In this treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, the author 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. The author uses a variety of examples from history and from headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don't know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence
