Page 42 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Just look at the full statistics from the Milgram experiment:

I fully believed the learner was getting painful shocks. 56.1
percent

Although I had some doubts, I believed the learner was probably getting the 24
shocks. percent

I just wasn’t sure whether the learner was getting the shocks or not. 6.1 percent

Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was probably not getting the 11.4
shocks. percent

I was certain the learner was not getting the shocks. 2.4 percent

Over 40 percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd—something that suggested the
experiment was not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren’t enough to trigger them out of
truth-default. That is Levine’s point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about
them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough
doubts about them.
I’m going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I
think it’s crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight,
for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had
doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is:
were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by
defaulting to truth you were only being human.

5.

Ana Belen Montes grew up in the affluent suburbs of Baltimore. Her father was a psychiatrist. She
attended the University of Virginia, then received a master’s degree in foreign affairs from Johns
Hopkins University. She was a passionate supporter of the Marxist Sandinista government in
Nicaragua, which the U.S. government was then working to overthrow, and her activism attracted
the attention of a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In 1985 she made a secret visit to Havana. “Her
handlers, with her unwitting assistance, assessed her vulnerabilities and exploited her psychological
needs, ideology, and personal pathology to recruit her and keep her motivated to work for Havana,”
the CIA concluded in a postmortem to her career. Her new compatriots encouraged her to apply for
work in the U.S. intelligence community. That same year, she joined the DIA—and from there her
ascent was swift.
Montes arrived at her office first thing in the morning, ate lunch at her desk, and kept to herself.
She lived alone in a two-bedroom condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. She
never married. In the course of his investigation, Scott Carmichael—the DIA counterintelligence
officer—collected every adjective used by Montes’s coworkers to describe her. It is an impressive
list: shy, quiet, aloof, cool, independent, self-reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated,
focused, hardworking, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming,
confident, businesslike, no-nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and
competent.
Ana Montes assumed that the reason for her meeting with Carmichael was that he was
performing a routine security check. All intelligence officers are periodically vetted so that they can
continue to hold a security clearance. She was brusque.
“When she first came in she tried to blow me off by telling me—and it was true—she had just
been named as the Acting Division Chief,” Carmichael remembered. “She had a ton of
responsibilities, meetings and things to do, and she just didn’t have a lot of time.” Carmichael is a