Do you Judge a Stranger?We all have countless interactions with strangers every day. Sometimes, these conversations can have a big impact on people. People decide whether to give a stranger a job, put them in prison, or let them be your kids babysitter. These exchanges are fundamental to society – but are we any good at them? Malcolm’s Gladwell’s latest book, Talking to Strangers, explains how when we talk to strangers, we get it all wrong. I wanted to highlight a few key messages as they provide great action points for when you talk to strangers. The book has endless insights and examples, so this is just touching the surface of the value inside the full book so if you are intrigued, I highly recommend it. What’s there to understand. We believe that we can get inside the heart of others based on very limited information. This causes us to jump at the chance to judge strangers. Yet, we would never do that to ourselves as we understand we are complex and enigmatic. But for some reason, the stranger is easiest person in the world to understand. Truth makes the world go round. We hold the assumption that people are being honest with us. Although, we could hold some doubts, we don’t have enough doubts to believe they are lying. We therefore default to truth. Society needs this to function though, imagine if we lived our lives without believing anyone. When someone defaults to truth, but is wrong, we shouldn’t punish them. We think we want authority figures to be alert to every suspicion, but this is not the answer. Transparency. Because we usually have limited communication, we don’t take the time to understand the stranger properly. This causes us to make sense of them through their behaviour and demeanour. When we confront a stranger, we have a substitute idea or stereotype of them; and that stereotype is wrong far too often. We need the criminal justice system and deciding on a babysitter to be a human interaction. But alongside this, we need tolerate a huge amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we are terrible at it. The issue is, that we have built a world that discriminates against people who, through no fault of their own, don’t follow our ridiculous ideas about transparency. They are complicated. Strangers are fragile. If we are careless then what we are trying to find out, will crumple under our feet. We need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits and that we can never know the whole truth. Something short of the whole story has be ok, so when speaking to strangers we should act with caution and humility. Context. The idea of coupling is that ideas and situations are tied to specific places. When talking to strangers we need to understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world. Conclusion. Take a moment to think whether any of these came into play when you last spoke to a stranger. There can definitely be some improvement in our interactions with strangers. We can give these important conversations a bit more thought and both you and the stranger will come out on top.
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