Review: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We try our best to make a good judgment call on strangers but we're often wrong about them.

Sexual charge case, ineffective Al Qaudi torturing, misreading an upset lady as being dangerous while pulling her over... sometimes we take people the wrong way. And it's an unfortunate thing when it comes to court cases. Sometimes adding more information like the persons expression and body language just makes things worse to judge them.

Sometimes people are mismatched; they seem like a killer but they really aren't and vice versa.

Extreme torture isn't effective because inhibits the frontal lobe and the person can't even remember anything from the past and later on doesn't even properly remember the torture.

Coupling is really interesting, you'd think that after they put up Golden Gate Bridge barriers that suicide rates would remain the same but they would use another tactic but it's not true, suicide rates actually declined. Also the British gas systems changed from having carbon monoxide in them to natural gas which has no carbon monoxide and suicide rates plummeted. Killing yourself with a gas was seen as a very tempting easy painless way for people to commit suicide so suicide rates went up.

Crime usually happens in a specific place and time, down to a street block. So don't waste your police patrol cars out in the suburbs trying to catch criminals.

Alcoholism and going to a frat party is a dangerous thing lol... The guy and/or the girl blacks out and they don't remember anything and there's no witnesses so we will never actually find out what really happened. Sexual abuse cases are so complicated... it's sad =/

The TV Show Friends seems like real life but it's not how ppl actually behave/express themselves in real life. It's how people think people react to things. Back in the time of Rome they wouldn't even understand our expressions today haha

We are all in general truth biased, we start clean slate assuming people are being truthful in what they say. Then we need not just one doubt but many doubts in order to change our minds about them. Hence, humans suck at detecting a person lying!

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