Getting People Wrong

Back in 2022 I wrote a post reflecting on Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know Abou the People We Don’t Know. You can read that post here.

Gladwell’s basic point is that we’re bad at talking to strangers. That is, encounters with people we don’t know have a tendency to go very badly. According to Gladwell’s analysis, that is because; 1) we default to truth, that is we assume other people are being honest with us. When they are, great. But when they’re not, not so great; 2) we buy into the illusion of transparency. We think a person’s body language is a clear indicator of intention or motive. When it is, we’re usually right. But when people are what Gladwell calls “mismatched,” even law enforcement professionals are terrible judges; and 3) we neglect context. We pay attention to the person but don’t account for time, place, or situation.

Surprisingly, a reason Gladwell does not cite in his book for why encounters with strangers can go terribly wrong is our existing, often unexamined prejudices.

We all assume certain things are likely to be true about certain other people based on various experiences and inputs. If every homeless person I see portrayed on television is a drunk or drug addict, I am likely to assume every homeless person I encounter in real life is as well. If I grow up hearing from authorities in my life that people of another race or religion are somehow “less than,” I will assume that to be true of all people in those categories.

We grow up believing certain things to be true of certain other people and more than that we assume we have good reason for our beliefs.

But just as we can be very wrong because we default to truth, assume we can read people based on their body language, or fail to consider context, we can be very wrong because of our preconceived assumptions about people who fall into certain categories or groups.

For example, there is a story in Genesis 20-21 involving Abraham, the patriarch of the nation of Israel, and a man named Abimelech. Abraham moved with his wife Sarah to the region of Gerar where Abimelech was king. Fearing that Abimelech would kill him to take possession of Sarah, Abraham introduced Sarah as his sister. Abimelech quickly took Sarah into his home to be his wife but before sleeping with her God appeared to him in a dream condemning him for what he did.

Abimelech was shocked. He had acted innocently. It was Abraham, the patriarch of God’s people, who had been deceptive.

When Abimelech confronted Abraham, Abraham’s excuse was, “I thought, ‘this is a godless place. They will want my wife and will kill me to get her.’”

“I thought, ‘this is a godless place.’”

Abraham just assumed that Abimelech and his people were godless and, as such, that they would take his wife by violence. But he was wrong. True, Abimelech did not know Yahweh, the God of Israel, but that did not mean Abimelech lacked a God-inspired conscience and a moral code. But that’s what Abraham assumed about him.

And because Abraham assumed Abimelech would treat him in an ungodly way, it was actually Abraham who treated Abimelech in an ungodly way. To protect himself against a presumed threat Abraham became the threat.

I understand anyone choosing to exercise caution around people they don’t know, especially when taking into account certain contexts. And there are good reasons for why our brains group people into categories. Those are shortcuts called heuristics that help us cut through the endless data input our brains receive each day so we can make decisions without melting down from exhaustion.

But those same heuristics can become biases or prejudices that contribute to us getting people wrong. And when we assume wrongly about another person, we tend to be the ones who act wrongly toward them. As I’ve said and written about many times, the beginning of love is to think the best of the other first. Let other people demonstrate to you who they are before you decide who they must be.