📚 Talking to Strangers

Author

Malcolm Gladwell

Year of release

2019

Genre

Psychology, Sociology

Pages

400

Average WPM

366

Date Started - Finished

1-Mar-2022 to 7-Mar-2022

Time took

3.18 Hours

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About the book

What I didn’t like about the book

• Graphic descriptions of r*pe and pedophelia

How I Discovered It

• Random Google search

Actionable Takeaways

• I don’t agree with everything he says. But what I like is that he finds interesting threads and premises and manages to weave them together in such a way that it makes me think about my own beliefs a little different.
• People are extraordinarily gullible when it comes to strangers

Top Quotes

When humans communicate with other humans, we tend to operate on a default presumption that what the other person says is basically honest. - Truth-Default Theory

The statistics say that the liar and the con man are rare. But to the Holy Fool, they are everywhere.

Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine.

Summary + Notes

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Chapter Two: Getting to Know der Führer

And the puzzle is that the group who were deceived are the ones you’d expect not to be, while those who saw the truth are the ones you’d think would be deceived.

illusion of asymmetric insight

Cognitive bias whereby people perceive their knowledge of others to surpass other people’s knowledge of them

Chapter Three: The Queen of Cuba

Truth-Default Theory

TDT is a new theory of deception and deception detection. The key idea is that when humans communicate with other humans, we tend to operate on a default presumption that what the other person says is basically honest.

You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.

Chapter Four: The Holy Fool

• The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers.

• The statistics say that the liar and the con man are rare. But to the Holy Fool, they are everywhere.

Chapter Five: Case Study: The Boy in the Shower

Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine.

Chapter Six: The Friends Fallacy

The unobservables create noise, not signal.

Chapter Seven: A (Short) Explanation of the Amanda Knox Case

• If you believe that the way a stranger looks and acts is a reliable clue to the way they feel—if you buy into the Friends fallacy—then you’re going to make mistakes.

• Human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.

Chapter Eight: Case Study: The Fraternity Party

All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations.

Chapter Nine: KSM: What Happens When the Stranger Is a Terrorist?

“Trying to get information out of someone you are sleep-depriving is sort of like trying to get a better signal out of a radio that you are smashing with a sledgehammer.…It makes no sense to me at all.”

• The harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become.

• The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

Chapter Ten: Sylvia Plath

• The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment…Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.

• When you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.