Talking to Strangers

Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States. But what do you do with either of those diagnoses aside from vowing, in full earnestness, to try harder next time

The way the Spanish interpreted Montezuma’s remarks, the Aztec king was making an astonishing concession: he believed Cortés to be a god, the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that said an exiled deity would one day return from the east. And he was, as a result, surrendering to Cortés. You can imagine Cortés’s reaction: this magnificent city was now effectively his

In that case, Montezuma’s speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender

Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

Each of the chapters that follows is devoted to understanding a different aspect of the stranger problem

In all of these cases, the parties involved relied on a set of strategies to translate one another’s words and intentions. And in each case, something went very wrong. In Talking to Strangers, I want to understand those strategies—analyze them, critique them, figure out where they came from, find out how to fix them

But the Cubans fooled the CIA, an organization that takes the problem of understanding strangers very seriously

Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours

The people on the computer’s list were 25 percent less likely to commit a crime while awaiting trial than the 400,000 people released by the judges of New York City. 25 percent! In the bake-off, machine destroyed man

Taking information away from the hiring committee made for better judgments

Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?

We have people struggling with their first impressions of a stranger. We have people struggling when they have months to understand a stranger. We have people struggling when they meet with someone only once, and people struggling when they return to the stranger again and again. They struggle with assessing a stranger’s honesty. They struggle with a stranger’s character. They struggle with a stranger’s intent. It’s a mess

The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

The number of scholars around the world who study human deception is vast. There are more theories about why we lie, and how to detect those lies, than there are about the Kennedy assassination. In that crowded field, Levine stands out. He has carefully constructed a unified theory about deception

The point of Levine’s research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You’d think we’d be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn’t

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest

We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away

Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them

Ana Montes wasn’t a master spy. She didn’t need to be. In a world where our lie detector is set to the “off” position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it

Harry Markopolos, alone among the people who had doubts about Bernie Madoff, did not default to truth. He saw a stranger for who that stranger really was

Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free

Madoff was part of one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the entire financial market. If he was really just making things up, wouldn’t one of the many government watchdogs have caught him already?

He was armed with all the same facts but none of the faith in the system. To him, dishonesty and stupidity are everywhere

The Holy Fool is a social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the truth. Nonetheless is actually the wrong word. The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast.

We need Holy Fools in our society, from time to time. They perform a valuable role. That’s why we romanticize them. Harry Markopolos was the hero of the Madoff saga. Whistleblowers have movies made about them. But the second, crucial part of Levine’s argument is that we can’t all be Holy Fools. That would be a disaster

But Levine’s point is that the price of giving up on that strategy is much higher. If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos, there would be no fraud on Wall Street—but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street

The most sensational fact about the Sandusky case, however, was that phrase “in due course.” McQueary saw Sandusky in the shower in 2001. The investigation into Sandusky’s behavior did not start until nearly a decade later, and Sandusky wasn’t arrested until November 2011

doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion

The Nassar case was open-and-shut. Yet how long did it take to bring him to justice? Years.

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

I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default to truth?

When we try to send people like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers—without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message

The second of the puzzles that began this book was the bail problem. How is it that judges do a worse job of evaluating defendants than a computer program, even though judges know a lot more about defendants than the computer does? This section of Talking to Strangers is an attempt to answer that puzzle, beginning with the peculiar fact of how transparent television shows such as Friends are.

The words are what make us laugh, or what explain particular nuances of narrative. But the facial displays of the actors are what carry the plot. The actors’ performances in Friends are transparent.

Darwin’s idea is deeply intuitive. Children everywhere smile when they are happy, frown when they are sad, and giggle when they are amused, don’t they? It isn’t just people watching Friends in their living room in Cleveland, Toronto, or Sydney who can make sense of what Ross and Rachel are feeling; it’s everyone

Transparency is a myth—an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment” or “eyes went wide with surprise.” Schützwohl went on: “The participants apparently reasoned that, since they felt surprised, and since surprise is associated with a characteristic facial display, they must have shown this display. In most cases, this inference was erroneous.”

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

our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look

human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched

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.

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.

that we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency.

Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. They think of it as an agent of myopia

alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates, in their words, “a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.”

Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences

Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.

Acknowledging the role of alcohol is not excusing the behavior of perpetrators. It’s trying to prevent more young men from becoming perpetrators

Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do?

But the harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become. Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should have stayed home and read Mein Kampf.

In 1962, the year before Sylvia Plath took her own life, 5,588 people in England and Wales committed suicide. Of those, 2,469—44.2 percent—did so as Sylvia Plath did. Carbon-monoxide poisoning was by then the leading cause of lethal self-harm in the United Kingdom

once the number-one form of suicide in England became a physiological impossibility, did the people who wanted to kill themselves switch to other methods? Or did the people who would have put their heads in ovens now not commit suicide at all?

