all.

The punchline: We’re bound to misunderstand one another from time to time and the bit we can do to change this isn’t really worth it.

Verdict: Good thought-provoking fun. To be taken with a grain of salt.

My thoughts:

I want to tackle this book from two different perspectives: critically, but also with fun in mind. Let’s start with the latter, shall we?

Talking to Strangers is an undeniable crowd pleaser. The high-octane, edge-of-your-seat case studies Gladwell is famous for are once again on full display, serving as his delivery-vehicle of choice. As far as vehicles go, this one is more prancing horse than commuter.

Now, I love a good story, and boy! Let me tell you! The book is chalk-full of knock-your-socks-off historic anecdotes. Is this hyperbole? Yeah, perhaps it is – sue me. The point is it inspired some smiles as I flipped through the pages.

This brings me to my second thought: Talking to Strangers is a bit of a page-turner. Cover to cover took me a little over two days (although quarantine-adjusted figures are likely higher). Now, I don’t mean that in a bad way. It certainly wasn’t the shallow read I think is typically associated with the colloquial “page-turner”. Instead, I found Gladwell does a good job of breaking his main points down into bite-sized pieces without sacrificing too much fidelity and nuance. But then I suppose crowd pleasing isn’t for the esoteric. Overall, Talking to Strangers is extremely approachable and a joy to read. Leisure rating: 8/10.

Alright, so what about the main course? Well, if you read my “Key Takeaways” and hardly flinched, you’re not alone. The posited explanations for why people tend to misunderstand one another aren’t the most robust. My guess is that many who will read this book will come out of it no “wiser” than before – a sentiment I generally extend to other pieces in the same niche (something for another day).

So, why bother reading it? Well, because rigorous inference is besides the point here. The more I read Talking to Strangers, the more parallels I drew to another book: Freakonomics. What does this mean? Well, two things, I think:

One. The book is more about provoking and shaping thought than about prescribing a magic elixir. In fact, Gladwell even proposes that the little we can do to avoid deceit probably isn’t worth it.

Two. It helps to read this book like an econometrician. Being a stats guy, I often think about the relationships between concurrent and competing variables. So, I couldn’t help seeing that one of Gladwell’s main points could be elegantly expressed as an optimization problem. My conjecture: Default to Truth likely produces the optimal bundle of Type I and Type II errors in everyday truth/lie classification.

In plain English, consider this: if I always trust strangers, I will never be held back by suspicion – or worse, accuse an honest person of lying – but I’d obviously be pretty na?ve. Conversely, if I assume everything is a lie, I’d never be duped but… well, I probably wouldn’t have many friends, would I? 

The reality is, the distribution of truths and lies is heavily skewed towards truths (you’re told significantly more truths than lies). Additionally, it can be quite hard to ascertain when someone is lying due in part to mismatching (explaining this would take away from one of the book’s more compelling experiments, so I won’t). Bottom line, when time and information are scarce, it generally makes more sense to default to truth and take the occasional deceit on the chin. Besides, rampant suspicion probably isn’t the best thing for social cohesion.

One last thought. There is a passage in the book where a judge is measured against a classification algorithm in setting bail. Both receive identical data on which to base their decisions with one exception: the AI does not get to interact with the defendants. I won’t spoil the outcome, but I wonder if the recent surge in virtual trials has had a measurable impact on trial outcomes. 

Alright, this seems like a good place to end things on. Final score: 7.5/10 

Summary: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43848929-talking-to-strangers?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=MHkO7r8Xft&rank=1

Case studies:

-         The pre-WWII Chamberlain-Hitler meetings

-         Cold-War era infiltration of the CIA by Cuban spies

-         Judge v. AI

-         The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme

-         The Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandals

-         The Brock Turner sexual assault case

-         The Amanda Knox trial

-         The Sylvia Plath Suicide

-         The KSM Terrorism Interrogations

-         The Kansas City Experiment