Page 181 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

verbal response” (Reid et al., Essentials of the Reid Technique, p. 98).
What? I happen to be someone who is constantly, nervously jiggling his foot. I do it when I’m
excited, or when I’m on a roll, or when I’m a little jumpy after too much coffee. What on earth does
this have to do with whether or not I’m telling the truth?
One more shot at the Reid Technique. Let me just quote from Brian Gallini’s devastating law-
review article, “Police ‘Science’ in the Interrogation Room: Seventy Years of Pseudo-Psychological
Interrogation Methods to Obtain Inadmissible Confessions,” Hastings Law Journal 61 (2010): 529.
The passage is a description of a study done by Saul Kassin and Christina Fong: “‘I’m Innocent!’:
Effects of Training on Judgments of Truth and Deception in the Interrogation Room,” Law and
Human Behavior 23, no. 5 (October 1999): 499–516.
More substantively, Professors Kassin and Fong videotaped one group of participants interrogated
pursuant to the Reid method to determine whether they committed a mock crime. A second group of
participants, some of whom were trained in the Reid method, watched the videos and opined on (1)
the guilt or innocence of each subject, and (2) their confidence in their assessment of guilt or
innocence. The results were as predictable as they were disturbing: First, judgment accuracy rates
were comparable to chance. Second, “training in the use of verbal and nonverbal cues did not
improve judgment accuracy.” In an effort to explain why training did nothing to improve judgment
accuracy, the authors stated pointedly, “There is no solid empirical basis for the proposition that
these same cues reliably discriminate between criminals and innocent persons accused of crimes
they did not commit.”
Finally, the authors reported, participants were overconfident in their assessment of guilt or
innocence. In the authors’ words:
[W]e found among both trained and naive participants that judgment accuracy and confidence
were not significantly correlated, regardless of whether the measure of confidence was taken
before, after, or during the task. Further demonstrating the meta-cognitive problems in this
domain is that confidence ratings were positively correlated with the number of reasons
(including Reid-based reasons) articulated as a basis for judgments, another dependent measure
not predictive of accuracy. Training had a particularly adverse effect in this regard. Specifically,
those who were trained compared to those in the naive condition were less accurate in their
judgments of truth and deception. Yet they were more self-confident and more articulate about
the reasons for their often erroneous judgments.
“I apologize…these last couple of weeks…”: “Sandy Speaks—March 1, 2015,” YouTube, posted
July 24, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJw3_cvrcwE, accessed March 22, 2019.
DOJ report on Ferguson, Missouri: United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division,
“Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” March 4, 2015,
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-
releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.
African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to traffic stops (in footnote):
Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel, How Police Stops Define
Race and Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
North Carolina State Highway Patrol statistics: “Open Data Policing: North Carolina,” accessed
March 2019, https://opendatapolicing.com/nc/, accessed March 2019.
FM 1098 is not “a high-crime, high-drug area”: This crime map reflects Waller County data from
2013 to 2017 collected by Baltimore-based crime data aggregator SpotCrime, which sources data
from local police departments.