Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

When talking with Strangers we need to be aware of defaulting to the truth and understand the amount of coupling in the situation.

Two Key Take Away

1. We are bad at talking to Strangers. We can’t read people like we think we can.
2. Context matters, place matters, mental state matters.

Chapter Notes

Introduction – Step out of the car

Main Point We misunderstand peoples words and interactions. Summary Sandra Bland getting pulled over and yanked from you car, committing suicide. Cortes meeting Montezuma and thinking that he is viewed as a God.

Chapter 1- Fidel Castor’s Revenge

Main Point Even the CIA can get lied to. Summary Cuban defector, Florentino “tiny” Aspillaga told the CIA about numerous double agents that had been working for Cuba for years. After hearing of the defection. Castro released a video of years of surveillance of CIA agents in Cuba. Even with lie detectors, they agents passed because people thought they could tell better than the machines. Key Quotes Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?

Chapter 2 – Getting To Know Der Fuhrer

Main Point It is not easy to tell what people are thinking. Summary Neville Chamberlain trusted Hitler when he said he wouldn’t keep invading. Halifax was also fooled, as were many other officials. Judges get it wrong when they give people parole. They think looking at them and hearing about their case can give insight into making a good decision. An economist, some computer programmers, and a bail expert made a program with better outcomes using less information. A word game had people respond saying it didn’t reveal anything about them. But when they were asked about others responses they thought they could tell what sort of person they were.

Chapter 3 – The Queen of Cuba

Main Point Ana Belen Montes was the mole inside the DIA for years. Every time something happened it was explained away and even the counter-intelligence sections didn’t pick up on her activities. Summary We are bad at picking up on lies. We default to the truth. There doesn’t need to be doubts, there needs to be enough doubts to overcome the threshold of belief. Discussed Milgram’s shock experiments and all of the information pointing to it being fake but people still thought they might have killed someone. The experiment with the students cheating and then being asked if they cheated or not, and people not being able to tell if they were or not.

Chapter 4 – The Holy Fool

Main Point We need people who have no threshold of belief, they always assume people are lying. Summary Harry Markopolos for years had been sending the SEC information about his belief that Bernie Madoff was running a ponzi scheme but they wouldn’t believe him. Nat Simmons, at Renaissance, wrote and email saying he didn’t trust Madoff, they cut their position in half but hedged their bets. Everyone defaulted to the truth and believed Madoffs wild success without any evidence that it was honest.

Key Quotes You just assume that someone was paying attention – Nat Simmons (Renaissance executive)

Chapter 5 – The Boy in the Shower

Main Point Leaders default to the truth. Summary Jerry Sandusky (Penn State) and Larry Nassar (US Gymnastics/Michigan State) abused children for years without anything happening to them. Parents didn’t listen to their children around Nassar until it was revealed that he had a computer full of child porn. Sandusky never had the smoking gun and had many different report of what was taking place. The university staff defaulted to the truth that he was ‘horsin around’. People that reported to be abused asked him to come to their wedding. In both cases, the leadership was held to account for not doing enough, but there was so many conflicting reports, who do you believe?

Chapter 6- The Friends Fallacy

Main Point Transparency is the ideal that people’s behaviour and demeanor – the way they represent themselves on the outside – provides and authentic and reliable window into how they feel on the inside. Summary Researches took a study of peoples expressions to school kids in Madrid, who nearly got 100% on it. Then they took the same study to a remote village of Trobrianders who scored terrible. They then took it to other remote villages and they also scored badly. We don’t all respond the same way with our face as our emotions. It is not a universal thing, but a social thing. TV has people over emphasize what we think emotions look like, mouth wide open in awe, but this is not how people actually emote. The requirement for face to face engagement means we need to tolerate a large amount of error.

