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

Chapter 1 introduces us to Florentino Aspillaga, a Cuban intelligence officer who defected to the US in 1987. Upon being taken into US custody, he requested to speak to a CIA officer known as “el Alpinista” (“the Mountain Climber”), a highly trained spy who had previously worked in Cuba. The focus of the chapter is not on Aspillaga’s defection, but rather the incredibly valuable intelligence that he brought with him. He revealed that there were dozens of double agents in Cuba feeding false information to the CIA, many of whom el Alpinista had worked with. The agents had been handpicked by Fidel Castro himself.

The CIA’s humiliation does not end there. The agency was similarly duped by numerous double agents in East Germany, and even one of the most senior officers in the CIA was working for the Soviet Union. Despite the CIA’s being “one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world” (27), and despite el Alpinista’s being one of the most renowned spies at that institution, they were all misled time and time again. Gladwell thus presents his first of two puzzles: Why can’t we tell when a stranger is lying to us?

The chapter opens with a story about Neville Chamberlain, who was the British prime minister during the years leading up to World War II. In 1938, Adolf Hitler appeared to be preparing to invade Sudetenland, the ethnically German regions of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain decided to resolve the crisis by flying to Germany and having a face-to-face meeting with Hitler. Upon receiving Hitler’s assurances that he only wanted Sudetenland (and not a world war), Chamberlain felt that he was “a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word” (31). They signed an agreement, which Hitler broke less than six months later.

Chamberlain was one of several British politicians who felt they could trust Hitler after meeting him. Those who believed Hitler was dishonest, on the other hand, usually had little to no personal interaction with him. We often assume that we can learn more about a person by interacting with them, yet doing so seems to have achieved the opposite in Chamberlain’s case.

Gladwell then shifts focus to a judge in the United States, Solomon, who presides over bail hearings. Solomon’s job involves deciding whether defendants must post bail or not—in essence, deciding from a brief interaction whether a perfect stranger deserves their freedom while they await trial. Although one would imagine that judges are quite skilled at assessing a person’s character, a study showed that a computer algorithm did a much better job than human judges in deciding which defendants should be let out on bail. This leads us to Gladwell’s second puzzle: Why does meeting a person sometimes make us worse at judging them?

The chapter ends with a brief look at a study led by the psychologist Emily Pronin in which participants were asked to perform a simple word completion task. While the participants rejected the suggestion that their answers revealed anything about their own personalities, they were quick to judge others who performed the exact same task. They believed that the strangers’ word choices revealed that they were vain, unfocused, competitive, and so on. Gladwell proposes that this is the central problem behind these two puzzles: We think of ourselves as complex but of strangers as simple.