Thinkers Hall

Talking to Strangers

• Human beings are equipped to make sense of intimates - friends, family, community. But the same strategies that work with intimates don’t work with strangers
• Human civil society is built on default to truth: the assumption that communication is fundamentally honest. That is what makes civil society possible. But it also opens us to occasional deception
• In our dealings with others, we use facial expressions and demeanor as a guide to internal emotional states. This works well some of the time. But it also introduces a significant amount of error into human interaction, when we confront people whose emotions do not match their demeanor
• The biggest mistake we make in dealing with these two flaws is to try and penalize trust - or introduce paranoia and suspicion into human interaction. That is a cure worse than the disease
• Talking to strangers successfully requires finding careful and targeted strategies to cope with our weaknesses

Time: 50 minutes