Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell - Page 3 of 3

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

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or KSM, was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. He was captured and interrogated using enhanced techniques. One can argue that the techniques were so intense that they made him confess to just about anything. There is also the argument that if you are too severe with interrogation you end up with damaged goods.
Things we want to learn from a stranger are fragile. We have to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

Plath was a famous poet who committed suicide using “town gas” from her stove in London, which was soon replaced with harmless natural gas. When a popular form of suicide is no longer available, suicide rates go down. This is due to coupling. When two things are coupled like town gas and suicide, the one that sticks around changes.
Suicide also went down when nets were added to the Golden Gate bridge. Like suicide, crime is tied too very specific places and contexts. When you shut down a prostitution area, most of the prostitutes don’t move, they change occupations. Most of the crime in big cities happens in a small number of places. Crime is not easy to move to a new place. You have to ask yourself where and when you confront a stranger.

Kansas City realized that most of the crime happened in only a few places. They decided to have officers stop anyone they could for the slimmest of reasons in hope of finding real criminals. This resulted in some unfortunate events when officers were no longer defaulting to truth.

The Sandra Bland story is an example of what can happen when an innocent person does not act innocent. She was arrested on flimsy charges and committed suicide in jail days later. Stopping people for little or no reasons are called haystack searches and they are noted for being mostly unproductive. Stop and search is a dangerous procedure as it can generate hostility and over reaction by police. Trusting each other has created our modern society and it is probably the best way to go, even for police.

Malcolm has been a staff writer with The New Yorker Magazine since 1996. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with The Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.
He is also the author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, (2005), and Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). They were all number one New York Times bestsellers. Click the above links for my summaries.