Chapter 7 – A (Short) Explanation of the Amanda Knox Case

Main Point If you think that the way a stranger looks and acts is a reliable indicator for how they feel then you are going to make mistakes, Summary Amanda Knox was found guilty of a brutal murder in the Italian hills because she didn’t quite fit in. None of the evidence staked up but because she wasn’t reacting in the way that people thought she should she was thought to be guilty. We are good at telling the truth if the person in “matched” – lying while looking like they are lying. But we are terrible if they are unmatched, lying but doesn’t look like the are lying, or telling the truth but looks like they are lying.

Chapter 8 – The Fraternity Party

Main Point How do you tell what someone is thinking when they are drunk? Or if you are drunk? Or if you are both drunk?

Summary 1 –

1. Two Swedish grad students happen upon “Emily Doe” being unconscious with Brock Turner on top of her.
2. We don’t have boundaries for what sexual consent looks like.
3. There was a lot of drinking that night by Turner and “Doe”. Turner said it was consensual, the jury didn’t believe that a self respecting woman would want to have sex by a dumpster.
4. Dwight Heath, Yale grad student went to Camba, Bolivia where the locals would drink 180 proof alcohol and the village didn’t have the social issues we see in the west. This lead to a change in the perception about alcohol. Different cultures would respond differently to alcohol as if following a script. It wasn’t an agent of disinhibition but an agent of myopia.
5. In vino veritas In wine, truth. Cluade Steele and Robert Josephs researched the myopic nature of alcohol with asking bar patrons if they would have sex with a person they went home with with no condom. The more drunk the more likely. The less they could think of the big picture. Camba had rituals around alcohol that kept everything in check.
6. British case Benjamin Bree – got convicted of rape, both parties were drunk, later released. Judge said it was impossible to figure out what the two of them did or did not consent to.
7. Black out drunk is when you are over 0.15 BAC and your hippocampus can’t form new memoires. There was a study and college students didn’t think that reducing alcohol was one of the main ways to reduce sexual violence.
8. 8 – Emily Doe read a statement to the court about Brock Turner that talked about her loss of innocence and feeling scared all the time. Not being able to sleep.

Key Quotes Consent is something that two parties negotiate, in the assumption that each side in a negotiation is who they say they are. But how do you determine consent when, at the moment of negotiation, both parties are so far from their true selves – pg 215 Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they get – Drunken Comportment (Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton) – pg 226

Chapter 9 – KSM : What Happens When the Stranger is a Terrorist?

Main Point Stress changes what people remember and can process. How do you trust what someone is saying if they are in a stressed state or if they might want to lie to you

Summary

1. James Mitchell is asked to interrogate Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) a high ranking Al Qaeda agent after Sept 11. There were two interrogators before Mitchell and Bruce Jensen who were unsuccessful.
2. Mitchell was part of the SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) course for the air force. Teaching soldiers how to deal with getting caught and interrogated. Mitchell had to go through the course too, getting put in a barrel and buried underground with a hose in it that is flooding with water.
3. The CIA asked Mitchell and Jensen to come in and work on ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ techniques. Sleep deprivation, walling, and water boarding. They found the KSM could open up his sinuses and let the water flow through his mouth. He is the only person it didn’t work on. Eventually he capitulated.
4. Charles Morgan, a psychiatrist, was asked to look at the SERE program for the Army. He did tests on soldiers going through the SERE training. He found that the prefrontal cortex was shut down and they didn’t remember many things going on. They become unreliable witnesses. The more they were stressed the worse was their recall.
5. KSM confessed to many many crimes. There is doubt whether he was telling the truth. There was suggestions that he was just building up his fame and claiming to do many things that never happened.

Key Quotes The ‘truth’… is not some hard and shin object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. pg 261

Chapter 10 – Sylvia Plath

Main Point We don’t understand the context of where the stranger is operating. You have to ask yourself where and when you are meeting the stranger. Don’t look at a stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the strangers world.

