We’re Not Good At Reading People and It’s Hurting Us
People get us wrong all the time, which means we get them wrong all the time.
As the holidays approach, as you navigate the pressurized social circumstances they bring, when there is relatively little time or desire to think, when food and alcohol dumb us all down, you might want to have downloaded the audio of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Talking to Strangers, onto one of your umbilical devices. The smartphone or iPad that’s responsible for keeping you sane during this most stressful season will thank you.
I’m set — I already have Headspace or Calm, you say.
Good for you; I do, too. They’re great, but they can lull you into a false sense of security that life is a placid pond with snow drifting gently down into that cup of cocoa in your mittened hand.
So, if you’ve got a long drive to grandma’s house consider having Gladwell be your GPS; he won’t lead you astray as you go over the river and through the woods. But he will be taking you through the woods; watch out for low hanging branches.
Know that this book has generated LOTS of controversy. That’s kind of the point. Gladwell talks about how mundane miscommunication (which starts with misapprehension/misunderstanding) can lead to unintended consequences.
Talking to Strangers is generally a well-reasoned and well-written book — deeply disturbing in its content and life changing in its effect on some (me included).
It’s in the literary tradition of other social commentaries that talk about some of the inconvenient truths that affect our lives in ways we may not fully understand. It’s not the whole story, as you’ll no doubt find if you listen. As with GPS, it points the way without saying much about the destination.
Much of my coaching work involves helping clients decipher the complex dynamics of important relationships in their lives. Some of these relationships are familiar and routine — they know the people they’re dealing with; they can listen to what they say and watch how they act. That’s just like Bill, he’s always…
But the vast majority of interactions we have in the course of a day are with people we don’t really know — strangers — even if they sit just a few feet away from us at work or in front of us at a Saturday soccer game. Given how geographically dispersed our families now are, even close relations are effectively strangers.
It turns out that we have certain mental biases borne of evolution and cultural context that lead us to make assumptions about people we don’t know, and these get us into trouble.
Gladwell talks about three of these mental biases in horrifying detail: [1] we tend to believe people are telling us the truth; [2] we tend to think we can “know” someone — that they are transparent to us; and [3] we don’t tend to consider actions in context or we discount that context as a driver of behavior.
The book’s examples are complex and riveting. Here are a few simpler examples from my work, to which many of you can probably relate.
Truthfulness: A long-tenured executive takes pride in mentoring new talent. An alum of his alma-mater, someone whose family he’s known for years, let’s call him Steve, joins his team, and the executive takes special interest in Steve’s progress, opening doors, sharing contacts, and bringing Steve into high level meetings that expose him to senior leadership. Steve begins taking on more and more responsibility.
Yet all while, All About Steve, is undermining his mentor at every turn and sharing disinformation about him. The executive confronts Steve, who denies the rumors. I know this kid; it can’t be true. That’s not the way he was raised. He accepts Steve’s denial until the facts make his continuing support impossible. By then, it’s too late.
Transparency: She had had some training in how to read body language and interpret behaviors. She was caring and compassionate. But as an oncologist, she was focused primarily on curing and managing cancer and only secondarily on understanding and alleviating the psychological toll of illness on her patients.
In the few minutes remaining during their short time together, she was trying to tell her well-dressed elderly patient that, while the chemo seemed to be working, another fall like the one that brought her in today, could kill her. But her patient was looking her right in the eyes, smiling and saying very lucidly that she “had some help from time to time” and didn’t need to change her living situation; she’d already removed all the throw rugs.
The doctor eventually accepted this explanation — mostly out of respect for her patient but, perhaps, out of convenience also. In doing so, she missed the extent of her charge’s depression, her dread fear that her family would put her in a nursing home if she admitted to needing any help, and the fact that she’d rehearsed her remarks in order to mask her deep anxiety. She looked fine; she was anything but. An opportunity to avert a disaster had been wasted.
Context: An American CEO learns that a key employee working in one of their company’s overseas offices is sharing outside the organization information he considers proprietary. Though the CEO encourages networking, he’s unaware that the local social circles this employee travels in while building connections that benefit their business sometimes depend on gossipy exchanges to maintain membership and legitimacy.
He moves to terminate the employee as unreliable and inappropriate without realizing how the employee’s growing social capital might be used to the company’s advantage. He doesn’t understand how, under other circumstances and with different incentives, the employee would likely never have shared company information and how he could be coached to be more thoughtful (and strategic) in his conversations.
It’s easy to read these accounts and conclude that the people who misunderstood what was happening to them had low emotional intelligence or were naïve — they were not.
We all want to believe that our judgments about other people are better informed, more accurate than they actually are. It’s human nature.
Gladwell offers no easy solutions to our bias to default to these mindsets — they are deeply engrained and, as he convincingly argues, practically necessary to live in the world and, often, vitally self-protective. That is, IN MOST CASES. But not always, and there’s the rub.
Here’s my advice to my clients in response to their question about they can apply the lessons of Talking to Strangers in their professional and personal lives.
As with so much interpersonal interaction, awareness of how we are thinking and how this might impact our emotions and actions may be the best that we can do when working with people we don’t really know. As a learned behavior, awareness creates just enough space for us to think before we speak and act.
What do I mean by “space”? Greater emotional distance might have led the mentoring executive to see All About Steve with greater objectivity; the doctor to be less persuaded by her client’s reassuring demeanor and more by the objective facts of the situation and to order a social worker evaluation; and the CEO to send someone he trusted to observe directly the situation before firing the indiscreet employee.
Mindfulness training teaches us that personal awareness — which is never simple or easy — can be a powerful companion to cultural norms and personal knowledge in shaping our actions and reactions. Gladwell says as much. He asks us to become hypervigilant in those high stakes situations where we really don’t know the people we need to know and where mistakes in judgment might be very costly.
The book ends too abruptly, and we’re left to consider what to do with his insights. We can start with critical self-awareness and create more opportunities for deeper understanding.
