Talking to Strangers - by Malcolm Gladwell
The central question is how do we make sense of strangers, people we don’t know? Using examples from real life, well-known author Gladwell exposes some of our common fallacies about figuring out others. First, we tend to default to the truth in spite of evidence to the contrary. Generally, our bent to believe what people say serves us well but does not help us determine scammers. Second, we believe people are transparent; i.e. that their responses match their feelings or even their guilt/innocence. Thus we build a world that systematically discriminates against those who don’t fit our ideas of transparency.
Dealing with the issue of sexual assault and drunkenness, especially on campuses, he shows the myopia often caused by alcohol. which transforms us into someone else. Our field of emotional and mental vision changes; we are not our true selves. Similarly torture, especially sleep deprivation, like traumatic events, often produces untrue results. In these cases the harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become.
Central to his book is the concept of coupling where things coincide to produce certain results or the idea context is a large influencing factor. One example he uses is the huge increase in suicides when Great Britain switched their home heating to an inexpensive gas that could be toxic. As soon as the gas was changed, the numbers of suicide returned to normal. Thus, to even begin to ‘see’ a stranger we need to look at the stranger’s world. When we look at strangers without our assumptions and within their context where they appear coupled with other factors, we begin to appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of strangers. He concludes that because we do not know how to talk to strangers when things go awry we often blame the stranger.
I found this latest book by Gladwell as fascinating as his previous ones.
-Jackie Potters, csj Associate