Summary

1. Sylvia Plath was a prolific writer and poet. She moved to London after her husband left her for another women. She wrote a new collection of poems and was even more productive. Then a cold winter set in and her depression returned. She would take her life by putting her head in the oven and turning on the gas, leaving her two children in their room.
2. Plath fit the criteria of someone to commit suicide, she had failed before, from a broken home, in a foreign country. Form the looks of it, it all made sense.
3. British gas changed over from ‘town gas’ to natural gas, this doesn’t have carbon monoxide. If the theory of displacement holds true, these people would just commit suicide in another way. If coupling holds true, the behaviour is coupled with the environment and context. Suicide went down. The same is true at the Golden State bridge. Putting up a suicide net reduced total suicides. Most of the public don’t believe this would happen, they think if someone wants to kill themselves they will find another way.
4. David Weisburd study the 72 precinct of NYC. It was one of the bad areas of the city. He was walking with the beat cops to learn about the people. The “Dracula” model is that the criminals have to do crime. What he found that within the bad area it was only one block that was ‘bad’ and that most areas were free of crime. He thought they should stop studying people and start studying places.
5. The law of the concentration of crime, similar to pareto efficiency. Most of the crime is in a small area rather than a whole region. Same with the AIDS epidemic.
6. Plath killed herself when the suicide rate of British women between 25 – 44 was the highest it has ever been.
7. Prostitutes’ were coupled/anchored to the area. They didn’t just move to a new place. There was different challenges and stresses that meant that moving wasn’t an option.

Chapter 11 – The Kansas City Experiments

Main Point We struggle to understand the idea that a stranger’s behaviour is tightly connected to place and context. We don’t do well with coupling.

Summary

1. Kansas City had a lot of crime and the police chief wanted to do something about it. They hired Criminologist George Kelling, he created three situations, a control group (no change), an area where police only responded when they got called, and a group that had double or sometimes triple the amount of police on the ground. The outcome… Nothing changed. There was no difference in crime with the three Groups.
2. 20 years later, Kansas City got in another criminologist, Lawrence Sherman. His focus was on guns. Reduce the guns, reduce the crime was his thought process. They picked a high crime area and sent out cops to knock on every door and talk to the population about gun crime and to give them information on who to report to. It didn’t work. Next was to teach the cops of detecting concealed weapons. They trained up the officers and the results were the same.
3. The next attempt was to use a loophole in the US legal system and search people with ‘reasonable suspicion’. They had 4 officers, 2 in 2 cars patrol a small 0.64 square mile area. They worked from 7pm to 1am for 200 consecutive days. Shootings were cut in half. This lead other policing areas to ‘try’ to do the same thing.
4. This lead to traffic stops going from 400k to 800k in North Carolina. The idea of focused stops changed to stop everyone. So instead of using a small number of police to target a particular area the learning was lost and it was to stop everyone. The success of Kansas city was the coupling of an activity with an area.

Chapter 12 – Sandra Bland

Main Point

When we don’t think through situations and we believe despite evidence, we are right we can create some terrible outcomes

Summary

1. Office Brian Encinia pulls over Sandra Bland for not signaling. Tensions rise. Encinia yanks her from the car and arrests her. Three days later, Bland commits suicide in a cell. Encinia was fired for breaking a Texas state police rule to basically be nice to people.
2. Needle in the hay stack policing. TSA check their staff and 95% of the planted devices get by. Policing shifted away from default to the truth to ‘curiosity ticklers’. Officer Encinia had a habit of pulling many people over for very minor things.
3. Officer Encinia did exactly what he was trained to do. He felt threatened and thought Bland could be dangerous. He tried to assert control over the situation. He didn’t read any of the signs from Bland that she was frustrated and annoyed, just dangerous.
4. Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri a year before Bland died. Ferguson police took the Kansas City model to the extreme. Stopping everyone. Their KPI’s were based on issuing tickets. The Sherman model in Kansas city was targeted. He knew that stopping people caused harm.
5. Encinia thought it was a high crime area but none of the evidence pointed to it, it was also in the afternoon when there was less crime. Encinia was just on a ‘fishing trip’
6. Because we are bad at talking with strangers in the end we blame the stranger.

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