Page 84 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

criticized for being “cold and calculating.” At every turn, Knox cannot escape censure for her
weirdness.
Knox: I think everyone’s reaction to something horrible is different.
She’s right! Why can’t someone be angry in response to a murder, rather than sad? If you were
Amanda Knox’s friend, none of this would surprise you. You would have seen Knox walking down
the street like an elephant. But with strangers, we’re intolerant of emotional responses that fall
outside expectations.

While waiting to be interviewed by police, four days after Kercher’s body was discovered, Knox
decided to stretch. She’d been sitting, slumped, for hours. She touched her toes, held her arms over
her head. The policeman on duty said to her, “You seem really flexible.”

I replied, “I used to do a lot of yoga.” He said, “Can you show me? What else can you do?” I
took a few steps toward the elevator and did a split. It felt good to know I still could. While I was
on the floor, legs splayed, the elevator doors opened. Rita Ficarra, the cop who had reprimanded
Raffaele and me about kissing the day before, stepped out. “What are you doing?” she
demanded, her voice full of contempt. 3
The lead investigator in the case, Edgardo Giobbi, says he had doubts about Knox from the
moment she walked with him through the crime scene. As she put on protective booties, she
swiveled her hips and said, “Ta-dah.”
“We were able to establish guilt,” Giobbi said, “by closely observing the suspect’s psychological
and behavioral reaction during the interrogation. We don’t need to rely on other kinds of
investigation.”
The prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini, brushed off the mounting criticisms of the way his
office had handled the murder. Why did people focus so much on the botched DNA analysis?
“Every piece of proof has aspects of uncertainty,” he said. The real issue was mismatched Amanda.
“I have to remind you that her behavior was completely inexplicable. Totally irrational. There’s no
doubt of this.” 4
From Bernard Madoff to Amanda Knox, we do not do well with the mismatched.

4.

The most disturbing of Tim Levine’s findings was when he showed his lying videotapes to a group
of seasoned law-enforcement agents—people with fifteen years or more of interrogation experience.
He had previously used as his judges students and adults from ordinary walks of life. They didn’t do
well, but perhaps that’s to be expected. If you are a real-estate agent or a philosophy major,
identifying deception in an interrogation isn’t necessarily something you do every day. But maybe,
he thought, people whose job it was to do exactly the kind of thing he was measuring would be
better.
In one respect, they were. On “matched” senders, the seasoned interrogators were perfect. You or
I would probably come in at 70 or 75 percent on that set of tapes. But everyone in Levine’s group of
highly experienced experts got every matched sender right. On mismatched senders, however, their
performance was abysmal: they got 20 percent right. And on the subcategory of sincere-acting liars,
they came in at 14 percent—a score so low that it ought to give chills to anyone who ever gets
hauled into an interrogation room with an FBI agent. When they are confronted with Blushing Sally
—the easy case—they are flawless. But when it comes to the Amanda Knoxes and Bernie Madoffs
of the world, they are hapless.
This is distressing because we don’t need law-enforcement experts to help us with matched
strangers. We’re all good at knowing when these kinds of people are misleading us or telling us the
truth. We need help with mismatched strangers—the difficult cases. A trained interrogator ought to
be adept at getting beneath the confusing signals of demeanor, at understanding that when Nervous
Nelly overexplains and gets defensive, that’s who she is—someone who overexplains and gets
defensive. The police officer ought to be the person who sees the quirky, inappropriate girl in a
culture far different from her own say “Ta-dah” and realize that she’s just a quirky girl in a culture