Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

In Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know (2019), journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell investigates why we face so many problems when interacting with strangers. He was inspired to search for the underlying causes of our miscommunications following the death of Sandra Bland, a black woman who was pulled over by a white police officer for a minor traffic infraction in 2015. Bland should have been let go with a warning; instead, a disastrous encounter escalated until Bland was arrested and put in jail, where she killed herself a few days later.

There were allegations of racism and misconduct following Bland’s suicide, but Gladwell believes that there is more to the story. There is something fundamentally flawed with how we make sense of strangers. To dig deeper into the matter, Gladwell examines numerous stories of interactions between strangers in which something went very wrong. He draws upon research from the social sciences to explain why each of these episodes happened the way they did.

Part 1 introduces two “puzzles” that will be addressed in the book: Why are we so bad at knowing when strangers are lying, and why are we sometimes even more prone to misunderstanding a stranger after having met them? Gladwell illustrates these problems with stories of the CIA being deceived by double agents and Neville Chamberlain being deceived by Adolf Hitler.