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

In Chapter 10, Gladwell contrasts coupling with displacement. Displacement is the idea that if one option is blocked, people will simply achieve the same thing in a different way. If a suicide method is made impossible, then it is assumed that people will kill themselves in a different way. If the police suppress crime in one area, then it is assumed that criminals will carry out their activities in a different area. Gladwell argues that some behaviors—including his chosen examples of suicide and crime—are actually coupled rather than displaced.

Chapter 8 discusses the role that alcohol plays in many rape cases, largely coming down to an effect called “myopia.” The psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs were the first to propose that alcohol creates “a state of shortsightedness in which […] immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion” (207). Under the influence of alcohol, we focus more heavily on the present, while the long-term consequences of our actions fade into the background.

Part 3 of Talking to Strangers centers around the notion of transparency, which is (along with default-to-truth) one of the strategies we use to understand strangers. If we assume that strangers are transparent, that means we assume that a person’s outward behavior and demeanor provide “an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside” (152). Actors on TV are often transparent in that their facial expressions and body language clearly convey the characters’ emotions. Reality is different, however. Although we tend to assume that we can understand who a stranger is by studying how they look and behave, this is nothing more than a “myth” in Gladwell’s view.