Talking to Strangers Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Talking to Strangers

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Zusammenfassung von Talking to Strangers

Name: Talking to Strangers
Rating: 4.1 (1216 reviews)
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

4.1 (1216 Bewertungen)

21 Min.

Themen

Manipulation General Knowledge

Inhaltsübersicht

Talking to Strangers
in 7 Kernaussagen verstehen

Audio & Text in der Blinkist App

Kernaussage 1 von 7

What’s in it for me? Find out how little you know about strangers.

When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to Munich to meet with Adolf Hitler in 1938, he wanted to get the measure of the man. Initially fearful of another world war, Chamberlain left Germany confident and satisfied that he fully understood what the German Führer had in mind. Hitler, he believed, was a man who could be trusted. History, though, proved Chamberlain catastrophically wrong.

Few of us will ever make a character judgment of such importance. But we do make judgments about strangers all the time. At work, at parties or even in the street, we engage with people of different perspectives, backgrounds and assumptions. We are constantly forced to interpret the words, intentions and characters of people we don’t really know. And the truth is, we are incredibly bad at understanding strangers.

In these blinks, you’ll understand why it’s so difficult to judge people’s characters. You’ll see why we are inherently trusting and bad at spotting lies.

A short warning before we begin: Blinks 5 - 7 raises murder and sexual violence and so contain sensitive or potentially triggering content.

We consistently overestimate our ability to judge strangers.

Solomon is a bail judge in New York State. His work comes with weighty responsibilities, which he takes seriously. He reads defendants’ files, of course, but he also knows how important it is to talk to them and look them in the eye. After all, a file won’t describe the glassy, dead-eyed stare that’s a sign of mental instability. It won’t reveal the shiftiness reflected in the failure to make eye contact.

Unfortunately, when it comes to assessing people, Solomon and his fellow judges fared worse than machines when this quality was tested against them.

In a 2017 study, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan examined bail decisions in New York. He gave an artificial intelligence program the same basic information the judges had received – age and criminal record – and asked it who of the 554,689 defendants should receive bail. The result? The defendants released by judges in real life were 25 percent more likely to commit a crime while out on bail than those the computer would have selected.

Judges think they can evaluate strangers based on the look in their eyes and a conversation. In fact, we all think that! But we’re wildly overconfident about our ability to make character judgments based on this flimsy evidence.

In a 2001 experiment, psychologist Emily Pronin asked a group of people to quickly fill in the missing letters in words like ‘GL_ _’ or ‘_ _ TER.’ Afterward, Pronin asked them to analyze what their word choices said about them. Most said that their choices were meaningless. Whether they’d written ‘glum’ or ‘glad’ didn’t reflect their personality or even their mood.

However, when Pronin showed the group lists completed by other people, everything changed. Clearly, this person was goal-oriented, the group decided, based on the words chosen. Another was obviously tired. While people were confident that their own word choices were random, they easily read into strangers’ word choices.

Pronin’s research points to a simple truth. With the smallest glimmer of information, we judge people we don’t know at all. We’re confident in our own complexity, but strangers are easy. Well, if there’s one thing these blinks show us, it’s that they are not.

We are incapable of spotting deception – it’s human nature to default to the truth.

Ana Montes was an intelligence analyst and a model employee at the US Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA. She was also a Cuban spy, who handed over damaging US defense and intelligence secrets to Havana.

In hindsight, there had been red flags. Her fellow intelligence analysts might have noticed that her reports parroted Cuban viewpoints, or that she sometimes took phone calls during crises. But there had never been enough to go on beyond a vague sense of suspicion. After all, what’s more likely? That the analyst sitting in front of you is one of the most damaging spies in US history, or that she’s just slightly odd?

Some people are better at spotting deception, but assuming the truth is important for society to function.

Perhaps society would be better off if we were better at spotting fraud and deception. In the early twenty-first century, a New York financier named Bernie Madoff defrauded thousands of investors of over $60 billion dollars, while claiming to be earning them stellar profits. And for a time, he got away with it. As one investor later commented, if Madoff had simply been making things up, surely someone would have noticed. Everyone assumed that someone else had their eye on the ball.

Everyone, that is, but Harry Markopolos. An independent fraud investigator, Markopolos wasn’t fooled by Madoff’s deception. He saw right through it because he doesn’t assume that everyone tells the truth. Growing up, he saw his parents’ restaurant business impacted by small-scale fraud and theft, and the experience affected him.

Life isn’t like an episode of Friends – what you see on people’s faces doesn’t tell the whole story.

Watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off, and you can still follow the action pretty closely. What’s happening is written all over the actors’ faces. When Joey is shocked, his jaw drops and his eyes widen. An angry Ross furrows his brow and narrows his eyes. And all of the characters show off broad, authentic smiles – and perfect teeth – when happy. You can read their faces like a book.

The performances in Friends are transparent. Transparency is the idea that someone’s demeanor reveals an authentic picture of their feelings. It’s one of the primary expectations we have when judging strangers. The problem is that transparency is often completely misleading.

When strangers aren’t transparent, we easily and completely misjudge them.

On November 1, 2007, a British student called Meredith Kercher was murdered by local criminal, Rudy Guede. The case against Guede was damning – he had a criminal record and his DNA was scattered all over the crime scene. Yet, for a long time, Meredith's roommate and fellow student Amanda Knox was the chief suspect, not Guede.

Knox found Kercher’s body and called the police, who came to believe that Kercher was killed in a drug-fueled sex game gone wrong between Kercher, Knox and Knox’s boyfriend. It was a bizarre conclusion. There was no physical evidence tying or even linking Knox to the crime, nor any evidence that Knox was interested in drug-fueled, dangerous sex games.

Alcohol can make interactions between strangers far worse, with terrible consequences.

Around midnight on January 18, 2015, two Swedish students spotted a man and woman on the ground outside a Stanford University fraternity house. Something seemed wrong. When the students approached the interlocked pair, the man, freshman Brock Turner, got up and ran away. Turner had sexually assaulted the woman, who was unconscious.

Encounters like this happen all too often. Why?

Sandra Bland was a victim of our inability to judge strangers.

On July 10, 2015, a 28-year-old African-American woman, Sandra Bland, was pulled over by a Texas State Trooper, Brian Encinia, for failing to signal a lane change. As Bland pointed out, however, she’d only changed lanes because Encinia had aggressively driven up behind her. She’d simply tried to get out of his way as quickly as possible.

Bland made her irritation clear. When Encinia then asked ‘Are you done?’ it must have felt, to Bland, like a provocation. Encinia later claimed not to have meant it that way.

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Worum geht es in Talking to Strangers?

Talking to Strangers (2019) is a powerful exploration of how little we know about the people we don’t know. It explores how we misjudge and misunderstand strangers, sometimes with terrible consequences, making a powerful case for more tolerance and patience in our dealings with others.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why real life is nothing like an episode of Friends;
how the look on our face when we are surprised is itself surprising; and
that artificial intelligence can assess a person’s character better than high court judges.

Bestes Zitat aus Talking to Strangers

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

—Malcolm Gladwell

Wer Talking to Strangers lesen sollte

City dwellers living in a crowd of strangers
Malcolm Gladwell fans
Those who think they’re a good judge of character

Über den Autor

Malcolm Gladwell is a renowned writer and thinker with five New York Times best sellers under his belt. The author of The Tipping Point and Outliers, Gladwell has been included in TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list and is one of Foreign Policy’s top global thinkers.

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