Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell
"We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can't. What should we do?"
"That is Levine's point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them." p. 78
"If you staged a screening o that Friends episode for the Trobriand Islanders, they would see Ross confronting Chandler and think Chandler was angry and Ross was scared. They would get the scene completely wrong. And if you threw a Friends premiere in ancient Rome for Cicero and the emperor and a bunch of their friends, they would look at the extravagant grimaces and contortions on the faces of the actors and think: What on earth?" p. 160
"The first set of mistakes we make with strangers--the default to truth and the illusion of transparency--has to do with our inability to make sense of the strangers as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating." p. 280
Recent Posts
See All"I continued to doubt. But I was not afraid. I just didn't want this to end." "But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sport
"Emotions determine the quality of our lives" "Emotion is a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something importa
"My reason for writing it was the conviction that the economy is too important to leave to the economists." "Debt, money, faith, and state all go hand in hand. Without debt there is no easy way to man