Key insights from
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know
Audio available
11 minute read
Published Sep 10, 2019
What you'll learn
There’s no way around talking with strangers, but we are not very good at it, and we are often overestimate our ability to size up someone we’ve never met. Gladwell uses spy stories, tabloid reporting, and sitcoms to illuminate the pitfalls we commonly fall into when talking with strangers.
Key insights
- 1 The historic interaction between Cortés and Montezuma kicked off a new era of grave misunderstandings between strangers.
- 2 Sometimes the more you think you know about a stranger, the less you actually know.
- 3 Sitcoms are incredibly misleading about what we can and can’t know about strangers.
- 4 Amanda Knox’s wrongful murder conviction shows us how a mismatch between behavior and social expectations can be damaging.
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