Page 82 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

our stereotype of how a liar acts. And she also happens to be lying. That’s why we all get her right.
In the Friends episode, when Monica finally breaks the news to her brother Ross about her
relationship, she takes Ross’s hand and says, “I’m so sorry that you had to find out this way. I’m
sorry. But it’s true, I love him too.” We believe her in that moment—that she is genuinely sorry and
genuinely in love, because she’s perfectly matched. She’s being sincere and she looks sincere.
When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we’re
flummoxed. Nervous Nelly is mismatched. She looks like she’s lying, but she’s not. She’s just
nervous! In other words, human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those
situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.
At one point in his pursuit of Bernie Madoff, Harry Markopolos approached a seasoned financial
journalist named Michael Ocrant. Markopolos persuaded Ocrant to take Madoff seriously as a
potential fraud, to the point that Ocrant made an appointment to interview Madoff in person. But
what happened?
“It wasn’t so much his answers that impressed me, but rather it was his entire demeanor,” Ocrant
said years later.
It was almost impossible to sit there with him and believe he was a complete fraud. I remember
thinking to myself, If [Markopolos’s team] is right and he’s running a Ponzi scheme, he’s either
the best actor I’ve ever seen or a total sociopath. There wasn’t even a hint of guilt or shame or
remorse. He was very low-key, almost as if he found the interview amusing. His attitude was sort
of “Who in their right mind could doubt me? I can’t believe people care about this.”
Madoff was mismatched. He was a liar with the demeanor of an honest man. And Ocrant—who
knew, on an intellectual level, that something was not right—was so swayed by meeting Madoff that
he dropped the story. Can you blame him? First there is default to truth, which gives the con artist a
head start. But when you add mismatch to that, it’s not hard to understand why Madoff fooled so
many for so long.
And why did so many of the British politicians who met with Hitler misread him so badly?
Because Hitler was mismatched as well. Remember Chamberlain’s remark about how Hitler greeted
him with a double-handed handshake, which Chamberlain believed Hitler reserved for people he
liked and trusted? For many of us, a warm and enthusiastic handshake does mean that we feel warm
and enthusiastic about the person we’re meeting. But not Hitler. He’s the dishonest person who acts
honest. 1

3.

So what was Amanda Knox’s problem? She was mismatched. She’s the innocent person who acts
guilty. She’s Nervous Nelly.
Knox was—to those who did not know her—confusing. At the time of the crime she was twenty
and beautiful, with high cheekbones and striking blue eyes. Her nickname was “Foxy Knoxy.” The
tabloids got hold of a list she had made of all the men she’d slept with. She was the femme fatale—
brazen and sexual. The day after her roommate’s brutal murder, she was spotted buying red
underwear at a lingerie shop with her boyfriend.
In fact, the “Foxy Knoxy” nickname had nothing to do with sex. It was bestowed on her at age
thirteen by soccer teammates for the deft way she moved the ball up and down the field. She was
buying red underwear a few days after her roommate’s murder because her house was a crime scene
2
and she couldn’t get access to her clothes. She wasn’t a femme fatale. She was an immature young
woman only a few years removed from an awkward and pimply adolescence. Brazen and sexual?
Amanda Knox was actually a bit of a misfit.
“I was the quirky kid who hung out with the sulky manga-readers, the ostracized gay kids, and
the theater geeks,” she writes in her memoir, published in 2011 after she was finally released from
an Italian prison.
In high school she was the middle-class kid on financial aid, surrounded by well-heeled
classmates. “I took Japanese and sang, loudly, in the halls while walking from one class to another.