Talking to Strangers
What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know
We are terrible at reading people we have never met, and the consequences reach from the courtroom to the traffic stop.
Prompted by the death of Sandra Bland after a routine traffic stop, Gladwell asks why we are so bad at reading people we have never met. He works through Chamberlain misjudging Hitler, judges outperformed by an algorithm, and the Madoff and Penn State cases. We default to believing one another, and we assume feelings show plainly on the face when often they do not. The failures, he argues, are structural rather than personal.
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