You lost respect for someone you didn't know because you saw them reading a book you had not read. You judged a book by its cover in both senses of the phrase.
Also...what if someone just wants more friends in their life, because they're lonely, and don't really know how to be more personable? A book on winning people over seems like a really useful book to have, if you want to, you know, develop relationships with people and aren't very good at it yet.
It's the same problem with coding as it is with socializing. I find reading books about things instead of doing ultimately leads to nothing but anxiety and a warped sense of whatever you're exploring. If you stay in those sorts of books too much it will begin to warp your mind. Taken to the extreme you get communities like 4chan r9k and reddits theredpill that try to boil every interaction down into a transaction.
You have to be well equipped mentally and somewhat socially to not let things like this bend your head.
Sure, you gotta go out and do it, but books are great ways to get at least some sense of what you're doing.
Like sales, in a past life I was selling stuff. I did sales for about 9 months before cracking open a sales book. I recognized that I'd learned to do, through blundering around, about 1/5th of what the book was telling me. Reading about that other 4/5ths really opened my eyes. It gave me stuff to think about and work on. It didn't replace experience, but guided it.
Same with a book about making friends, I think, especially for people who didn't make a lot of friends as a kid, but want more in adulthood.
But there are techniques like Rejection Therapy: processes for getting exactly that kind of practice in an efficient manner, that you can fall back on to feel more confident about each interaction (because you only have one goal, and you can meet it early on.)
I also haven't read Carnegie (I really need to get to it), but I would expect it to be full of things like that, rather than being a treatise on abstract evolutionary sociology.
No, it was because he saw them reading a book he thought was about manipulation. I don't think a reasonable person would lose respect for another because they saw them reading the latest best-seller.
Understandable, the title of the book is really misleading. I think because "winning" friends implies some sort of competition and "influence" often has a negative connotation, like unduly influencing someone to do something not in their own interest.
Also...what if someone just wants more friends in their life, because they're lonely, and don't really know how to be more personable? A book on winning people over seems like a really useful book to have, if you want to, you know, develop relationships with people and aren't very good at it yet.