Talking to Strangers

by

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell Character Analysis

Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian author, journalist, and public speaker. He writes Talking to Strangers from the first-person perspective, presenting simplified explanations of psychological and sociological research in a conversational tone to create a story-driven narrative that appeals to a lay audience. The central thesis Gladwell puts forth in Talking to Strangers is that we are inherently bad at making sense of people, cultures, and perspectives with which we are unfamiliar. Furthermore, we consistently employ inadequate social strategies to combat our inability to talk to strangers, which can lead to conflict. These poor social strategies derive from fundamental misunderstandings we have about ourselves and strangers. Some of the main problems Gladwell identifies as complicating our ability to make sense of strangers include our bias toward truth (an idea Gladwell derives from Tim Levine’s Truth-Default Theory), our belief that people are transparent, and our tendency to dismiss the subjective perspectives every stranger brings to our interactions with them. Gladwell bookends Talking to Strangers with a discussion of the 2015 death of Sandra Bland, which he views as a tragic example of how mishandling a stranger interaction can elicit devastating consequences. While Gladwell doesn’t conclude his book with a definitive answer about how we can solve our “stranger problem,” he suggests that we should strive to approach our engagements with unfamiliar people, perspectives, and cultures with more introspection, empathy, and humility.

Malcolm Gladwell Quotes in Talking to Strangers

The Talking to Strangers quotes below are all either spoken by Malcolm Gladwell or refer to Malcolm Gladwell. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Default to Truth Theme Icon
).
Introduction Quotes

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 understanding each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Montezuma II, Hernán Cortés
Page Number: 11-12
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

This is what makes no sense about Florentino Aspillaga’s story. It would be one thing if Cuba had deceived a group of elderly shut-ins, the way scam artists do. But the Cubans fooled the CIA, an organization that takes the problem of understanding strangers very seriously.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Florentino Aspillaga, El Alpinista
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Yesterday afternoon I had a long talk with Herr Hitler,” he said. “I feel satisfied now that each of us fully understands what is in the mind of the other.”

Related Characters: Neville Chamberlain (speaker), Malcolm Gladwell, Adolph Hitler
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Emily Pronin (speaker), Malcolm Gladwell
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler, Emily Pronin
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant with them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Ana Belen Montes, Tim Levine
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. 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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine, Jerry Sandusky
Page Number: 78-79
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

The difference between Markopolos and Renaissance, however, is that Renaissance trusted the system. Madoff was part of one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the entire financial market. If he was really just making things up, wouldn’t one of the many government watchdogs have caught him already? As Nat Simons, the Renaissance executive, said later, “You just assume that someone was paying attention.”

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Nat Simons (speaker), Bernie Madoff, Nat Simons
Related Symbols: The Holy Fool
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:

What sets the Holy Fool apart is a different sense of the possibility of deception. In real life, Tim Levine reminds us, lies are rare. And those lies that are told are told by a very small subset of people. That’s why it doesn’t matter so much that we are terrible at detecting lies in real life. Under the circumstances, in fact, defaulting to truth makes logical sense. If the person behind the counter at the coffee shop says your total with tax is $6.74, you can do the math yourself to double-check their calculations, holding up the line and wasting thirty seconds of your time. Or you can simply assume the salesperson is telling you the truth, because on balance most people do tell the truth.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine, Bernie Madoff
Related Symbols: The Holy Fool
Page Number: 99-100
Explanation and Analysis:

If they came for him, he concluded, his only hope would be to hold them off as long as possible, until he could get help. He loaded up a twelve-gauge shotgun and added six more rounds to the stock. He hung a bandolier of twenty extra rounds on his gun cabinet. Then he dug out his gas mask from his army days. What if they came in using tear gas? He sat at home, guns at the ready—while the rest of us calmly went about our business.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Harry Markopolos, Bernie Madoff
Related Symbols: The Holy Fool
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The fact that Nassar was doing something monstrous is exactly what makes the parents’ position so difficult.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine, Larry Nassar
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nassar
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:

The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it—and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with one another about just how terrible at it we are.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 166-167
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:

“There is no trace of me in the room where Meredith was murdered,” Knox says, at the end of the Amanda Knox documentary. “But you’re trying to find the answer in my eyes.…You’re looking at me. Why? These are my eyes. They’re not objective evidence.”

Related Characters: Amanda Knox (speaker), Malcolm Gladwell
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

The lesson of myopia is really very simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger—to represent their own desires honestly and clearly—they cannot be blind drunk.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

[W]e 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?

