Page 80 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

The amplified DNA product in sample B was also subjected to capillary gel electrophoresis. The
electrophoretic graph showed peaks that were below the reporting threshold and allele imbalance
at most loci. I counted only 6 alleles that were above the reporting threshold. The electrophoretic
graph showed a partial DNA profile that was claimed to match Meredith Kercher. Consequently,
sample B was borderline for interpretation.
But instead, let me give you the simplest and shortest of all possible Amanda Knox theories. Her
case is about transparency. If you believe that the way a stranger looks and acts is a reliable clue to
the way they feel—if you buy into the Friends fallacy—then you’re going to make mistakes.
Amanda Knox was one of those mistakes.

2.

Let’s return, for a moment, to the theories of Tim Levine that I talked about in Chapter Three.
Levine, as you will recall, set up a sting operation for college students. He gave them a trivia test to
do. In the middle of it the instructor left the room, leaving the answers on her desk. Afterward,
Levine interviewed the students and asked them point-blank whether they had cheated. Some lied.
Some told the truth. Then he showed videos of those interviews to people and asked them if they
could spot the students who were lying.
Social scientists have done versions of this kind of experiment for years. You have a “sender”—a
subject—and a “judge,” and you measure how accurate the judge is at spotting the sender’s lies.
What Levine discovered is what psychologists always find in these cases, which is that most of us
aren’t very good at lie detection. On average, judges correctly identify liars 54 percent of the time—
just slightly better than chance. This is true no matter who does the judging. Students are terrible.
FBI agents are terrible. CIA officers are terrible. Lawyers are terrible. There may be a handful of
“super-detectors” who beat the odds. But if there are, they are rare. Why?
The first answer is the one we talked about in Chapter Three. We’re truth-biased. For what turn
out to be good reasons, we give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that the people we’re
talking to are being honest. But Levine wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. The problem is
clearly deeper than truth-default. In particular, he was struck by the finding that lies are most often
detected only after the fact—weeks, months, sometimes years later.
For example, when Scott Carmichael said to Ana Montes during their first meeting, “Look, Ana.
I have reason to suspect that you might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation,”
she just sat there looking at him like a deer in the headlights. In retrospect, Carmichael believed that
was a red flag. If she had been innocent, she would have said something—cried out, protested. But
Montes? She “didn’t do a freaking thing except sit there.”
In the moment, however, Carmichael missed that clue. Montes was uncovered only by chance,
four years later. What Levine found is that we nearly always miss the crucial clues in the moment—
and it puzzled him. Why? What happens at the moment someone tells a lie that specifically derails
us? To find an answer, Levine went back to his tapes.
Here is a snippet of another of the videos Levine showed me. It’s of a young woman—let’s call
her Sally. Levine walked her through the straightforward questions without incident. Then came the
crucial moment:
Interviewer: Now, did any cheating occur when Rachel left the room?
Sally: No.
Interviewer: Are you telling me the truth?
Sally: Yeah.

Interviewer: When I interview your partner, I’m going to ask her the same question. What is she
going to say?
Sally pauses, looks uncertain.
Sally: Probably…the same answer.