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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “Coupling”

Chapter 10 Summary: “Sylvia Plath”

The poet Sylvia Plath killed herself in 1963 by placing her head inside an oven with the gas turned on. Plath had long suffered from depression and was obsessed with suicide, which she wrote about frequently in her works. Her friend Anne Sexton was a similarly brilliant and troubled person who took her own life in 1974. However, Gladwell argues that neither of their suicides were inevitable. They died because they had the impulse to do so when the circumstances were right. At the time of Plath’s death, people’s homes in Britain were supplied with “town gas,” which contained the deadly compound carbon monoxide. It was a simple and effective way to kill oneself and consequently was the most popular method of suicide until the country began making the switch to natural gas in 1965. Natural gas was free of carbon monoxide, and the preferred form of suicide was thus taken away.

Many would assume that suicidal people would simply find a different way to kill themselves. This is an idea called displacement, in which removing one option means that people will just try something else. Gladwell, however, proposes that some behaviors are coupled, or “linked to very specific circumstances and conditions” (273). The suicide rate in the UK did not stay steady after 1965 but rather declined as town gas was gradually phased out. It seems that many of those people who would have killed themselves with town gas did not switch to another method—they didn’t kill themselves at all.

The criminologist David Weisburd studied a similar phenomenon. It’s commonly believed that crime is more frequent in certain neighborhoods in a city, but Weisburd found that location was actually far more specific than that. His research showed that a huge amount of the crime in various cities occurred in just a small fraction of street segments, meaning that crime is coupled with particular places. When the police started cracking down on a red-light district in New Jersey, there was no displacement as one might assume. The prostitutes preferred to find another vocation instead of moving away. Their reasons for staying were largely the same as they would be for most people—moving is too stressful, they wanted to stay close to their friends, or they didn’t want their children to change schools. Prostitutes are individuals with their own complex lives. Gladwell argues that we should pay more attention to the context a stranger is living in rather than jumping to conclusions.

Chapter 11 Summary: “Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments”

A criminologist named George Kelling conducted a study in cooperation with the Kansas City Police Department in the 1970s. He wanted to see whether preventive patrol—in which police cars roamed around the city to create a seemingly constant presence—did anything to deter crime. Kelling found that it did absolutely nothing. Another criminologist, Lawrence Sherman, conducted some more experiments in Kansas City in the early 1990s. After trying out several ideas to reduce gun violence with no success, Sherman hit upon an idea that worked. The police department sent four police officers to a high-crime area of the city and had them pull over suspicious-looking drivers on nearly any pretext they could find, which then allowed them to search the car if they had reason to believe that the person could be armed. Gun crimes were cut in half as a result.

Police departments across the country have tried to apply the strategy that was so successful in Kansas City, but an important detail has been lost in the process. The police in Kansas City focused their attention specifically on high-crime areas, while other police departments started aggressively patrolling anywhere and everywhere. The idea that crime is coupled with place was one that people did not readily accept.

Chapter 12 Summary: “Sandra Bland”

The final chapter of the book returns to the encounter between Sandra Bland and Brian Encinia. When Encinia noticed that Bland was irritated, he escalated the situation instead of diffusing it—this was his first mistake, according to Gladwell. Encinia then became annoyed at Bland for smoking a cigarette, which she had every right to do. When she refused to put it out, he felt that his authority had been challenged and failed to maintain his composure. The situation continued escalating as Encinia tried to physically pull her out of the car, threatened her with a stun gun, and arrested her on assault charges.

The Kansas City style of policing (explained in Chapter 11) requires that police officers be suspicious of every car they approach—in other words, they can’t default to truth. Encinia was just such a police officer. Police officers are also explicitly taught to judge people based on their demeanor. To Encinia, Bland’s demeanor fit the profile of a criminal. In reality, she had just been going through difficult times, was trying to pull her life together, and was upset that she had been pulled over for something absurd. Encinia was terrified of Bland because he completely misinterpreted her.

