Full Title: Talking to Strangers. What We Should Know About the People
Highlights
Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger. (Page 8)
The two men talked, argued, ate together, walked around together. Chamberlain was the only Allied leader of that period to spend any significant time with Hitler. (Page 34)
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. (Page 49)
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. (Page 49)
If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy. (Page 49)
We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who are telling the truth. But we’re much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying. (Page 70)
We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. (Page 70)
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. (Page 71)
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. (Page 75)
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. (Page 75)
lie detection does not— cannot— work the way we expect it to work. In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time. (Page 81)
“People have too much faith in large organizations,” he said. “They trust the accounting firms, which you should never trust because they’re incompetent. On a best day they’re incompetent, on a bad day they’re crooked, and aiding and abetting the fraud, looking the other way.” (Page 92)
He thought between 20 and 25 percent of public companies were cheating on their financial statements. (Page 92)
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. (Page 93)
Levine argues that over the course of evolution, human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behaviors of those around you. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. (Page 95)
I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default to truth? (Page 122)
defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency. (Page 129)
FACS, which stands for Facial Action Coding System. 1 In FACS, every one of the forty- three distinctive muscle movements in the face is assigned a number, called an “action unit.” (Page 136)
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. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. 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. (Page 141)
Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Smiling and frowning and wrinkling our noses in disgust, he argued, were things that every human being did as part of evolutionary adaptation. Accurately and quickly communicating our emotions to one another was of such crucial importance to the survival of the human species, he argued, that the face had developed into a kind of billboard for the heart. (Page 141)
If real life were like Friends, judges would beat computers. But they don’t. (Page 142)
Transparency is a myth— an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment” or “eyes went wide with surprise.” (Page 149)
When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea— a stereotype— for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often. (Page 150)
But all that extra information isn’t actually useful. Surprised people don’t necessarily look surprised. People who have emotional problems don’t always look like they have emotional problems. (Page 151)
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. (Page 153)
What Levine discovered is what psychologists always find in these cases, which is that most of us aren’t very good at lie detection. On average, judges correctly identify liars 54 percent of the time— just slightly better than chance. This is true no matter who does the judging. Students are terrible. FBI agents are terrible. CIA officers are terrible. Lawyers are terrible. (Page 158)
What Levine found is that we nearly always miss the crucial clues in the moment— and it puzzled him. Why? What happens at the moment someone tells a lie that specifically derails us? (Page 159)
We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well- spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. (Page 161)
Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match— whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look. (Page 162)
human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched. (Page 162)
Matched people conform with our expectations. Their intentions are consistent with their behavior. The mismatched are confusing and unpredictable: (Page 164)
with strangers, we’re intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations. (Page 167)
Tim Levine’s research suggests that they aren’t random— that we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate (Page 169)
Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. They think of it as an agent of myopia. (Page 191)
The myopia theory was first suggested by psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs, and what they meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates, in their words, “a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.” Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short- term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer- term considerations fade away. (Page 191)
Lots of people drink when they are feeling down because they think it will chase their troubles away. That’s inhibition- thinking: alcohol will unlock my good mood. But that’s plainly not what happens. Sometimes alcohol cheers us up. But at other times, when an anxious person drinks they just get more anxious. Myopia theory has an answer to that puzzle: it depends on what the anxious, drunk person is doing. If he’s at a football game surrounded by rabid fans, the excitement and drama going on around him will temporarily crowd out his pressing worldly concerns. The game is front and center. His worries are not. But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences. 2 (Page 192)
One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”— where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. (Page 192)
When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes. This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped- down, distilled version of their sober self— without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.” (Page 193)
The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer- term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer- term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer- term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self. (Page 193)
Alcohol is a drug that reshapes the drinker according to the contours of his immediate environment. (Page 196)
