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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Default to Truth”

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Queen of Cuba”

On February 24, 1996, the Cuban military shot down two US civilian aircraft, killing all four people aboard. The airplanes were operated by Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue), an organization that saved stranded migrants attempting to leave Cuba by raft. Hermanos al Rescate had violated Cuban airspace multiple times over the years, but the airplanes were in international airspace at the time of the incident in question.

It soon emerged that the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was warned of the Cuban government’s intentions only the day before the attack, on February 23. The attention quickly shifted to the incompetence of the US government, which was very convenient for Cuba. A DIA analyst became suspicious that this was not merely a coincidence but was rather the work of a Cuban spy. His suspicions fell on a DIA colleague and Cuban expert named Ana Belen Montes, who had arranged the meeting on February 23. Montes was interviewed, but her answers checked out. Five years later, in 2001, it was discovered that Montes was a Cuban spy after all. In retrospect, the DIA official who investigated her in 1996 realized that there were a number of moments in the interview in which she had behaved strangely. There wasn’t quite enough to fully convince him that she was a spy, however, and so the red flags were explained away.

For an answer to his first puzzle—why we’re so bad at telling when people are lying—Gladwell looks to the research of psychologist Tim Levine. Levine’s truth-default theory holds that we assume by default that people are being honest. To convince ourselves otherwise, we need a “trigger.” A trigger is not simply a trace of doubt, but enough doubt to “push [us] over the threshold of belief” (79).

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Holy Fool”

Bernie Madoff was “the mastermind of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history” (90), but it took decades before he was finally convicted for his crimes. People noticed that something didn’t quite add up about him, but their doubts never passed the threshold needed to believe that he was conning people out of billions of dollars, so everyone defaulted to truth. The exception was a fraud investigator named Harry Markopolos. He tried for years to get the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to look into Madoff, but with no success. Markopolos was not a person who defaulted to truth, but instead was suspicious of nearly anyone.

While it may be tempting to believe that the world would be better off if we were all more like Harry Markopolos—and thus able to see through the lies of criminals—Gladwell cautions that there is a reason why most of us default to truth. People like Markopolos are what Gladwell calls “Holy Fools,” or social outcasts who work tirelessly to expose the lies of others. In real life, however, lies are the exception, not the rule. Defaulting to truth makes far more sense than defaulting to disbelief and paranoia, as the latter would leave us incapable of having a functioning society.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Case Study: The Boy in the Shower”

Chapter 5 examines the case of Jerry Sandusky, a former football coach at Penn State who was convicted of rape in 2012. Over a decade earlier, in 2001, an assistant coach named Michael McQueary reported to his boss that he had witnessed what appeared to be Sandusky raping a child in the shower. The issue reached the university’s president, but Sandusky was not investigated until years later. Three university officials were ultimately found guilty of child endangerment due to their inaction.

In Gladwell’s view, the Penn State officials were not necessarily trying to cover anything up. They simply defaulted to truth. To make his point, he compares the Sandusky case to that of Larry Nassar, a doctor who was similarly convicted of sexually assaulting minors. In addition to the hundreds of people who accused him of abuse, Nassar was found to be in possession of a large collection of child pornography. Nassar’s case was far more “open-and-shut” than Sandusky’s, yet people still ignored the warning signs for years. Many of those who defended Nassar were parents of the victims—or, in one case, a victim who stood by him until she could no longer ignore the mounting evidence against him. Nassar’s defenders were clearly not motivated by greed or any personal interests but truly believed that he was a good person.

Jerry Sandusky’s case was less straightforward. Some of Sandusky’s accusers had spent years socializing with him and acting as though nothing had ever happened. McQueary second-guessed what he had witnessed and never contacted the police. Upon hearing McQueary’s story, university officials defaulted to more innocent explanations—they already knew Sandusky liked to play around, so maybe that’s all it was. By the time the issue was reported to the school’s president, Graham Spanier, it was being described as mere “horseplay.” Spanier had little reason to suspect that Sandusky was a rapist and, like most people, defaulted to truth.

Part 2 Analysis

The central concept throughout Part 2 is Tim Levine’s truth-default theory, which states that most people believe that others are telling the truth until they see substantial evidence to the contrary. Gladwell explores how this theory manifests itself in three different cases, each concerning a person who got away with concealing their crimes for years on end: the Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes, the con artist Bernie Madoff, and the child rapist Jerry Sandusky.

In relation to Montes and other spies, Gladwell claims that the issue is not so much that they are particularly brilliant, but rather that “there is something wrong with us” (68). The same could easily be argued about Madoff and Sandusky. For all three people, there had been numerous red flags that people had noticed many years before their crimes were finally revealed. The problem is that those worrying signs were always explained away, and people defaulted to more innocent explanations.

Some people are probably inclined to think that there is something actually wrong with us—that defaulting to truth makes us naïve and exploitable. It allows people to carry out even the most heinous crimes without hindrance. It would be far worse if we were all like Harry Markopolos, however. Gladwell depicts him as a highly intelligent man who bears the burden of being suspicious of everyone around him, leading him to become paranoid. A world in which criminals sometimes go undetected is not a perfect one, but neither is a world in which no one trusts each other.

One of Gladwell’s key messages in these chapters is to be more understanding of those who trusted the wrong person. We tend to question how they could have been so blind to the obvious warning signs, but Gladwell cautions that they were only being human, and that they “deserve our sympathy, not our censure” (141). Although we might imagine that we would not have been deceived if we had been in the same situation, this sort of overconfidence is quite problematic, as will be seen throughout the rest of the book.

It is easy to judge others and question their actions when we have not been in their shoes, and Chapter 5 shows this repeatedly. People questioned McQueary’s story because he didn’t act the way they thought a witness should act: Why didn’t he call the police? Why didn’t he just step in and stop Sandusky? People questioned the victims’ stories because they didn’t act the way they thought a victim should act: Why didn’t they speak up years ago? Why couldn’t they recount what happened with consistency and clarity? People questioned how the Penn State officials and the parents of Nassar’s victims could not see what was going on: How could they ignore a man saying he witnessed a rape? How could they not listen to their own child when she said she felt uncomfortable?

The reality is that witnessing a traumatic event can lead to psychological consequences, and people do not always do what seems logical or obvious when they are panicking. Victims do not always see themselves as victims until much later. They might be in denial about what happened to them, they might feel too ashamed to say anything, or their memories may be clouded. Those who brushed aside the red flags, meanwhile, were just being normal, trusting people. Before blaming people for not being more suspicious of their fellow humans, Gladwell believes that we should think about what kind of world such suspicion would create.