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

We misjudge strangers on a regular basis, but the bigger problem is perhaps that we are far too confident that our judgments are correct, in large part because we don’t usually realize how bad we are at making sense of strangers. We think we can tell who a person is by meeting them and studying them. We think strangers fit into our narrow stereotypes of how people are supposed to behave. We criticize others for being fooled by dishonest people, believing that we would never have made the same mistakes if we had been in their shoes.

Because we’re overconfident, we often don’t stop to consider alternative possibilities when dealing with a stranger, instead jumping to premature conclusions. Neville Chamberlain was sure that he fully understood Adolf Hitler’s intentions after meeting him a few times. It didn’t occur to Brian Encinia that maybe Sandra Bland was agitated not because she was hiding some sort of criminal activity, but because he himself had made her agitated by pulling her over for something so minor.

Our overconfidence also leads to the conviction that we can figure out the “truth” about a stranger if we just try hard enough.