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)
Page Number: 262
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia, David Weisburd
Page Number: 285
Explanation and Analysis:

Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 296
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands. So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency? You get Sandra Bland.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton
Page Number: 311-312
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

To Encinia’s mind, Bland’s demeanor fits the profile of a potentially dangerous criminal. She’s agitated, jumpy, irritable, confrontational, volatile. He thinks she’s hiding something. This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched: when they do not behave the way we expect them to behave.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia
Related Symbols: Sandra Bland’s Cigarette
Page Number: 330
Explanation and Analysis:

Brian Encinia’s goal was to go beyond the ticket. He had highly tuned curiosity ticklers. He knew all about the visual pat-down and the concealed interrogation. And when the situation looked as if it might slip out of his control, he stepped in, firmly. If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn’t because Brian Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia
Page Number: 334
Explanation and Analysis:

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 346
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Talking to Strangers LitChart as a printable PDF.
Talking to Strangers PDF

Malcolm Gladwell Quotes in Talking to Strangers

The Talking to Strangers quotes below are all either spoken by Malcolm Gladwell or refer to Malcolm Gladwell. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Default to Truth Theme Icon
).
Introduction Quotes

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 understanding each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Montezuma II, Hernán Cortés
Page Number: 11-12
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

This is what makes no sense about Florentino Aspillaga’s story. It would be one thing if Cuba had deceived a group of elderly shut-ins, the way scam artists do. But the Cubans fooled the CIA, an organization that takes the problem of understanding strangers very seriously.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Florentino Aspillaga, El Alpinista
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Yesterday afternoon I had a long talk with Herr Hitler,” he said. “I feel satisfied now that each of us fully understands what is in the mind of the other.”

Related Characters: Neville Chamberlain (speaker), Malcolm Gladwell, Adolph Hitler
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Emily Pronin (speaker), Malcolm Gladwell
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler, Emily Pronin
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant with them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Ana Belen Montes, Tim Levine
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. 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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine, Jerry Sandusky
Page Number: 78-79
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

The difference between Markopolos and Renaissance, however, is that Renaissance trusted the system. Madoff was part of one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the entire financial market. If he was really just making things up, wouldn’t one of the many government watchdogs have caught him already? As Nat Simons, the Renaissance executive, said later, “You just assume that someone was paying attention.”

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Nat Simons (speaker), Bernie Madoff, Nat Simons
Related Symbols: The Holy Fool
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:

What sets the Holy Fool apart is a different sense of the possibility of deception. In real life, Tim Levine reminds us, lies are rare. And those lies that are told are told by a very small subset of people. That’s why it doesn’t matter so much that we are terrible at detecting lies in real life. Under the circumstances, in fact, defaulting to truth makes logical sense. If the person behind the counter at the coffee shop says your total with tax is $6.74, you can do the math yourself to double-check their calculations, holding up the line and wasting thirty seconds of your time. Or you can simply assume the salesperson is telling you the truth, because on balance most people do tell the truth.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine, Bernie Madoff
Related Symbols: The Holy Fool
Page Number: 99-100
Explanation and Analysis:

If they came for him, he concluded, his only hope would be to hold them off as long as possible, until he could get help. He loaded up a twelve-gauge shotgun and added six more rounds to the stock. He hung a bandolier of twenty extra rounds on his gun cabinet. Then he dug out his gas mask from his army days. What if they came in using tear gas? He sat at home, guns at the ready—while the rest of us calmly went about our business.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Harry Markopolos, Bernie Madoff
Related Symbols: The Holy Fool
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The fact that Nassar was doing something monstrous is exactly what makes the parents’ position so difficult.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Tim Levine, Larry Nassar
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nassar
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:

The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it—and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with one another about just how terrible at it we are.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 166-167
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:

“There is no trace of me in the room where Meredith was murdered,” Knox says, at the end of the Amanda Knox documentary. “But you’re trying to find the answer in my eyes.…You’re looking at me. Why? These are my eyes. They’re not objective evidence.”

Related Characters: Amanda Knox (speaker), Malcolm Gladwell
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

The lesson of myopia is really very simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger—to represent their own desires honestly and clearly—they cannot be blind drunk.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

[W]e 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?

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)
Page Number: 262
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia, David Weisburd
Page Number: 285
Explanation and Analysis:

Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 296
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands. So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency? You get Sandra Bland.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton
Page Number: 311-312
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

To Encinia’s mind, Bland’s demeanor fits the profile of a potentially dangerous criminal. She’s agitated, jumpy, irritable, confrontational, volatile. He thinks she’s hiding something. This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched: when they do not behave the way we expect them to behave.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia
Related Symbols: Sandra Bland’s Cigarette
Page Number: 330
Explanation and Analysis:

Brian Encinia’s goal was to go beyond the ticket. He had highly tuned curiosity ticklers. He knew all about the visual pat-down and the concealed interrogation. And when the situation looked as if it might slip out of his control, he stepped in, firmly. If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn’t because Brian Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Sandra Bland, Brian Encinia
Page Number: 334
Explanation and Analysis:

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker)
Page Number: 346
Explanation and Analysis: