Episode 09: Talking to Strangers
Hello and welcome back to episode 9 of Metamorphosis, this time featuring the book, Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. A fun fact is that I picked up this book on 01/01/2022, on a long haul flight. Courtesy of the title, I got a few chances to confabulate with ‘Strangers’. A great experience in hindsight, to live through a microcosm of interactions, mainly comprising of small talk, however giving me the perfect chance to indulge in a before/after introspection, as I interacted with strangers and experienced a tour de force of awareness (or lack thereof) in dealing with them.
Sparing the details of the conversation, upon finishing the book I could easily reflect on how nuanced and appropriate the examples in the book were. I felt that the book pierced through an obdurate conviction of ‘knowing others better than they know us’- and the fact that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa). Thus, providing a compelling case for describing belief, as Malcolm wrote, “Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.” This just proves how convincing the fact is that strangers are not easy, and that it is human nature to think that we are nuanced, complex and enigmatic but the stranger is easy.
Through examples and provocative studies in the book, erroneous practices such as talking when we would do well to listen and becoming impatient when others express conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly are depicted as the cornerstone of failing to understand a stranger.
What one stumbles upon is a paradox of talking to strangers: We need to talk to them, that is how we indulge in meaningful social encounters, but we’re terrible at it. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed.
My first takeaway is from a puzzle in the book i.e., why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? The explanation though very expansive consorts to this simple platitude of defaulting to the truth. As humans, based on that assumption, we reach a position to square everything almost without realizing it. We naturally operate under the assumption that the majority of strangers we meet are honest. (Truth Default Theory)
Practically, only the whistleblowers are less likely to default to truth, take the example of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” where the King believes he has a magic outfit while he is outright naked and it takes a child to yell out “The King isn’t wearing anything!” while the others fear that they’ll be called stupid.
We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, however, the threshold for triggers is high and accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts is cumbersome. We default to truth- even when that decision carries terrible risks- because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise if you think. Plush with historic examples, of Fidel Castro being able to pull the wool over the CIA’s eyes for a generation, Neville Chamberlain thinking he could trust Adolf Hitler and of the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the mastermind behind a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, Malcolm refers to the Trivia Experiment by psychologist Tim Levine to help understand and analyze the Truth Default Theory.
My next takeaway is from the idea of transparency, or simply the question, does the level of truthfulness correspond with the way a person looks? (We observe their facial expression and try to implicate congruence with how they feel.)
Transparency is a crucial tool we use to make sense of strangers. When we don’t know someone or can’t communicate with them. But somehow, humans can be mismatched to telegraph their internal states through facial signals. In other words, it’s like a dishonest person who acts honest or an innocent person who acts guilty. So in order to understand the question, one must be aware that if one believes that the way a stranger looks and acts is a reliable clue to the way they feel, then one is sure to make mistakes.
My final takeaway is about understanding the concept of coupling. “We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating”
The truth is that a stranger’s behaviour is tightly connected to place and context – that eludes us. This is a fundamental misconception, which if could have been comprehensible, could save us from the misfortune of controversies. Adding to the layers of errors we commit, on top of the default to truth and the illusion of transparency, this has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. Simply said, what this teaches us is to not look at the stranger and jump to conclusions, but to look at the stranger’s world. When confronting a stranger, ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger.
The concept of coupling is showcased through Sylvia Plath’s suicide. We look at her poetry and think we understand her but there’s something we forget, that the thing we want to learn about any stranger is fragile. If we are careless, which we often are, it can easily disassociate and vanish. In other words, “when dealing with strangers there are real limits, and we will never know the whole truth. We must be satisfied with something short of that. And, most importantly the right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”
This brings us to the end of this episode, and like always leaving you with some words to live by,
“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defence against predation and deception – is worse.”
Thank you for reading and I hope to catch up with you soon in the next episode!
