Malcolm Gladwell's "Talking to Strangers"

In Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Talking to Strangers”, he demonstrates again and again how bad we are at properly assessing the motives of strangers. 

One of my favorite concepts of his is what he calls “default to truth”, in which we tend to assume, on the whole, that strangers are always telling the truth. “Innocent until proven guilty” if you will.

While this is great for our society as a whole (the alternative would be a constant state of paranoia and mistrust - essentially *my* default state), it has its challenges.

For example, despite putting “satire” and “parody” in every post you make, people on TikTok will still believe you are telling the truth, even when you think you are way over the top, tongue-in-cheek, and obviously beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt sarcastic.

However, in this crazy world we live in, there’s almost nothing a satirist could say that’s crazier than what people ACTUALLY believe, so we tend to assume that however absurd someone’s words are, they are telling the truth.

This could be a reason why so many business influencers are blindly trusted on social media. “They must be telling the truth, because they tell me over and over again!”

They must be telling the truth, because they have so many followers!

They started from nothing.

They did it all themselves.

They *definitely* earn xx amount per month, they just won’t show you their bank statements or tax returns.

Their course is surely worth the $2,000 price tag, otherwise, why would they price it at $2,000?

Oh, and cigarettes must be healthy, because why would so many people smoke them otherwise? After all, over one billion people can’t be wrong, can they?

If, through all the nonsense, incoherent ramblings and utter jibberish spouted on this channel, you, the viewer realize that perhaps NO ONE can be trusted at their word on social media and that EVERYthing should be taken with a huge grain of salt, yours truly included above all, then maybe this will have been a successful experiment.