Introduction: "Step out of the car!" -- Part one: Spies and diplomats: two puzzles. Fidel Castor's revenge ; Getting to know der Führer -- Part two: Default to truth. The queen of Cuba ; The holy fool ; Case study: The boy in the shower -- Part three: Transparency. The Friends fallacy ; A (short) explanation of the Amanda Knox case ; Case study: The fraternity party -- Part four: Lessons. KSM: what happens when the stranger is a terrorist? -- Part five: Coupling. Sylvia Plath ; Case study: The Kansas City experiments ; Sandra Bland

In this thoughtful treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African-American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, New Yorker writer Gladwell (The Tipping Point) aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers-to "analyze, critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them," in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. He uses a variety of examples from history and recent headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don't know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence