Talking to strangers

Talking to strangers: what we should know about the people we don't know / Malcolm Gladwell, read by the author and a cast of others, 386 pgs.

You meet someone who is quite different from yourself.  Maybe from a different culture, maybe a different age group or ethnicity.  What could go wrong with your communications?  Plenty!  In this book, Gladwell looks into the psychology behind how we evaluate strangers, how we communicate with them and what we think we know about them.  The problem is that study after study says we are mostly wrong about what we think we know.  But not just you and I.  Police officers, judges, spy bosses, planners, even psychologist.  There are enough examples here to make you rethink a lot of your own attitudes.  If the CIA can't find double agents and they have people there whose SOLE JOB is to find double agents, what chance to the rest of us have?  There is a lot here that could/should disturb you.  The audio version is fantastic...using, whenever possible, the real voices of people Gladwell writes about.