This blog is inspired from Malcolm Gladwel's book Talking to Strangers.
Sometimes the best conversation with a stranger also allows you to remain strangers.
Alcohol makes you myopic. You can just think of immediate consequences and cannot focus on long-term consequences. Earlier theories had suggested that alcohol has dis-inhibition effect.
We will never know the whole truth. But something short of it. We need to use caution and humility.
How alcohol works
Step 1: Dampens attention, motivation, planning, and learning. Myopia.
It makes us a little dumber and less capable of handling complicated and competing situations.
Hits the reward centers. Gives jolt to the centres for euphoria.
Tones down amygdala... The part which tells us how to react to the situations... What kind of situation are we in?
Step 2: Hippocampus gets effected. It is responsible for forming memories of our lives. When hippocampus is effected, we can't recall what happened.
Where norms and standards are clear and obvious, the drinker can become more rule-bound than his sober counterpart. This is because they don't rationalize.
“illusion of asymmetric insight.”:
We know others better than they know us - and that we may have insight about them which they lack... But not vice versa. Try to listen.
We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who are telling the truth. But we’re much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying.
Truth-default mode:
We start with a truth-defailt mode. We consider that the other person is lying ONLY if the case is definitive. We need a trigger to go out of the truth-defailt mode.
You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.
If a reaction makes no sense, you act on it. Try to understand why the reaction makes no sense.
Being trusting.ames sense because most people have to speak truth. Being suspicious once in a while also makes sense. But being oversuspicious, you may never be able to form social interaction.
doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.
Transparency:
We think that all the emotions are on the face and physical movement, for us to judge the soul of a person.
We have developed this idea by reading novels and watching TV. But this is not true always.
When we see a stranger, we usually match their expression with a stereotype. But people do not always fit that stereotype.
Coupling actions with context:
Both Crime as well as suicide were found to be concentrated to specific contexts. More than 50% crime in about 3% street... And more suicides due to easy availability of a source of suicide.
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