Page 77 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

This is the explanation for the second of the puzzles, in Chapter Two, about why computers do a
much better job than judges at making bail decisions. The computer can’t see the defendant. Judges
can, and it seems logical that that extra bit of information ought to make them better decision-
makers. Solomon, the New York State judge, could search the face of the person standing in front of
him for evidence of mental illness—a glassy-eyed look, a troubled affect, aversion of the eyes. The
defendant stands no farther than ten feet in front of him and Solomon has the chance to get a sense
of the person he is evaluating. But all that extra information isn’t actually useful. Surprised people
don’t necessarily look surprised. People who have emotional problems don’t always look like they
have emotional problems.
Some years ago there was a famous case in Texas in which a young man named Patrick Dale
Walker put a gun to his ex-girlfriend’s head—only to have the gun jam as he pulled the trigger. The
judge in his case set bail at $1 million, then lowered it to $25,000 after Walker had spent four days
in jail, on the grounds that this was long enough for him to “cool off.” Walker, the judge explained
later, had nothing on his record, “not even a traffic ticket.” He was polite: “He was a real low-key,
mild-mannered young man. The kid, from what I understand, is a real smart kid. He was
valedictorian of his class. He graduated from college. This was supposedly his first girlfriend.” Most
important, according to the judge, Walker showed remorse.
The judge thought Walker was transparent. But what does “showed remorse” mean? Did he put
on a sad face, cast his eyes down, and lower his head, the way he had seen people show remorse on
a thousand television shows? And why do we think that if someone puts on a sad face, casts their
eyes down, and lowers their head, then some kind of sea change has taken place in their heart? Life
is not Friends. Seeing Walker didn’t help the judge. It hurt him. It allowed him to explain away the
simple fact that Walker had put a gun to his girlfriend’s head and failed to kill her only because the
gun misfired. Four months later, while out on bail, Walker shot his girlfriend to death.
Team Mullainathan writes,
Whatever these unobserved variables are that cause judges to deviate from the predictions—
whether internal states, such as mood, or specific features of the case that are salient and over-
weighted, such as the defendant’s appearance—they are not a source of private information so
much as a source of mis-prediction. The unobservables create noise, not signal.
Translation: The advantage that the judge has over the computer isn’t actually an advantage.
Should we take the Mullainathan study to its logical conclusion? Should we hide the defendant
from the judge? Maybe when a woman shows up in a courtroom wearing a niqab, the correct
response isn’t to dismiss her case—it’s to require that everyone wear a veil. For that matter, it is also
worth asking whether you should meet the babysitter in person before you hire her, or whether your
employer did the right thing in scheduling a face-to-face interview before making you a job offer.
But of course we can’t turn our backs on the personal encounter, can we? The world doesn’t
work if every meaningful transaction is rendered anonymous. I asked Judge Solomon that very
question, and his answer is worth considering.
MG: What if you didn’t see the defendant? Would it make any difference?
Solomon: Would I prefer that?
MG: Would you prefer that?

Solomon: There’s a part of my brain that says I would prefer that, because then the hard
decisions to put somebody in jail would feel less hard. But that’s not right.…You have a
human being being taken into custody by the state, and the state has to justify why it’s taking
liberty away from a human, right? But now I’ll think of them as a widget.
The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our
strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need
the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But
the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is
the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it—and, as we’ll
see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with one another about just how terrible at it
we are.