Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.Talking to Strangers audiobook: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know is now available on Free Audiobooks Online.
Talking to Strangers audiobook: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
We believe in transparency—”the way a stranger appears and acts is a dependable indicator to the way they feel”—and we prefer to appraise people’s honesty based on their attitude. People who are well-spoken, confident, and have a firm handshake, as well as those who are nice and engaging, are seen as credible. People who are nervous, shifty, stammering, or uncomfortable who deliver windy, complicated explanations are not perceived as credible. While people—including professional investigators—are good at judging the credibility of those whose honesty and demeanor match, they are terrible at judging the credibility of the confident liar or the nervous truth teller, which is how Amanda Knox ended up spending years in an Italian prison despite the fact that there was no evidence linking her to the crime.
Gladwell extensively used well-known instances to demonstrate that when interacting with strangers, we are not always the best judges of their character. Examples range from Hitler to the Amanda Knox case in Italy, amongst many more. Spying, child sexual abuse, racism, prejudice, financial dishonesty, and other issues are addressed. Talking to Strangers audiobook: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know demonstrates again again that Malcolm Gladwell is an acute observer of our culture.
There are some fantastic anecdotes in Talking to Strangers audiobook: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know, as well as some new twists on old ones, but the lens through which he insists us perceive these stories (i.e. our “default to truth” when speaking to strangers) doesn’t work. Sandra Bland’s interaction with the police did not result in her death because humans are not adept at conversing with strangers. Brock Turner’s raping of the Stanford lady, nor Sandusky’s, etc.
Talking to Strangers audiobook: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know is a book with a daring premise: it attempts to explain why a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic infraction in rural Texas, arrested, and incarcerated, and then committed suicide three days later in her cell. Mr. Gladwell, like in his previous works, seeks to explain this through an examination of psychology and social scientific studies.
The paradox of conversing with strangers is that we need to converse with them but are lousy at it. We have an automatic “default to truth” operational assumption that the persons we are working with are trustworthy. We only leave that truth default mode when our doubts and misgivings become so strong that we can no longer reason them away. This default enables for the efficient communication necessary by our society, but it puts us at danger of being duped by someone like Jerry Sandusky or Larry Nassar on occasion.
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