After reading so many fiction books this year I felt like I needed a break and decided to pick up Talking To Strangers. This is a non-fiction book about assumptions and how we react and make decisions when talking to people we don't know, and I was fascinated. The book brought up points that I would never have thought of but make so much sense now after thinking about them. I don't think anything covered is massively groundbreaking BUT, it's one of those books which I honestly believe will change the way I think about things from now on - just small things like contradictions in the way we think about ourselves but don't apply the same thinking to other people. I liked the combination of stories that were covered and the author presented some interesting theories.

4.5★s
“There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention. We should accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers.”

Talking To Strangers is the sixth book by British author, Malcolm Gladwell. Is it a book about social interaction? Yes, certainly, but not so much a “how to” as a “why do we get it wrong”. Gladwell explores the reasons that we seem to be so bad at telling when strangers are lying to us. He does this with reference to a myriad of psychological experiments, research, case studies and examples.

Gladwell holds that we are successfully deceived by strangers through a combination of three main reasons: the fundamentally human tendency to default to believing we are being told the truth; that facial expression and demeanour are much less reliable than we believe; and context matters a great deal.

“We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”

Gladwell cites examples of Cuban spies and the CIA, Hitler and Chamberlain, Bernie Madoff and the SEC, the Penn State Paedophile Case, a murder in Perugia, and more “If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.”

Gladwell talks about whistle blowers, bail judges, alcoholic blackout and sexual assault, the effects of torture on brain function, and ultimately relates it all back to the tragic consequences of a traffic stop in Texas.

Regards reading faces and behaviours: “Each of us, over the course of our lives, builds our own set of operating instructions for our face, based on the culture and environment we inhabit. The face is a symbol of how different human beings are, not how similar we are, which is a big problem if your society has created a rule for understanding strangers based on reading faces.”

He tells us “Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it”

And also “The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

Fully indexed, and with footnotes and thirty-one pages of comprehensive end notes, this is a fascinating and enlightening read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Penguin UK

I didn't finish this book - not the books fault but I wasn't in the correct headspace for non-fiction of this sort during lockdown.

Just what is the point of this book? It seems to be merely saying that we don’t always read others accurately, that we make false assumptions and jump to conclusions when dealing with strangers. Is that a new idea? An original insight? No, it is not. It’s a fact of daily life and I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of it at some stage. Yes, sometimes that inability to judge others and be deceived can be fatal (the old chestnut of Chamberlain and Hitler is brought out to play yet again) and yes, we should all be more thoughtful and perceptive about others’ intentions – but a whole repetitive and essentially shallow book with banal observations, and with some very flimsy conclusions, is quite simply a waste of reading time. It merely states the obvious and offers no solutions.

Why do we default to 'trust' when we question actions of people? Why is 'coupling' of events and emotions so important? In a wild ride around the world Gladwell considers some of the most influences on society and makes causal links that seem so obvious in hindsight. From paedophile scandals hushed up and ignored for years to the Amanda Knox case, played out in the light of the world's media, errors are explained and related to current events.
I have to be honest I am a huge Gladwell fan and thoroughly recommend his podcast 'Revisionist History'. Here again Gladwell makes links between the seemingly disparate and it all makes sense. I found it interesting as Gladwell talks about the dangers of trusting strangers based on human instinct as opposed to looking dispassionately at fact. I have been doing course this same week in which the recommendation was always to trust first. People are hard to read and first instinct is not always correct!

It's not the first book I read by Malcom Gladwell and always appreciated his style of writing and his being a great populariser and a good storyteller. I don't always agree with his ideas but they always made me think and reflect.
This book is no exception. I loved how he tell the story and build his theories using historical and real life examples even if I didn't always agree with his findings.
I think that one must consider that is a book that will be read by lots of people who aren't experts of psychology or communications and considering the target this books works well.
I liked it and it made me reflects even if I didn't agree with him a lot of times.
I think this a book you can love or hate, I loved the storytelling even if I had a lot of doubts about his conclusion.
I want to recommend it to anyone who want to read some interesting stories and reflects on his theories.
If you want a serious book about communication this is not the right one.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.”