When Lawrence Sherman conducted his experiment in Kansas City, he was fully aware of the risks of overusing the stop-and-search procedure. It can easily lead to mistrust and hostility toward the police, which is why Sherman used it only in the most dangerous area of the city, and only on the specific street segments where it was most needed. The place where Sandra Bland was pulled over was not a high-crime area by any definition. Encinia never should have stopped her in the first place.

In Gladwell’s view, Encinia’s actions that day were a “collective failure” (344). Someone taught Encinia to suspect everyone, and someone taught him to judge people’s demeanor. His superiors decided to conduct Kansas City stops in an area with little crime. However, this is not just about Encinia and other police officers, because the assumptions behind each of those decisions are ones that “too many of us share—and too few of us have ever bothered to reconsider” (344).

Gladwell reiterates that we should act with humility. We shouldn’t blame people for defaulting to truth, because giving people the benefit of the doubt is necessary for our society to work. We should accept that we can’t see clairvoyantly into the minds of others no matter how hard we try. Many reduced Sandra Bland’s arrest and death to an individual encounter gone awry, rather than recognizing that there are systemic problems with how we talk to people we don’t know. When we are “blind to the ideas that underlie our mistakes with strangers” (345), we end up blaming the stranger.

Part 5 Analysis

Part 5 introduces the final key concept of the book: coupling. Unlike default-to-truth and the assumption of transparency, coupling is not a strategy we use to make sense of strangers. It is something that we ought to consider but often don’t. Coupling centers around the idea that people’s actions are affected by context—including the time, place, and circumstances that they are in.

Sylvia Plath struggled with depression before her death, but that doesn’t mean she was inevitably going to kill herself one way or another. She died because she felt suicidal and because she had access to a method of killing herself that she was willing to use. If we don’t pay attention to context when interacting with strangers, we are bound to oversimplify and essentialize them. People oversimplify Plath by seeing her as hopelessly suicidal. People oversimplify prostitutes by seeing them only as prostitutes rather than as complex humans who happen to earn money through sex work. This argument harkens back to a point raised near the beginning of the book, in Chapter 2. The psychologist Emily Pronin found that participants in her study took for granted that strangers were less complex and easier to decipher than they themselves were.

The book closes by once again focusing on the encounter between Sandra Bland and Brian Encinia, but this time Gladwell brings together the ideas he has developed throughout the course of the book. He goes through the transcript of their interaction, allowing the reader to witness how the encounter unfolded. At multiple moments in the dialogue, Gladwell points out how things could have gone very differently if Encinia had made a different choice—such as diffusing the situation instead of escalating it or staying calm instead of becoming angry.

The actions of Encinia in his encounter with Bland exemplify two of Gladwell’s main points. First, defaulting to truth is a good thing, even if it doesn’t always seem like it. Gladwell previously made the point that society would cease to function if we didn’t default to truth, and Encinia’s treatment of Sandra Bland is a concrete example of why we don’t want a world filled with mistrust. He was trained to see people as criminals at even the slightest clue, and as a result he harassed an innocent person like Bland. Second, it is risky to assume that people are transparent. Doing so makes us far more confident than we should be in our often-misguided judgments. In the investigation following Bland’s suicide, Encinia stated that he took Bland’s agitated demeanor as a sign that she was dangerous—but as we have seen, dangerous people don’t always act like dangerous people, nor do innocent people always act like innocent people. It is important to recognize that someone’s behavior could mean a multitude of things.

Therefore, we shouldn’t abandon our truth-biased nature just because some people deceive us at times, nor should we blame others when they are deceived. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions about people based on how they look or act, and we shouldn’t punish people just because they don’t match our preconceived notions of what constitutes normal behavior. We shouldn’t assume that we are capable of uncovering who a person really is.

Most of what Gladwell prescribes consists of things were should not do. He does not end the book with a solution for how we can do a better job at making sense of strangers, because such a solution does not exist. Instead, the key is to focus on ourselves. We need to reevaluate our own behavior when we interact with strangers. If we act with more self-awareness and humility, we can recognize our own shortcomings instead of assuming that the stranger must be at fault. Blaming the stranger for our miscommunications only results in a deepening of social divisions.