Page 81 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Interviewer: Okay.
The moment Levine asks the question “Did any cheating occur?” Sally’s arms and face begin to
turn a bright red. Calling it an embarrassed blush doesn’t quite do it justice. Sally gives a whole new
meaning to the expression “caught red-handed.” Then comes the critical question: What will your
partner say? Blushing Sally can’t even come up with a convincing “She’ll agree with me.” She
hems and haws and says, weakly, “Probably…the same answer.” Probably? Blushing Sally is lying,
and everyone called in to judge the tape realizes she’s lying.
Here’s the next tape Levine showed me. It’s of a woman who spent the entire interview
obsessively playing with her hair. Let’s call her Nervous Nelly.
Interviewer: Now, Rachel had to get called out of the room. Did any cheating occur when she
was gone?
Nervous Nelly: Actually my partner did want to look at the scores, and I said no—was like, “I
want to see how many we got right”—because I don’t cheat. I think it’s wrong, so I didn’t. I
told her no. I was like, “I don’t want to do that.” But she did say, “Well, we’ll just look at
one.” I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” I don’t know if that was part of it or not, but
no, we didn’t do that.
Interviewer: OK, so are you telling me the truth about the cheating?
Nervous Nelly: Yeah, we didn’t—she wanted…my partner honestly said, “We’ll just look at
one.” I was like, “No, that’s not cool, I don’t want to do that.” The only thing I said was, “I’m
surprised they left all the money in here.” I honestly don’t steal or cheat, I’m a good person
like that. I was just kind of surprised, because normally when people leave money behind, you
are going to take it—that’s just what everybody does. But no, we didn’t cheat. We didn’t steal
anything.
The twirling of the hair never stops. Nor do the halting, overly defensive, repetitive explanations,
nor the fidgeting and the low-level agitation.
Interviewer: OK, so when I call in your partner for an interview, what is she going to say to that
question?
Nervous Nelly: I think she’ll say that she wanted to look.
Interviewer: OK.

Nervous Nelly: If she says otherwise, then that’s not cool at all, because I said, “No, I don’t want
to cheat at all.” She just said, “Why not just look at one?” She said, “Well, the answers are
right there,” and I was like, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not who I am. It’s not what I
do.”
I was convinced Nervous Nelly was lying. You would conclude the same, if you saw her in
action. Everybody thought Nervous Nelly was lying. But she wasn’t! When her partner reported
back to Levine, he confirmed everything Nervous Nelly said.
Levine found this pattern again and again. In one experiment, for instance, there was a group of
interviewees whom 80 percent of the judges got wrong. And another group whom more than 80
percent got right.
So what’s the explanation? Levine argues that this is the assumption of transparency in action.
We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a
firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering,
uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes
toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight
countries around the world, 63 percent of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was
“gaze aversion.” We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their
internal states with squirming and darting eyes.
This is—to put it mildly—nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our
stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he
finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of
truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look. Blushing Sally matches. She acts like