Business Book Club: Talking to Strangers

I've set myself a goal to read one self-development book per month. To make sure I truly reflect on what I'm reading I'm going to extract the wisdom from the best business and personal development books and share it with you.

This time, I've been reading Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Book

How good are you at reading the intentions of strangers?

As someone who has spent many years learning how to understand other people’s behaviour, I like to think that I’m quite good at it. Malcolm Gladwell is here to tell us that the evidence shows that we are not good at this at all. Gladwell puts forward two surprising and troubling questions about our ability to talk to strangers.

#1: When talking to strangers, why can’t we tell when the stranger is lying to our face?

#2: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them at all?

What did I learn?

You can find out in this video. A summary is below:

Gladwell highlights three things that make talking to strangers difficult:

‘Default to Truth’

Our baseline operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. We assume people are telling the truth even when we have our doubts. We have to reach a high threshold of doubt before we are willing to entertain the idea that someone is lying.

Gladwell gives the example of Ana Montes. Ana Montes worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the 90s and was eventually convicted of spying on behalf of Cuba. After her arrest, it seemed clear that there were clues all along. Montes’s reports often contained Cuban viewpoints. Sometimes she would take phone calls while a crisis was happening. However, the idea that this high performing analyst could be a spy seemed unbelievable. There may have been doubts, but not enough for her colleagues to raise the alarm. They defaulted to truth.

We need this tendency to default to truth for society to function. Think about it: what would life be like if we didn’t default to the idea that strangers are inherently good and honest people?

Transparency

Transparency is the idea that people’s behaviour and how they represent themselves on the outside, provides an authentic window into the way they feel on the inside. When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, we believe we can make sense of them through their behaviour. It turns out that this isn’t the case, or even if we can some of the time, we can’t all of the time.

Gladwell describes how Judge Soloman of New Work City was pitted against an AI programme to compare which could more accurately predict if defendants would be likely to commit crimes if granted bail. You would think that the judge, being able to look the defendant in the face and understand the context of the person’s circumstances, could make a better decision. He couldn’t. The programme was 25% more accurate in its predictions. In some cases this proved fatal, as one defendant went on to kill his partner after being released. If the decision had been made using the software, the same defendant would not have been granted bail.

Coupling

We often judge people by their behaviour when we meet them, assuming this gives us some insight into their mindset or behaviour. However, we often ignore the importance of context when making these judgements. In a different environment or at a different time, a person may behave very differently.

Gladwell explains this using the example of the Golden Gate Bridge. Since 1937 around 1700 people have plummeted to their death by jumping from the bridge. Despite this, a safety barrier wasn’t erected until 2018!

Why?

The safety barrier was controversial. It cost $211 million, three times what it cost to build the bridge. Many people in San Francisco didn’t think public money should be spent on the barrier because they believed that people attempting to jump from the bridge were determined the end their lives and that they would only find another way to kill themselves anyway. A psychologist named Richard Seiden proved that this isn’t the case. Seiden followed up with the 515 people between 1937 and 1971 who attempted to jump but who had somehow been restrained or stopped before they could do it. Of these, less than 5% persisted in killing themselves by some other method. People who wanted to jump off the bridge that time, only wanted to kill themselves on that bridge at that time. This is what Gladwell calls coupling. When you change the context the event is coupled with, behaviour can be very different.

What can we make of this?

Gladwell concludes that because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry? We blame the stranger. He advises that making sense of a stranger, "requires humility and thoughtfulness and a willingness to look beyond the stranger, and taking time, place and context into account."

Perhaps we should think twice before drawing conclusions about the behaviour of others.

What did I think?

I enjoyed the book, although for some reason not as much as Tipping Point. I think this book labours the point in places. I also found his explanations of the killing of Sarah Bland (who hung herself in her cell after being pulled over by a police officer) and the rape conviction of Brock turner, to be a little oversimplified. The Brock Turner part didn’t sit well with me at all. However, I found the examples of the ideas in action compelling and it offered some new and interesting insights into how we read other people. It also made me stop and question whether we are really as good at understanding others as we think we are. Our inability to read strangers at times can have fatal consequences so perhaps Gladwell is right. Maybe we do need to show humility, thoughtfulness and a willingness to look beyond the stranger,

What should I read next?

Have you read Talking to Strangers? What did you get from it? What should I read next?

If you have any recommendations let me know below or via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn

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