Talking to Strangers Quotes

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception - is worse.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

“The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet... The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

“Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

“If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution—and, in many cases, the support of their peers—in the service of exposing fraud and deceit.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

“Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about Amanda Knox or Jerry Sandusky or KSM is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility. How many of the crises and controversies I have described would have been prevented had we taken those lessons to heart?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the “Holy Fool.” The Holy Fool is a social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the truth. Nonetheless is actually the wrong word. The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted. In one Russian fable, a Holy Fool looks at a famous icon of the Virgin Mary and declares it the work of the devil. It’s an outrageous, heretical claim. But then someone throws a stone at the image and the facade cracks, revealing the face of Satan.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“That’s the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York. Seattle. Cincinnati. Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas. Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically. His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv. Same thing. “I said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration.6 Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“they would have worried for my soul. Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know