“Talking to Strangers” book on Goodreads

I picked this book up randomly in a Canadian bookstore thinking it was about the act of starting to interact with random strangers on the street or how to maintain conversations with people you barely know. The book isn't literally about that, but by the time my wife made her way back to me I was already hooked and I bought the book.

In my own words, and as far as my understanding goes, the book focuses on three main topics, namely

1. the principle of defaulting to truth, which is a principle by which most humans operate and in which we assume that others are truthful by default;
2. the principle of transparency, which is a principle by which we assume that one's body language is transparent with respect to what that person is feeling; and
3. the principle of coupling, which is a principle by which some behaviours are tightly coupled to some places, and if you were to remove access to that place, the same person would not pursue the same behaviour elsewhere.

I enjoyed learning a bit more about human psychology and I found that most of the stories and examples shared of these principles in action, or of the rare counter-examples, were quite powerful... In the sense that they illustrate how things can go terribly wrong when we don't take into account the limitations we have when interacting with people we don't know.