Imagine yourself in the shoes of a judge who needs to decide whether to release a suspect on bail. You are offered to either simply familiarize yourself with the dry facts of the suspect’s biography, or meet and talk with him personally, look him in the eyes and see his reaction. Many of us will choose the second option because we often find information received in person to be incredibly valuable. But this, according to Malcolm Gladwell, is the reason for fatal mistakes, personal tragedies, wrong court decisions and even global disasters. A spy who worked for many years in the Pentagon, transmitting data to Cuban intelligence. Politicians who failed to recognize Hitler's double game led the world to disaster. Cops shooting innocent people simply because their reactions seem suspicious. Parents who cannot recognize a rapist in a sports doctor who is molesting their children. The author analyzes all these stories and comes to shocking conclusions. It turns out that we are not able to recognize a liar, even when we communicate with him for a long time. And all our usual ideas about the suspicious behavior of people, their facial expressions, gestures, intonations turn out to be completely wrong. Malcolm Gladwell invites us to go on an intellectual adventure through the dark side of human nature. You will see that our perceptions of strangers almost always do not coincide with reality, and misperceptions of their behavior can have disastrous consequences.