Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

“We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanour. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty people who give convoluted explanations aren’t.”

Why is it so difficult for us to make sense of a stranger? Or to understand when someone is lying to us? Why is our interpretation of a communicative exchange often so different from the message that our counterpart originally meant to convey? Written in 2019, the book ‘Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know’ by Malcolm Gladwell discusses how the way in which we communicate with others might be affected by a set of biases, assumptions and judgements that can lead to misunderstanding, miscommunication and conflict. Using a variety of examples, mainly taken from history and US news on topics like police misconduct, financial fraud and suicide, the book is not always an easy read but provides an interesting - although at times arguably oversimplified - analysis of the reasons why due to often overlooked or underestimated linguistic, cultural or social differences, our strategies to communicate and interact with strangers can potentially lead to disastrous outcomes.

A new pattern of social interaction

Throughout most of human history, the majority of our interactions have taken place between people who lived either within the same borders or just outside them, in other words, between neighbours and not between strangers in the full sense of the term - a stranger is usually defined as a person that is completely unfamiliar to and/or different from us. It is only in relatively recent times, and especially following the introduction of tech advancements that have enabled boundaryless communication, that we are all increasingly interacting, for either personal or professional reasons, with people who might come from a very different background from ours, whether cultural, economic or social. Gladwell mentions the meeting between the Spanish Conquistador Cortez and the Aztec Ruler Montezuma in the 16th century as one of first examples of interaction between two people from far away worlds, both in a geographical and cultural sense. Unfortunately, what in appearance could have looked like a respectful, almost positive interaction ended up in war and in the consequent destruction of the Aztec empire, due to reasons that many historians mainly attribute to a mistranslation of Montezuma's speech to Cortez. As Gladwell explains in the book, humans are ill-equipped to understand strangers and the strategies that we use are mainly shortcuts wired in our brains to help us in unfamiliar situations, but that can easily lead to misinterpretations and misunderstandings with often irreparable consequences.

Personal interaction is not always a source of reliable information

One of the key biases that affect our understanding of others is ‘the illusion of asymmetric insight’.  Rooted in the misconception that, unlike others, we are uniquely gifted to develop accurate opinions and views on people, ideas and events, this is a cognitive bias that leads us to think that we can understand others better than they can understand us. While we see ourselves as complex and hard to understand, we consider others as simple to read and, as a result, we rarely doubt our opinions and make various mistakes when it comes to make sense of strangers.

In particular, the book structure is built around three of these mistakes: the default to truth, the illusion of transparency and the lack of consideration given to the context in which the stranger acts.

Overcoming our default to truth

When we meet someone and try to form an opinion on them, we are wired to think that the person opposite us is telling the truth and we only stop believing this when the doubts we have cannot be logically explained anymore. In Gladwell’s words, this is based on the difference between having a few doubts and having enough doubts. In the book, the Ponzi scheme run by Bernie Madoff in 2008 is mentioned as one of the cases when people trusted him with their money without suspecting anything, even after the first incriminating facts and behaviours started to emerge.

The myth of transparency

In addition, one of the assumptions that we often make is that by looking someone in the eye or observing someone’s communicative and behavioural patterns, we can draw accurate conclusions on whether they are honest and trustworthy. This is based on the myth of transparency: we erroneously think that the way in which we express ourselves on the outside is a loyal reflection of our inner thoughts and feelings. When we have limited time or information at out disposal to make a judgment, this becomes a useful shortcut to quickly make a decision on whether to trust someone or not. However, even though this might work well when people behave and react consistently with our expectations, it can lead to negative consequences when strangers’ behaviours and their actual intentions are mismatched with what we’d predict.

In the book, the meeting between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler is mentioned as a very illustrative example of how this might go terribly wrong. The British Prime Minister was convinced then if he had a chance to meet with Hitler, he would be able to create rapport, understand him and, ultimately, be able to reason with him. We all know that, unfortunately, things did not exactly go that way. According to Gladwell, the people who made an accurate judgement of Hitler were those who personally knew him the least, because they were not influenced by potentially misleading behaviours or verbal and non-verbal cues that an in-person meeting might have provided.

Context is key

Finally, Gladwell discusses the concept of coupling, namely the idea that strangers’ behaviours are deeply interwoven with the conditions and specific circumstances in which they take place. According to research, it seems particularly hard for us to fully appreciate the importance that context plays in certain situations and to take it into consideration when trying to make sense of strangers.  While context should not be used as an excuse or a justification for certain behaviours, it should be seen as a source of useful insights to make a more accurate judgement.

So, what are the implications of this for us professionals?

As management consultants, an important part of what we do relies on our ability to understand clients and be able to interact with them. Even though our failure to do so may not lead to some of the terrible consequences discussed in the book, we should still consider how we can and should improve our approach to building rapport and creating trust, even when it seems particularly difficult to make sense of specific situations or interactions with strangers. The book does not really offer solutions or practical strategies to use, but suggests that a useful starting point is to come to terms with the fact that our ability of understand others is fundamentally flawed and therefore has considerable limitations. As a result, we should have the humility to doubt our knowledge and way of forming an opinion of people and situations. In addition, we should make a deliberate effort to identify the assumptions and biases that we might, often unconsciously, use to make quick decisions and pay more attention to the details and patterns that may help us deal with strangers in a more appropriate way.

Valentina Lorenzon is a member of the CMCE Coordination group and editor of the CMCE newsletter.