Talking to Strangers

ilian herzi
5 min readDec 2, 2020

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TL;DR: Humans are biased to perceive conversations and observed behaviors as accurate representations of another person even though these perceptions may be incorrect particularly with strangers. The takeaway is that it’s difficult to truly understand an individual and the best we can do is gather more data about that person by asking the right questions, considering each person’s origin, history of behavior, and history of temperament. Additionally, an individual is capable of many possible behaviors that depend both on the person and the context (meaning behavior is more situational than dispositional).

Learning about others is difficult, even more so than learning about ourselves which is already an arduous, lifelong process. While “Talking to Strangers” discusses many different ideas surrounding interpersonal communication and interaction, in this article I’ll focus on the book’s discussion of our ability to accurately perceive people and peoples’ intentions.

We can start with a toy example of two people in conversation: person_1 and person_2. The question this book explores, which I pose to the reader, is: if person_2 wants to accurately understand/perceive person_1 what signals should person_2 look for and how should these signals be interpreted?

How person 2 interprets person 1 through conversation and observed behavior

“Talking to Strangers” attempts to answer this question by focusing on conversations and observed behavior as the signals while also analyzing certain human biases that sometimes lead to incorrect interpretation of these signals.

Can we believe what we learn about others?

Truth Default (TD)is the tendency for people to think that others are honest during a conversation.

A good example is that if someone says they care about the environment but has a fracking company that cuts corners, TD theory implies that most people would not question this belief.

TD theory has some underpinnings in the conservation of energy reinforcer, where humans have a tendency to perform actions that save energy. To question every statement requires thoughtful contemplation, data gathering, and analysis all of which requires much more energy than simply believing whatever an individual has to say.

This also relates to how humans evolved in social interactions, in particular, a conversation where every statement is questioned is unmanageable and possibly hazardous; particularly when it detracts from discussions that require immediate action i.e. “There’s a tiger behind you”.

Transparency is the idea that behaviors, facial expressions, and actions are accurate indications of a person. This is essentially the analogue of TD except for behaviors and nonverbal perceptions.

To illustrate when transparency can cause us to misinterpret someone else Gladwell describes an experiment where Spaniards and Trobianders — a group of people with very little western culture interaction — were asked to evaluate which emotion a person felt based on a photo of their facial expression. While Spaniards were able to classify the facial expressions perfectly according to western views on facial expressions and emotions the Trobianders were not, with quite a bit of variance between different emotions for typical western facial expressions e.g the “angry” facial expression was seen as somewhat happy by the Trobianders.

Western Culture facial expression and their associated emotion

By highlighting the difference in the Spaniards and the Trobianders interpretation of emotion in facial expressions, Gladwell argues that our interpretation of facial expressions may be inaccurate and that we should recognize that each person may express an emotion in a different way, not necessarily in the typical western face-emotion association.

Another experiment related to the expression of emotion is the Facial Directed Action Task (FDAT) experiment. In this experiment, voluntary facial actions elicited emotion. If emotions aren’t linked by default with a specific facial configuration it would be interesting to try the FDAT on the Trobianders, e.g. the “angry” face and see if a different emotion is expressed. The results could determine whether the link between emotions and faces is or is not universal and whether said link is learned and culture dependent.

Transparency is also somewhat related to the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) where people tend to use behavior as an explanation of personality without considering the context surrounding the behavior. The difference appears to be that FAE is more focused on how the perception of others’ behaviors is biased towards dispositional explanations rather than situational while transparency refers to a more general acceptance of the observed behaviors.

How should we evaluate someone’s behavior?

Coupling is the idea that specific behaviors only occur in specific contexts. Displacement is the belief that specific behaviors occur regardless of the context. These two definitions are primarily used to demonstrate the importance of context in behavior. The example used in the book is suicide rates and the fall in suicide rates after switching from coal based gas to natural gas systems where the amount of carbon monoxide is greatly reduced in the latter. Other examples used are The Kansas City Experiments that most of crimes in a region are concentrated to specific hot spots and targeting those hotspots either by increased police activity reduced overall crime.

While these are only a few of the concepts discussed in Gladwell’s book, I hope this helps illustrate just how difficult it is to perceive someone . Learning about each person requires forgoing our predisposed biases and learning about that person’s situation, behavior, and (possibly untruthful) thoughts through conversation.

P.S Definitely check out the book. While I mentioned some of the general ideas related to learning about other people, the stories mentioned in the book are a powerful. The stories demonstrate the importance of understanding our own flaws and biases in perceiving others and the true danger of what happens when we fail to recognize these biases and improperly perceive others.

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ilian herzi
ilian herzi

Written by ilian herzi

Apple ML Engineer, just taking life one idea at a time

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