Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know isa book written by Malcolm Gladwell. It expresses the cognitive fallacy ofcommunication by giving readers a collection of miscommunications through stories from headlines and history. It contains many controversial topics like the child-abuse scandal involving Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, and the deceptions of financier Bernie Madoff. By writing these stories from the perspective of the fallibility of human communication skills, Gladwell explores the concepts of “default to truth” and “transparency” of our human nature. Due to these profound concepts, this bookchanged my perspective on strangers greatly.

​Before reading this book, I never thought a lot about strangers, and I also never thought about myself in others’ eyes. I also saw myself with a skeptical or questioning mind and a critical mindset, which made it difficult for others to fool me. However, reading Gladwell’s book changed my mind on human nature. I realized that I’m still a constant victim of the human instinct to “default to truth” — that we tend to take on face value the things people tell us, even if we should know better. A solid example of this is described in Chapter 2 about Neville Chamberlain’s encounter with Adolf Hitler: “‘Yesterday afternoon, I had a long talk with Herr Hitler,’ he said. ‘I feel satisfied now that each of us fully understands what is in the mind of the other.’” I was surprised that even an experienced and wise man like Chamberlain could be fooled by Hitler, a man is so obviously untrustworthy to readers now. My pride and confidence in myself collapsed when I saw men like Chamberlain “default to truth.” When reading, I constantly asked myself: do you think you are more intelligent than Chamberlain and that you can see through a stranger’s real intention instead of “default[ing] to truth”?

​The answer was no. I don’t really think twice about what a stranger tells me. Idefault to truth unconsciously. For example, during the start of my summer vacation, I asked people online about the difficulty levels of my AP classes. In particular, I asked a teacher about her recommendation for those AP classes. Looking surprised, she kept talking about how hard they were, kept saying that I wouldn’t be able to manage them, and kept suggesting I do preparations. At the end of our conversation, she asked me if I wanted to take AP preparation classes with her. Although I had already taken four AP courses previously and was not overwhelmed by them, I still trusted every word she said and was ready to start classes with her. Luckily, I read this book and was introduced to the idea of “default to truth.” I suddenly realized I already defaultedto truth when talking to the online teacher. “You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth, you were only being human.” These words hit me hard because I had questions about the difficulties of those AP classes; however, there were not enough red flags for me to believe that she was telling lies about course difficulty levels to entice me into signingup for her classes and paying tuition. Now, after reading Gladwell’s book, I am seeingstrangers more cautiously and being more intelligent about recognizing lies from truth.

​Although the tendency to “default to truth” seems to be a simple mistake that humans make and is one that can be gotten rid of sooner or later, Hegel said: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.” There must be something right about it that has allowed it to remain in human nature after years of evolution. Like Gladwell states, “‘Default to truth’ is an efficient way of life because the cost outweighs the benefits of checking the reliability of all interactions. It is worth ‘default the truth’ since most of the trial-and-error costs were not high in real life.”

​In his book, Gladwell also introduces the idea of “transparency,” the assumption that the way people present themselves outwardly through behavior, especially facial expressions, is not always an accurate and reliable representation of their inner feelings and intentions. But when we are dealing with strangers, we always make an assumption about their thoughts and personality based on their demeanors. The transparency experiment described in Chapter 6 left me most profoundly impressedbecause it also changed my perspective on the world. Gladwell states that the experiment discovered “100 percent of the 113 Spanish schoolchildren identified the happy face as a happy face. But only 58 percent of the Trobrianders did, while 23 percent looked at a smiling face and called it ‘neutral.’ And happiness is the emotion where there is the most agreement between the Trobrianders and the Spanish children. On everything else, the Trobrianders' idea of what emotion looks like on the outside appears totally different from our own” (Gladwell, 157). The experiment showed how much education and culture shapes our world's perspective. It’s shocking that even our feelings of connection towards other people and our expression of different emotions are shaped by the society we live in. For instance, most people connect lowered lips, showing teeth, frowns, redness on the face, and other facial expressions to identify anger. However, the isolated islanders connected facial expressions to anger very differently: “But anger baffled the Trobriand islanders. Just look at the scores for the angry face. Twenty percent called it a happy face. Seventeen percent called it a sad face. Thirty percent called it a fearful face. Twenty percent thought it was a sign of disgust—and only seven percent identified it the way nearly every Spanish schoolchild had” (Gladwell, 159). This difference in identifying emotions based on facial expressions revealed that without intentionally labeling different facial expressions with different emotions, humans are unable to read another’s mood purely based on their facial expressions.

​The results of this experiment implied the world-changing power of globalization. I noticed that the countries that went through globalization and are connected to the internet interpret these pictures similarly, showing that globalization enforced a common culture or common sense beyond the borders of nations and cultures. By mixing and spreading different cultures, globalization gave a “universal common sense” to most people. Consequently, people in Spain and in Japan will both interpret frowning, hard eyes, and tight mouths as angry. In contrast, regions without internet and exposure to globalization interpret these pictures differently. Moreover, to demonstrate that the Trobriand islanders were not a special case, the researchers performed the same experiment in other isolated regions, such as the Mwani people and people in the mountains of northwest Namibia. Not only did they interpret those pictures differently than we do, but the interpretations were also different for each one of them. These experiment results led me to discover a scary truth: humans can’t acutely understand each other based on their external actions. Also, there are no natural connections between certain facial expressions and emotions. For example, smiling doesn’t naturally come from happiness, and frowning doesn’t naturally come from anger. Instead, culture plays a huge role in facial expressions related to specific emotions.