Page 180 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Watch out for the smooth-talking black guy. White people who don’t smile are up to no good. No!
That doesn’t work either, because of the enormous variability Johnson uncovered.
Take a look, for example, at the range of responses that make up those averages. Eye contact for
innocent African Americans ranged from 7 seconds to 49.41 seconds. There are innocent black
people who almost never make eye contact, and innocent black people who make lots of eye
contact. The range for smiling for innocent black people is 0 to 13.34. There are innocent black
people who smile a lot—13.34 times per minute. But there are also innocent black people who
never smile. The “speech disturbances” range for innocent Caucasians is .64 to 9.68. There are
white people who hem and haw like nervous teenagers, and white people who speak like Winston
Churchill. The only real lesson is that people are all over the map when it comes to when and how
much they smile, or look you in the eye, or how fluidly they talk. And to try to find any kind of
pattern in that behavior is impossible.
Wait! I forgot one of the Reid Technique’s big clues: watch the hands!
During a response, a subject’s hands can do one of three things. They can remain uninvolved and
unmoving, which can be a sign that the subject lacks confidence in his verbal response or is simply
not talking about something perceived as very significant. The hands can move away from the body
and gesture, which is called illustrating. Finally, the hands can come in contact with some part of the
body, which is referred to as adaptor behavior. (Reid et al., p. 96).

What follows is an explanation of how hand movements do and don’t contribute to our
understanding of truthfulness. The Reid Technique assumes there is a pattern to hand movement.
Really? Here are Johnson’s hand-movement data. This time I’ve included the range of responses—
the shortest recorded response in the second column and the longest in the third column. Take a
look:

Hand gestures per minute

Average time (in Shortest time (in Longest time (in
seconds) seconds) seconds)

African 28.39 00.00 58.46
American/innocent

African 23.98 00.00 56.00
American/suspect

Caucasian/innocent 07.89 00.00 58.00

Caucasian/suspect 17.43 31.00 56.00

Hispanic/innocent 22.14 23.00 57.00

Hispanic/suspect 31.41 13.43 53.33

Entire sample 23.68 00.00 58.46

If you can make sense of those numbers, you’re smarter than I am.
By the way, the weirdest of all Reid obsessions is this: “Changes in [foot] bouncing behavior—
whether it be a sudden start or stop—that occur in conjunction with a verbal response can be a
significant indication of deception.…The feet are also involved in significant posture changes called
‘shifts in the chair.’ With this behavior, the subject plants his feet and literally pushes his body up,
slightly off the chair to assume a new posture. Gross shifts in the chair of this nature are good
indications of deception when they immediately precede or occur in conjunction with a subject’s