What happens to us when we get drunk is a function of the particular path the alcohol takes as it seeps through our brain tissue. The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning. The first drink “dampens” activity in that region. It makes us a little dumber, less capable of handling competing complicated considerations. It hits the reward centers of the brain, the areas that govern euphoria, and gives them a little jolt. It finds its way into the amygdala. The amygdala’s job is to tell us how to react to the world around us. Are we being threatened? Should we be afraid? Alcohol turns the amygdala down a notch. The combination of those three effects is where myopia comes from. We don’t have the brainpower to handle more complex, long- term considerations. We’re distracted by the unexpected pleasure of the alcohol. Our neurological burglar alarm is turned off. (Page 198)
Alcohol hits the hippocampus— small, sausage- like regions on each side of the brain that are responsible for forming memories about our lives. At a blood- alcohol level of roughly 0.08— the legal level of intoxication— the hippocampus starts to struggle. When you wake up the morning after a cocktail party and remember meeting someone but cannot for the life of you remember their name or the story they told you, that’s because the two shots of whiskey you drank in quick succession reached your hippocampus. Drink a little more and the gaps get larger— to the point where maybe you remember pieces of the evening but other details can be summoned only with the greatest difficulty. (Page 198)
At the next level— roughly around a blood- alcohol level of 0.15— the hippocampus simply shuts down entirely. “In the true, pure blackout,” White said, “there’s just nothing. Nothing to recall.” (Page 199)
In a blackout state— in that window of extreme drunkenness before their hippocampus comes back online— drunks are like ciphers, moving through the world without retaining anything. (Page 200)
At or around the 0.15 mark, the hippocampus shuts down and memories stop forming, but it is entirely possible that the frontal lobes, cerebellum, and amygdala of that same drinker— at the same time— can continue to function more or less normally. “You can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you’re drunk,” White said. You’re just not going to remember it. (Page 200)
the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of fifty years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, ‘Pft, that’s just getting started,’” reports alcohol researcher Kim Fromme. She says the heavy binge- drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. (Page 203)
Women are also increasingly drinking wine and spirits, which raise blood- alcohol levels much faster than beer. (Page 204)
Having a meal in your stomach when you drink reduces your peak BAC [blood- alcohol concentration] by about a third. In other words, if you drink on an empty stomach you’re going to reach a much higher BAC and you’re going to do it much more quickly, and if you’re drinking spirits and wine while you’re drinking on an empty stomach, again higher BAC much more quickly. And if you’re a woman, less body water [yields] higher BAC much more quickly. (Page 204)
The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims. (Page 205)
we are failing to let men know that when they render themselves myopic, they can do terrible things. Young men are getting a distorted message that drinking to excess is a harmless social exercise. The real message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will commit a sexual crime. Acknowledging the role of alcohol is not excusing the behavior of perpetrators. It’s trying to prevent more young men from becoming perpetrators. (Page 206)
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. And if they are blind drunk, and therefore at the mercy of their environment, (Page 207)
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. (Page 239)
And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates— as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds— and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath. (Page 244)
Plath was obsessed with suicide. She wrote about it, thought about it. “She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self- pity,” Alvarez wrote. “She seemed to view death as a physical challenge she had, once again, overcome. It was an experience of much the same quality as… careering down a dangerous snow slope without properly knowing how to ski.” (Page 244)
Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions. (Page 249)
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. (Page 254)
“I was inspired, at the time, by the AIDS map of the country,” Sherman remembers, “which showed that fifty census tracks out of fifty thousand had over half of the AIDS cases in the United States.” AIDS didn’t look to him like a contagious disease roaming wildly and randomly across the land. It looked to him like an interaction between certain kinds of people and certain very specific places, an epidemic with its own internal logic. (Page 257)
Sherman crunched the numbers and found something that seemed hard to believe: 3.3 percent of the street segments in the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the police calls. (Page 258)
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. (Page 258)
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. (Page 258)
People who overdose on pills die 1.5 percent of the time. Sexton was coupled to a method of suicide that was highly unlikely to kill her. That is not a coincidence. Like many people with suicidal tendencies, she was profoundly ambivalent about taking her own life. (Page 267)
Sleepmonger, deathmonger, with capsules in my palms each night, eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles I make arrangements for a pint- sized journey. I’m the queen of this condition. I’m an expert on making the trip and now they say I’m an addict. Now they ask why. Why! Don’t they know that I promised to die! I’m keeping in practice. I’m merely staying in shape. The pills are a mother, but better, every color and as good as sour balls. I’m on a diet from death. (Page 267)
Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world. (Page 269)
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. (Page 284)
the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conducts audits at different airports. They slip a gun or a fake bomb into a piece of luggage. What do they find? That 95 percent of the time, the guns and bombs go undetected. This is not because airport screeners are lazy or incompetent. Rather, it is because the haystack search represents a direct challenge to the human tendency to default to truth. (Page 292)
