Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

30 May 2025

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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Not sure why I picked this one up; it might’ve been mentioned during our last winter residency at Regis University’s Mile-High MFA (which, by the way, I am about to graduate—eek!).

By this point, everyone should know who Malcolm Gladwell is. He might not be the household name that Stephen King is, but it feels like everyone and their dog is quoting his Outliers for the 10,000 hour rule, whereby Gladwell proposed that it takes 10,000 hours of practice in any given skill to achieve a sufficient level of expertise to know whether or not you’re good at that skill (and should pursue it further). Outliers was a game-changing book for me, especially because we pushed my son, who has a September 10th birthday, into kindergarten at age 4, because we felt he was “ready.” Now, my son has graduated high school at age 17 and his pole-vaulting career is only just launching; if we’d waited on kindergarten that one extra year, how high would he have pole vaulted before graduation? Gladwell’s Outliers suggests we should have waited—and the waiting, the slightly larger, slightly older child in the classroom/grade level, has ramifications in all areas, not just sports.

And leaning upon the legacy of Outliers, picking up Talking to Strangers required no arm-twisting, for me.

As with Outliers, Talking to Strangers was a breeze to read, in terms of technical writing and craft. Gladwell does an excellent job of tying theory closely with narrative, such that the brief chapters fly by. I was riveted by every page.

Gladwell’s main lessons in this book are the following:

1. And 2. Spies and Diplomats and Default to Truth: We tend to think we understand strangers based on minimal cues—but we don’t. Strangers are not easy to decipher (though we believe they are). We are terrible at detecting lies and tend to default to believe people are telling the truth. Basically, we are suspicious when we shouldn’t be, and not suspicious when we should be. We simply don’t know and most often cannot tell. When we have doubts, we explain them away. So we get swindled. Hoodwinked. All the time.

3. And 4. Transparency and Lessons: We believe nonverbal cues should look “standard,” the way we witness them on TV shows (like Friends, Gladwell proposes) and movies—or even more exaggeratedly on stage in plays and Broadway musicals. We expect people’s behavior (nonverbal cues and facial expressions) to match how they feel inside. But often, it doesn’t. Gladwell writes, “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 demeanor and behavior” (152). The problem is, we fail at this regularly because when under pressure, different people act in different ways than expected. Take an autistic person, for example. Many neurotypicals misread autistic cues and reactions because they do not follow norms. Which makes sense!

5. Coupling: Certain behaviors are coupled to a particular context. That is to say, people do certain things more often given a certain situation or setting. Here, Gladwell uses the example of Sylvia Plath’s suicide by town gas as coupled between Plath’s suicidality and town gas’s availability and lethality. The theory was that people would find other ways to commit suicide if town gas was not available, but this was a false assumption: instances of deaths by suicide dropped when town gas was phased out. Gladwell applies this to the seedier areas of a city, saying that if you go just 1-5 blocks away from a particular crime-ridden street, crime rates drop to nearly zero; this is particularly true for Albuquerque’s Central Ave (Route 66).

In this final section, Gladwell ties all these concepts (default to truth, transparency, and coupling) together to explain how a tragedy like Sandra Bland could happen in the first place.

Overall, the book was insightful and engaging. In it, there are lessons we should carry with us every day. One of the better nonfiction books I’ve read this decade.