Page 179 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Suspicious Non-Verbal Cues,” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and
Management 30, no. 2 [June 2007]: 277–90.)
Johnson went back and looked at old episodes of the half-hour television documentary Cops. You
may remember this show: it began in 1989 and still airs today, making it one of the longest-running
programs on American television. A camera crew rides along with a police officer and films—
cinema verité–style, without narration—whatever happens on that particular shift. (It’s strangely
riveting, although it’s easy to forget that what you see on a typical Cops show is heavily edited;
police officers simply aren’t that busy.) Johnson watched 480 old episodes of Cops. He was looking
for interactions between a police officer and a citizen in which the citizen was on camera, from the
waist up, for at least sixty seconds. He found 452 segments like that. Then he divided the segments
into “innocent” and “suspect,” based on the information provided in the show. Was this the mother,
child in arms, whose home had just been burglarized? Or was this the teenager who ran the instant
he saw the police, and was found with the woman’s jewelry in his backpack? Then he subdivided
his collection of clips one more time by race—white, black, and Hispanic.
It should be pointed out that there is a small mountain of research on so-called demeanor cues. But
Johnson’s study is special because it was not done in a college psychology lab. It’s real life.
Let’s start with what many police officers believe to be the most important demeanor cue—eye
contact. The Reid Technique’s training manual—the most widely used guide for law enforcement—
is clear on this: People who are lying look away. Truthful suspects maintain eye contact.
So what does Johnson find when he examines this idea in the light of real-world interactions on
Cops? Are the innocent more likely to look an officer in the eye than the guilty?
Johnson calculated the total number of seconds of eye contact per minute of footage.
Black people who are perfectly innocent are actually less likely to look police in the eye than black
people who are suspected of a crime. Now let’s look at white people:

The first thing to note here is that Caucasians on Cops, as a group, look police officers in the eye far
more than black people do. In fact, whites suspected of a crime spend the most time, of all four
groups, looking the police officer in the eye. If you use gaze aversion as a cue to interpret someone’s
credibility, you’re going to be a lot more suspicious of black people than white people. Far worse,
you’re going to be most suspicious of all of perfectly innocent African Americans.
OK. Let’s look at facial expressions. The Reid Technique teaches police officers that facial
expressions can provide meaningful clues to a suspect’s inner state. Have I been found out? Am I
about to be found out? As the manual states:
“The mere fact of variation of expressions may be suggestive of untruthfulness, where the lack of
such a variation may be suggestive of truthfulness” (Reid et al., Essentials of the Reid Technique, p.
99).
This is a version of the common idea that when someone is guilty or being evasive, they smile a lot.
Surveys of police officers show that people in law enforcement are very attuned to “frequent
smiling” as a sign that something is awry. To use the language of poker, it’s considered a “tell.”
Here is Johnson’s Cops analysis of smiling. This time I’ve included Johnson’s data on Hispanics as
well.
Once again, the rule of thumb relied upon by many police officers has it exactly backward. The
people who smile the most are innocent African Americans. The people who smile the least are
Hispanic suspects. The only reasonable conclusion from that chart is that black people, when they
are on Cops, smile a lot, white people smile a little bit less, and Hispanic people don’t smile much at
all.
Let’s do one more: halting speech. If someone is trying to explain themselves, and they keep
nervously stopping and starting, we take that as a sign of evasion or deception. Right? So what does
the Cops data say?
The African American suspects speak fluidly. The innocent Hispanics are hemming and hawing
nervously. If you do what the Reid manual says, you’ll lock up innocent Hispanics and be fooled by
guilty African Americans.
Does this mean we simply need a better, more specific set of interpretation rules for police officers?