Talking to Strangers

by

Malcolm Gladwell

Themes and Colors
Default to Truth Theme Icon
Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Talking to Strangers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Default to Truth Theme Icon

Gladwell’s primary purpose in Talking to Strangers is to explain why we are so bad at understanding and engaging effectively with people we don’t know. Each chapter of Talking to Strangers explores a different interaction between strangers that ends badly due to our fundamental inability to know others as well as we know ourselves, and the ineffective social strategies we deploy to combat this inability. Gladwell discusses the first of these social strategies in Chapter Three. “Truth-Default Theory,” or TDT, is a theory developed by psychologist Tim Levine as he sought to understand why humans are bad at identifying deception. Through a series of experiments that tasked participants with determining whether a stranger was lying or telling the truth, Levine discovered that humanity has a bias toward truth. Levine’s findings suggested that we tend to take things at face value and assume that the people we interact with are behaving honestly. Gladwell adapts Levine’s theory to form the phrase “default to truth,” which becomes a refrain he evokes throughout the book to designate when people—for better or for worse—choose to believe in the honesty of the stranger they are trying to understand. On one hand, this bias toward truth invites the opportunity for us to be deceived by strangers and even complicit in more devastating betrayals of trust, such as the Penn State scandal, where an administration’s collective default to truth allowed Jerry Sandusky’s serial abuse of young boys to continue for years without repercussion. Yet, on the other hand, Gladwell argues that “assum[ing] the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.” While defaulting to truth requires a certain degree of risk, Gladwell suggests that this risk is the price we pay to experience the privilege of living as social beings among other social beings, familiar and otherwise.

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The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Default to Truth appears in each chapter of Talking to Strangers. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Default to Truth Quotes in Talking to Strangers

Below you will find the important quotes in Talking to Strangers related to the theme of Default to Truth.
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:
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 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: