Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell

Another random library pick. As you may have learned, I am not really a non-fiction reader, but this one looked interesting so I picked it up.

Talking to Strangers is about things we should know about the people we don't know. In the book, Malcolm Gladwell uses both current events and psychology experiments to explain how we misunderstand each other.

The book starts off with a story of a woman pulled over by the police who ended up committing suicide in jail. Throughout the book Malcolm Gladwell goes back to the story, trying to show us why it happened. He returns to the story at the end of ties it all together.

One theory that he goes over a few times in the book is the default to truth, where humans naturally assume people are truthful. Gladwell walks us through times where people defaulted to truth and the resulting consequences. His examples are generally outliers, he is not suggesting that we stop defaulting to truth. He discusses WWII and the opinion world leaders had of Hitler. He also discusses the controversy at Penn State.

Another theory we learn about is the "mismatch" where a person's actions don't match with the situation they are in, resulting in people assuming a possibly incorrect conclusion. Here he talks about the Amanda Knox case and even ties it back to episodes of Friends.

This was a good read with lots of interesting ideas to think about. I have read a few Malcolm Gladwell books and always enjoy them. He makes you think about things in new ways, which is always a good thing. If you are looking for an easy non-fiction that touches on some interesting current events, I would recommend it.