In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of five NewYork Times Bestseller non-fiction titles, explores the factors at play when we make judgements about who people are, and why our interactions with strangers so often leads to misunderstanding and conflict.

“We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.“

By default most humans afford each other some level of trust, we must in order to operate within society, the advantage to human beings, in assuming that strangers are truthful, results in efficient communication and social coordination, argues psychologist Tim Levine. He calls this the Truth-Default Theory and in Talking to Strangers, Gladwell examines how this instinctive behaviour shapes our interactions with others, why it matters, and what happens when we get it wrong.

“Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside.”

Most of us believe we know when someone is telling the truth, or being deceptive - that we can tell by a person’s behaviour, demeanour, or even their attractiveness. Statistically however our ability to determine someone’s truthfulness seems to be quite poor, particularly when there is a mismatch between behaviour and intent. Gladwell discusses how this applies by looking at relevant high profile cases involving people such as Bernie Madoff, and Amanda Knox.

“Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.”

Gladwell also introduces the idea that context has a greater influence on our interactions with strangers than often considered. I found this information interesting but I think he overlooked the obvious, and more relatable, aspects of this argument.

In fact there were several issues I thought would be relevant to the discussion in Talking To Strangers that Gladwell barely mentioned, if at all, particularly in terms of how interactions are influenced by conditions such as narcissism and anti-social disorders (which matter when you are talking about politicians), and the difference between how men and women judge strangers. In fact the perspective of this book feels overwhelmingly masculine even though the subject of the book was inspired by the death of a woman, Sandra Bland.

“But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it...”

I wasn’t entirely convinced in regards to some of Gladwell’s analysis, but I found the narrative to be accessible and the subject thought-provoking. I know I will likely be more conscious of my thought process the next time I talk with a stranger

Gladwell's phrasing of the stories is problematic and although the main idea of this book is that we can't appropriately understand or attempt to analyze strangers if we try to get them to fit in a box, the stories themselves, in general, hardly fit this or have factors that are not properly examined.

Gladwell is one of the pioneers of popular psychology/sociology and in many ways nobody does it better, but some of his books end up seeming like over-extended magazine articles. Talking to Strangers falls into that category I think. It is full of interesting stories and insights, and Gladwell always writes fluently and persuasively, but in the end it seemed rather superficial to me and failed to hang together. There is a connection to be made between our failure to read other people and their intentions and society's wider failure to address issues like areas of high crime, but he didn't quite make it for me, despite all the research outlined in the notes. Put it down as intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying.

Malcolm Gladwell is viewed as a hugely influential writer and I was eagerly anticipating reading this, my first taste of his work, a body of his thinking on how we, the people, are extraordinarily gullible when it comes to strangers, all too easily taken in by them in our general eagerness to trust rather than be more cautious. He gives the a raft of well known examples from history, such as Neville Chamberlain being all to willing to take Hitler at face value, and more recent contemporary examples, such as the runaway success of Bernie Madoff's fraudulent ponzi scheme until it all fell apart, interspersed with interviews with prominent personalities. It turns out that overall, I was doomed to be disappointed with this book.

However, for me he makes far too many generalisations, often jumping to ill thought out judgements and conclusions whilst omitting key variables, and all too keen to let off those with responsibilities to prevent abuse. The problem is that he sounds frighteningly plausible and genial in the manner in which he lays out his often controversial, poorly researched thinking, so disarmingly seductive, and there are occasions that I cannot deny he is certainly interesting and thought provoking. The latter is insufficient for me to recommend this tome to other readers, I would prefer to direct readers to the many far more expert and well thought out other psychological studies on the complexities of human communication which in my view will turn out to be more a more helpful and productive experience, and additionally are more academically rigorous. Many thanks to Penguin UK for an ARC.