Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
By: Malcolm Gladwell

This reminds me why I minored in Psychology. Studying people is just so fascinating! I've read Outliers, and was equally as interested in that. Here Gladwell explains a lot of interesting social experiments done in the journey to better understand why our interactions with strangers are the way they are. He also sorts through some controversial real-life scenarios in a better way than the media feeds them to you in order to bring to life the implications of our perceptions.

The thing I keep coming back to even after reading it, is the Default-to-Truth facet. That basically we all have a threshold of doubts we accept/explain away- defaulting to truth. Only once we are pushed over our threshold of red flags do we call foul. I've realized how often that comes in to play in our day-to-day lives. But as Gladwell points out- we kind of have to live that way in order for society not to be a mess of suspicion and paranoia. We can't always assume the worst about people, but we do need SOME people to question. It's a precarious balance.

The only criticism I have for the book would be that sometimes the flow of the book- jumping from study to study- was at times hard to follow. A few times I couldn't remember what his point was and the connection to the main theme of the book wasn't super obvious. It didn't really matter to me because I would have found the studies interesting either way, but it did detract from being able to easily follow his train of thought. Additionally, the end was very abrupt. From the beginning I wasn't sure where he was going to end up, and I'm still not sure where exactly he landed. Or what I'm supposed to do with this information. I wish he would have had more of an 'in summation' chapter at the end to review and apply. We are left hanging a bit.

I will also say that while the science and sociology behind all of this is super interesting and telling and makes a lot of sense, I do believe it has its limits. There are just too many variables in our interactions with people to ever really boil it down to a few universal standards. I think he presents really good guidelines and things to keep in mind and be aware of, but it is by no means gospel. And when he tries to explain any of it evolutionarily speaking I have to roll my eyes a bit. (Personally I think it's more of a stretch for evolutionists to explain things like emotions and stranger interactions, etc than Creationists, but whatever.)

I'm smart, but I'm not smart enough to evaluate or challenge the validity of the studies. I can't speak to the academic nature of this book. But I can tell you that I found it interesting and valuable and worth reading.

Disclaimer: do not read the digital version. Get yourself an actual book. There are lots of footnotes that don't show up until the last page of each chapter on the digital version which is kind of annoying. It's also one of those books that you find yourself flipping back to previous sections or pages to make connections and that's hard to do without physical pages.

**I received an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review**