Displacement assumes that when people think of doing something as serious as committing suicide, they are very hard to stop. Blocking one option isn’t going to make much of a difference

What does coupling theory tell us about the Golden Gate Bridge? That it would make a big difference if a barrier prevented people from jumping, or a net was installed to catch them before they fell. The people prevented from killing themselves on the bridge wouldn’t go on to jump off something else. Their decision to commit suicide is coupled to that particular bridge.

But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating

It’s because it is really hard for us to accept the idea that a behavior can be so closely coupled to a place

Their job was to walk around those beat areas and to interact with the public, and to develop ways of doing something about the problems,” Weisburd said. He was the observer and note-taker, responsible for writing up what was learned.

Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime. It’s a model that says that people are so highly motivated to commit crime, nothing else really matters.”

So that then begins a sort of rethinking of my idea of criminology,” Weisburd said. “Like most other people, my studies were about people. I said, maybe we ought to be more concerned with places.

Sherman crunched the numbers and found something that seemed hard to believe: 3.3 percent of the street segments in the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the police calls

Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration

Plath was really unlucky. Had she come along ten years later, there would have been no clouds like “carbon monoxide” for her to “sweetly, sweetly…breathe in

Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world

Kelling ran the experiment for a year, meticulously collecting every statistic he could on crime in the three areas of the study. The result? Nothing. Burglaries were the same in all three neighborhoods. So were auto thefts, robberies, and vandalism. The citizens in the areas with beefed-up patrols didn’t feel any safer than the people in the areas with no patrols. They didn’t even seem to notice what had happened.

In the end, 88 percent of the people visited said that they would use the hotline if they saw any guns. So how many calls came in—after 858 door-to-door visits over three months? Two. Both were about guns in another neighborhood

Outside District 144, where police business was conducted as usual, crime remained as bad as ever. But inside 144? All of the new focused police work cut gun crimes—shootings, murders, woundings—in half

And what was the principal implication of coupling? That law enforcement didn’t need to be bigger; it needed to be more focused. If criminals operated overwhelmingly in a few concentrated hot spots, those crucial parts of the city should be more heavily policed than anywhere else, and the kinds of crime-fighting strategies used by police in those areas ought to be very different from those used in the vast stretches of the city with virtually no crime at all

If you go from 400,000 traffic stops in one year to 800,000 seven years later, does that sound like focused and concentrated policing? Or does that sound like the North Carolina State Highway Patrol hired a lot more police officers and told everyone, everywhere, to pull over a lot more motorists?

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us.

Rather, it is because the haystack search represents a direct challenge to the human tendency to default to truth

The bible for post–Kansas City policing is called Tactics for Criminal Patrol, by Charles Remsberg. It came out in 1995, and it laid out in precise detail what was required of the new, non-defaulting patrol officer. According to Remsberg, the officer had to take the initiative and “go beyond the ticket.” That meant, first of all, picking up on what Remsberg called “curiosity ticklers”—anomalies that raise the possibility of potential wrongdoing

possible. Where you from? Where are you headed? Chicago? Got family there? Where? He’s looking for stumbles, nervousness, an implausible answer, and whether the driver’s answer matches what he’s seeing. The officer is trying to decide whether to take the next step and search the car.

And we have decided that we would rather our leaders and guardians pursue their doubts than dismiss them. Encinia leans in the window, tells her why he pulled her over, and—immediately—his suspicions are raised

the Reid system is based directly on the idea of transparency: it instructs police officers, when dealing with people they do not know, to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt

This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched:

He’s terrified of her. And being terrified of a perfectly innocent stranger holding a cigarette is the price you pay for not defaulting to truth. It’s why Harry Markopolos holed up in his house, armed to the teeth, waiting for the SEC to come bursting in

Encinia is not indifferent to Bland’s feelings. When he approaches her car, one of the first things he says to her is, “What’s wrong?” When he returns to her car after checking her license, he asks again: “Are you okay?” He picks up on her emotional discomfort immediately. It’s just that he completely misinterprets what her feelings mean

The U.S. Department of Justice almost immediately sent a team of investigators to Ferguson—and their report, published six months later, is an extraordinary document

It was a place where the entire philosophy of law enforcement was to stop as many people as possible for as many reasons as possible

How many extra guns and drugs did the North Carolina Highway Patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples

Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing

The first question for Brian Encinia is: did he do the right thing? But the second question is just as important: was he in the right place

Sherman said that the special police officers made their stops solely at night. That’s the only time of day when the crime rate was high enough to justify aggressive policing

This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent

We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers

There is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies in its midst, or for investors to spot schemers and frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we do not know. What is required of us is restraint and humility

There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention.

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger