Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (ePub)

Imagine yourself in the place of a judge who needs to decide whether to release a suspect on bail. You are offered to either just get acquainted with the dry facts of the suspect's biography, or meet and talk with him personally, look into his eyes and see the reaction. Many of us will choose the second option, because often we consider the information received through personal contact to be extremely valuable. But it is precisely in this, according to Malcolm Gladwell, that the cause of fatal mistakes, personal tragedies, bad judgments and even global catastrophes lies. A spy who worked for the Pentagon for many years, passing data to Cuban intelligence. Politicians who failed to recognize Hitler's double game, which led the world to disaster. Police officers shooting innocent people just because their reactions seem suspicious. Parents who can't recognize a sports doctor as a rapist who molests their children. The author analyzes all these stories and comes to shocking conclusions. It turns out that we are not able to recognize a liar, even when we communicate with him for a long time. And all our usual ideas about the suspicious behavior of people, their facial expressions, gestures, intonations turn out to be fundamentally wrong. Malcolm Gladwell invites us to embark on an intellectual adventure through the dark side of human nature. You will see that our perceptions of strangers almost always do not match reality, and misperceptions of their behavior can have disastrous consequences.