Why we are so terrible about knowing strangers？Because we intend to take strangers at face value; we are incline to believe whatever strangers appears is true; and we assume strangers are transparent to us.
“Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor — the way they represent themselves on the outside — provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor”*
The study about transparency can be tacked back to 1872, 13 years before the Evolution theory published, Charles Darwin had written his observations in an article, ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.’
“Smiling and frowning and wrinkling our noses in disgust, he argued, were things that every human being did as a part of evolutionary adaptation. Accurately and quickly communicating our emotions to on another was of such crucial importance to the survival of the human species, he argued, that the face had developed into a kind of billboard for the heart.”*
And after having reviewed some real cases, Malcolm Gladwell summarize the insight about interaction with strangers from an psychologist as follows:
“The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humanity…”*
We are very bad at detecting lies. “Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn’t.”*
“We have a default to truth: our operation assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.”
“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.” That is the reason why when we found cheated we would regret that we should have known, in retrospect, all those red flags that had been totally ignored.
There is also a very good reason why human being would intend to assume people honest, they are what they appear.
“…over the course of evolution, 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…the trade-off between truth-default and the risk of deception is…a great deal for us. What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. Sure, we get deceived in a while. That is just the cost of doing business.”*
To cheat or to be cheated is a fact of our lives. “To augment the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative — to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception — is worse.”
In 2015, there was a survey about the degree of trust between people conducted among mainland Chinese. 100% of the participants trust their family members, 86.5% trust their friends, 80.1% trust their neighbors, and only 5.6% trust strangers. **
There was a similar survey done in Taiwan in 2019. 95.8% of the participants trust their family members, 91.6% trust their doctors, 73.3% trust their neighbors, 68.3% trust other people in society (proxy to strangers); however Taiwanese has relatively low trust on judges, governors and reporters.***
We might be deceived and suffer by taking strangers at face value but we all are better due to the default trust. The cost of life would be least if we trust strangers with lowest caution. From Darwin’s evolution theory, it’s purely about a cost effective trade-off. As to Chinese who had developed a very low trust level on strangers, just wondering whether it is related to the magic transformation by the Culture Revolution.
There is a Chinese saying, once one is scared by a snake, would be scared by a snake-like paper rope for the next 10 years. Chinese might be able to catch up the level of trust to strangers, unless they had become a different human species which according to Darwin’ evolution theory that needs longer period of time and seems unlikely.
Taiwanese has always been so friendly to strangers. It won’t be changed easily and shortly, either.
Likewise, you love someone not because you don’t have any doubt about them but because you don’t have enough proof of doubts to triple the balance of belief. About love. That’s all. It’s all about trust.
*：“Talking to Strangers, what we should know about the people we don’t know,” by Malcolm Gladwell
**：〈當前中國社會信任度調查：陌生人信任度僅5.6%〉, kknews.cc 網站
***：〈「2019臺灣社會信任」調查結果出爐〉，遠見研究調查
2021/6/29 Talking to Strangers Damakey
