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Talking to Strangers : What We Should Know about the People We Don t Know -Malcolm Gladwell
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TALKING TO STRANGERS : What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know (Copy)

Malcolm Gladwell
WELL USED, PAPERBACK
Malcolm Gladwell
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM18.00

Fascinating Study of Why We Misread Those We Don’t Know Based On The Assumptions We Make When Dealing With Strangers

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9780316462914
Book Condition WELL USED
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Little Brown and Company
Publication Date 28 Apr 2020
Pages 400
Weight 0.30 kg
Dimension 17.3 × 10.6 × 3 cm
Availability: Out of stock

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★★A Best Book of the Year★★
-The Financial Times,
– Bloomberg,
– Chicago Tribune,
– and Detroit Free Press
 
Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers— and why they often go wrong. It is a powerful exploration of how little we know about the people we don’t know. We consistently overestimate our ability to judge strangers.
 
It explores how we misjudge and misunderstand strangers, sometimes with terrible consequences, making a powerful case for more tolerance and patience in our dealings with others.

☞ How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation?

☞ Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler?

☞ Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise?

☞ Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true?
 
Talking to Strangers studies miscommunication, interactions and assumptions people make when dealing with those that they don’t know. In other words, Talking to Strangers, is a typically roundabout exploration of the assumptions and mistakes we make when dealing with people we don’t know.
 
If that sounds like a rather vague area of study, that’s because in many respects it is – there are all manner of definitional and cultural issues through which Gladwell boldly navigates a rather convenient path. But in doing so he crafts a compelling story, stopping off at prewar appeasement, paedophilia, espionage, the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox and Bernie Madoff cases, suicide and Sylvia Plath, torture and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before coming to a somewhat pat conclusion.
 
Talking to Strangers is also a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And 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.
 
In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt.
 
To make his point, Gladwell covers a variety of events and issues, including
◆ the arrest and subsequent death of Sandra Bland;
◆ British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s interactions with Adolf Hitler;
◆ the sex abuse scandal of Larry Nassar;
◆ the Cuban mole Ana Montes;
◆ the investment scandal of Bernie Madoff;
◆ the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal;
◆ the trial of Amanda Knox;
◆ the Brock Turner rape case;
◆ Sylvia Plath’s death;
◆.and the Kansas City preventive patrol experiment.
 
The book opens and closes with an analysis of the Sandra Bland case. The book draws from the truth-default theory by psychologist and communication studies professor Timothy R. Levine. “Default to truth” is used throughout the book to observe how human beings are by nature trusting, not only of people or technology, but of everything. Sometimes this kind of behavior, the lack of understanding each other, leads to disastrous and tragic outcomes, as elaborated by Gladwell in the stories he brings.
 
Gladwell notes how there are evolutionary social reasons why we trust more than suspect – the need for cooperation being one. He asserts that defaulting to distrust would be disastrous and that we should “accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers”.
 
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KIRKUS REVIEW :
 
The latest intellectually stimulating book from the acclaimed author.
 
Every few years, journalist Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, 2013, etc.) assembles serious scientific research on oddball yet relevant subjects and then writes a bestseller. Readers expecting another everything-you-think-you-know-is-wrong page-turner will not be disappointed, but they will also encounter some unsettling truths.
 
The author begins with a few accounts of black Americans who died at the hands of police, using the incidents to show how most of us are incompetent at judging strangers. Countless psychological studies demonstrate that humans are terrible at detecting lying. Experts such as FBI agents don’t perform better.
 
Judges interview suspects to determine if they deserve bail; they believe it helps, but the opposite is true. Computers, using only hard data, do much better. Many people had qualms about Bernie Madoff, but interviewers found him completely open and honest; “he was a sociopath dressed up as a mensch.” This, Gladwell emphasizes, is the transparency problem. We believe that someone’s demeanor reflects their thoughts and emotions, but it often doesn’t.
 
Gladwell’s second bombshell is what he calls “default to truth.” It seems like a university president resigns in disgrace every few months for the same reason: They hear accusations of abusive behavior by an employee—e.g., Larry Nassar at Michigan State, Jerry Sandusky at Penn State—conduct an investigation, but then take no action, often claiming that they did not have enough evidence of deceit.
 
Ultimately, everyone agrees that they were criminally negligent. Another example is CIA official James Angleton, who was convinced that there was a Soviet mole in the agency; his decades of suspicion and search ruined careers and crippled American intelligence.
 
Gladwell emphasizes that society could not function if we did not give everyone the benefit of the doubt. “To assume the best of another is the trait that has created modern society,” he writes. “Those occasions when our trusting nature is violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.”
 
Another Gladwell tour de force but perhaps his most disturbing.
 
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About the Author :
 
Malcom Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He is also the cofounder of Pushkin Industries, an audiobook and podcast production company. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York.

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