Page 62 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

appointment? He said he hadn’t.
And…God forgive me, I dropped it. I filed it back in the parenting filing cabinet until 2016.
After a while, the stories all start to sound the same. Here’s another parent:

And she’s sitting in the car very quiet and depressed and saying, “Dad, he’s not helping my back
pain. Let’s not go anymore.” But this is Larry. This is the gymnastics doctor. If he can’t cure her,
nobody will cure her. Only God has more skills than Larry. “Be patient, honey. It’s gonna take
time. Good things take time.” That’s what we always taught our kids. So, I would say, “OK.
We’re gonna go again next week. We’re gonna go again the following week. And then you will
start seeing the progress.”
She said, “OK, Dad. You know. I trust your judgment.”
The fact that Nassar was doing something monstrous is exactly what makes the parents’ position
so difficult. If Nassar had been rude to their daughters, they would have spoken up immediately. If
their daughters had said to them on the way home that they had smelled liquor on Nassar’s breath,
most parents would have leapt to attention. It is not impossible to imagine that doctors are
occasionally rude or drunk. Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose
between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine. Is
Ana Montes the most highly placed Cuban spy in history, or was Reg Brown just being paranoid?
Default to truth biases us in favor of the most likely interpretation. Scott Carmichael believed Ana
Montes, right up to the point where believing her became absolutely impossible. The parents did the
same thing, not because they were negligent but because this is how most human beings are wired.
Many of the women he had abused, in fact, defended Nassar. They couldn’t see past default to
truth either. Trinea Gonczar was treated 856 times by Nassar during her gymnastics career. When
one of her teammates came to Gonczar and said that Nassar had put his fingers inside her, Gonczar
tried to reassure her: “He does that to me all the time!”

When the Indianapolis Star broke the Nassar story, Gonczar stood by him. She was convinced he
would be exonerated. It was all a big mix-up. When did she finally change her mind? Only when the
evidence against Nassar became overwhelming. At Nassar’s trial, when Gonczar joined the chorus
of his victims in testifying against him, she finally gave in to her doubts:
I had to make an extremely hard choice this week, Larry. I had to choose whether [to] continue
supporting you through this or to support them: the girls. I choose them, Larry. I choose to love
them and protect them. I choose to stop caring for you and supporting you. I choose to look you
in the face and tell you that you hurt us, you hurt me…I hope you will see it from me in my eyes
today that I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. I hope you cry like we cry. I hope
you feel bad for what you’ve done. I hope more than anything, each day these girls can feel less
pain. I hope you want that for us, but this is goodbye to you, Larry, and this time it’s time for me
to close the door. It’s time for me to stand up for these little girls and not stand behind you
anymore, Larry.
Goodbye, Larry. May God bless your dark, broken soul.
I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default
to truth?
Default to truth operates even in a case where the perpetrator had 37,000 child-porn images on
his hard drive, and where he had been accused countless times, by numerous people, over the course
of his career. The Nassar case was open-and-shut—and still there were doubts. Now imagine the
same scenario, only in a case that isn’t open-and-shut. That’s the Sandusky case.

5.

After the accusations against Sandusky were made public, one of his staunchest defenders was a
former Second Mile participant named Allan Myers. When the Pennsylvania police were
interviewing former Second Mile kids in an attempt to corroborate the allegations against Sandusky,
they contacted Myers, and he was adamant. “Myers said that he does not believe the allegations that