You Don't Understand People as Well as You Think You Do (Talking to Strangers Review)

You don’t understand people as well as you think you do, and that makes you terrible at dealing with strangers. At least that’s what Malcolm Gladwell sets out to prove in his book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t know. And he is convincing both at pointing that out and in making it possible to see how the state of our modern world is largely an outcome of that problem.

I try to avoid politics on this website. Typically, the most political thing I’ll say is that I did or didn’t like something. But it’s impossible to stay entirely apolitical when talking about the book Talking to Strangers. You’ll understand that when I tell you that the framing device of this book is Sandra Bland, a black woman, being pulled over by the police for failure to use a turn signal. She is then arrested and a couple days later commits suicide.

But Malcolm does a good job of not politicizing this more than it has to. This isn’t a book about how police are bad people and he never comes to that conclusion. He does something interesting by being able to look closely at a single case and at our society and connects how they intersected without conflating the two. Sandra Bland was a unique and complicated woman who doesn’t have to represent every black person in America, just as Brian Encinia doesn’t have to represent every police officer. They can both be people who were failed by a system that is failing all of us.

How he goes about connecting that to society is facing. It touches on sexual assault cases, Sylvia Platte’s suicide, Bernie Madoff, Adolph Hitler and then circles back to the same story, but this time with far more understanding of what is happening. And what is happening is that people are not as good at understanding strangers as we think we are.

There is a ton to be taken from this book. The understanding that even police officers and judges can’t tell if someone is lying at them unless that person is bad at lying is important. As is the understanding that we default in our everyday lives to trust, and the costs when we teach the police not to default to that cost. But out of all the things he wrote, perhaps the most profound to me was that he wasn’t ready to move on. He wrote that before 2020 and the clear evidence that the rest of us aren’t willing to move on yet. But unlike most of us, he has genuine answers, ones that don’t depend on picking sides and throwing figurative and literal rocks at each other. And while they aren’t perfect, being able to look at other people as more complex than we think and perhaps not so much the enemy as someone we just misunderstood is a good start to fixing this mess.