Welcome back to my miniseries about Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers. If you don’t remember anything from the previous post in the series, here’s an excerpt describing what the book is about.

“Talking to Strangers highlights the different aspects of our relationships and how many of those aspects often lead to misunderstandings. While the book does reference different situations, its main objective is to provide some level of understanding as to what occurred in the death of Sandra Bland.”

This book followed an interesting structure where stories were used to illustrates different lessons and ideas. As Gladwell talks about the different factors that contribute to our ability or inability to understand strangers, he relays different stories that highlight the presence of those factors in our daily lives.

With that said, I figured the best way to convey the findings from this book would be to discuss them in the context of examples given in the book as well as daily life. If you’re still reading this, and you’re not too impressed with the book, that is ok. I was in your shoes when I first decided to read this book. I also could be doing a terrible job of explaining the book. Either way, I ask that you continue to read through at least this blog post. I hope you find the material as interesting as I did. Here we go.

Lesson 1:  Interacting with strangers is a part of living in society.

This lesson may seem intuitive, however, it’s important to remember the concept of this book. This book highlights the nuances of social interaction, particularly through negative lenses. I’ll go into more depth in a later post but hearing about how inaccurate our perceptions are of truth-telling, another fundamental aspect of social interactions, forced me to reconsider my relationships with others. The next lesson illustrates what I’m referring to.

Lesson 2: We have to trust people we interact with.

Trust is a spectrum. On one extreme, you can choose to trust everyone, and the opposite end is it complete lack of trust. As spectrums go, there’s space in the middle, which calls on individuals to use their discretion with regards to being trusting v. not trusting.

Again, this lesson is based on the fundamental understanding that was not as good at understanding strangers as we think we are. To use the example that I referenced earlier, individuals often believe that they are able to determine when another individual is lying. However, as studies have shown, our “skills” are not as good as we make them out to be.

More next week.