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121 " If crime is concentrated on a few percent of the city streets,” Weisburd asked, “why the hell are you wasting resources everywhere? If it’s coupled to those places and doesn’t move easily, even more so.” The coupling theorists believed they had solved the problem that had so confounded the earlier days of preventive patrol. How do you effectively patrol a vast urban area with a few hundred police officers? Not by hiring more police officers, or by turning the entire city into a surveillance state. You do it by zeroing in on those few specific places where all the crime is. "
― Malcolm Gladwell , Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
122 " To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a “trigger.” A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away. "
123 " There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands. "
124 " We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy. "
125 " Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation. Each of the chapters that follows "
126 " To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. "
127 " I believed in you always until I couldn't anymore. "
128 " When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes. "
129 " We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. "
130 " Não nos comportamos , em outras palavras, como cientistas de mentalidade fria, lentamente coletando indícios de verdades ou falsidade de algo antes de chegarem a uma conclusão. Fazemos o contrário. Começamos acreditando. E paramos de acreditar somente quando nossos receios e dúvidas chegam ao ponto em que não podemos mais dissipá-los. "
131 " FACS, which stands for Facial Action Coding System. "
132 " human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behaviors of those around you. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. As "
133 " The unobservables create noise, not signal. "
134 " When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. "
135 " I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default to truth? "
136 " People have too much faith in large organizations,” he said. “They trust the accounting firms, which you should never trust because they’re incompetent. On a best day they’re incompetent, on a bad day they’re crooked, and aiding and abetting the fraud, looking the other way. "
137 " The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human. "
138 " Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world. "
139 " Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. They think of it as an agent of myopia. 5. The myopia theory was first suggested by psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs, and what they meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates, in their words, “a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.” Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away. "
140 " Chamberlain would later "