Talking to Strangers

Why We Misunderstand People We Do Not Know

In July 2015, a young African American woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over by a police officer, Brian Encinia, in a small Texas town for failing to signal a lane change. What began as a routine and courteous interaction escalated rapidly when Encinia asked Bland to put out her cigarette. The confrontation turned hostile, resulting in Bland being forcibly removed from her car at gunpoint and arrested. Three days later, she committed suicide in her jail cell. This tragedy occurred during a period of intense national debate over police violence, yet the public discourse often missed the deeper mechanical failure at play. The core issue was the fundamental difficulty human beings face when trying to interpret the intentions of people they do not know.

The difficulty of these encounters is a relatively modern problem in human history. For most of human existence, conflict and cooperation occurred between neighbors who shared the same language, faith, and social rules. A turning point in this history occurred in 1519 when the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés met the Aztec ruler Montezuma II. They were complete strangers from different worlds who relied on a complex chain of translators to communicate. When Montezuma spoke in a traditional and humble royal code to assert his power, the Spanish misinterpreted his words as a total surrender. This failure to translate both language and cultural context ultimately led to the collapse of an entire empire.

Malcolm Gladwell suggests that we are now living in a world defined by these types of interactions between complete strangers. We constantly encounter people whose backgrounds and perspectives are vastly different from our own. Despite this reality, we rely on flawed strategies to make sense of the people we meet. Whether it is a high-stakes police stop, a courtroom trial, or a spy operating undetected within the government, we often use a set of tools for understanding others that are prone to catastrophic error.

The case of Sandra Bland serves as a haunting reminder of what happens when these interpretative tools fail. Bland and Encinia were strangers divided by geography, race, gender, and power dynamics. Their inability to accurately read one another’s intentions led to a senseless death. By examining the specific ways we misread strangers, we can begin to understand why our modern encounters so often go wrong. This understanding is the first step toward figuring out what might be done to fix these broken interactions.