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161 " And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.1 "
― Malcolm Gladwell , Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
162 " Chamberlain was acting on the same assumption that we all follow in our efforts to make sense of strangers. We believe that the information gathered from a personal interaction is uniquely valuable. "
163 " Suicides tend to fall in wartime, for example, and rise in times of economic distress.) "
164 " Second, the consumption gap between men and women, so pronounced a generation ago, has narrowed considerably—particularly among white women. (The same trends aren’t nearly as marked among Asians, Hispanics, or African Americans.) “I think it’s an empowerment issue,” Fromme argues: "
165 " Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them? "
166 " likely to commit a crime while awaiting trial than the 400,000 people released by the judges of New York City. 25 percent! In the bake-off, machine destroyed man.4 "
167 " If we were more thoughtful as a society, if we were willing to engage in some soul searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers Sandra Bland would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell. "
168 " A few years later, she deliberately drove her car into a river—then, in typical fashion, wrote a poem about it: And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. "
169 " We were able to establish guilt,” Giobbi said, “by closely observing the suspect’s psychological and behavioral reaction during the interrogation. We don’t need to rely on other kinds of investigation. "
170 " standard immigrant-entrepreneur story is about the redemptive power of grit and ingenuity. "
171 " Then he released on Cuban television an astonishing eleven-part documentary entitled La Guerra de la CIA contra Cuba—The CIA’s War against Cuba. Cuban intelligence, it turned out, had filmed and recorded everything the CIA had been doing in their country for at least ten years—as if they were creating a reality show. Survivor: Havana Edition. "
172 " Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them. "
173 " They were strangers to each other. If we were more thoughtful as a society—if we were willing to engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers—she would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell. "
174 " 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. "
175 " why are we so bad at detecting lies? "
176 " We do the opposite. We start by believing. "
177 " The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it—and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with one another about just how terrible at it we are. "
178 " Can you blame him? "
179 " We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high. "
180 " Students think it is a good idea to be trained in self-defense, and not such a good idea to clamp down on drinking. But what good is knowing the techniques of self-defense if you’re blind drunk? Students think it’s a really good idea if men respect women more. But the issue is not how men behave around women when they are sober. It is how they behave around women when they are drunk, and have been transformed by alcohol into a person who makes sense of the world around them very differently. "