Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know / Разговор с незнакомцем. Что мы должны знать о людях, которых не знаем (by Malcolm Gladwell, 2019) - аудиокнига на английском

In July 2015, a young African American woman named Sandra Bland drove from her hometown of Chicago to a little town an hour west of Houston, Texas. She was interviewing for a job at Prairie View A and M University, the school she’d graduated from a few years before. She was tall and striking, with a personality to match. She belonged to the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority in college, and played in the marching band. She volunteered with a seniors group. She regularly posted short, inspirational videos on YouTube, under the handle “Sandy Speaks,” that often began, “Good morning, my beautiful Kings and Queens.” I am up today just praising God, thanking His name. Definitely thanking Him not just because it’s my birthday, but thanking Him for growth, thanking Him for the different things that He has done in my life over this past year. Just looking back at the twenty-eight years I have been on this earth, and all that He has shown me. Even though I have made some mistakes, I have definitely messed up, He still loves me, and I want to let my Kings and Queens know out there to that He still loves you too. Bland got the job at Prairie View. She was elated. Her plan was to get a master’s degree in political science on the side. On the afternoon of July 10 she left the university to get groceries, and as she made a right turn onto the highway that rings the Prairie View campus, she was pulled over by a police officer. His name was Brian Encinia: white, short dark hair, thirty years old. He was courteous—at least at first. He told her that she had failed to signal a lane change. He asked her questions. She answered them. Then Bland lit a cigarette, and Encinia asked her to put it out. Their subsequent interaction was recorded by the video camera on his dashboard, and has been viewed in one form or another several million times on YouTube. Bland: I’m in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette? Encinia: Well, you can step on out now. Bland: I don’t have to step out of my car. Encinia: Step out of the car. Bland: Why am I… Encinia: Step out of the car! Bland: No, you don’t have the right. No, you don’t have the right. Encinia: Step out of the car. Bland: You do not have the right. You do not have the right to do this. Encinia: I do have the right, now step out or I will remove you. Bland: I refuse to talk to you other than to identify myself. [crosstalk] I am getting removed for a failure to signal? Encinia: Step out or I will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order. Get out of the car now or I’m going to remove you. Bland: And I’m calling my lawyer. Bland and Encinia continue on for an uncomfortably long time. Emotions escalate. Encinia: I’m going to yank you out of here. [Reaches inside the car.] Bland: OK, you’re going to yank me out of my car? OK, all right. Encinia: [calling in backup] 2547. Bland: Let’s do this. Encinia: Yeah, we’re going to. [Grabs for Bland.] Bland: Don’t touch me! Encinia: Get out of the car! Bland: Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me! I’m not under arrest—you don’t have the right to take me out of the car. Encinia: You are under arrest! Bland: I’m under arrest? For what? For what? For what? Encinia: [To dispatch] 2547 County FM 1098. [inaudible] Send me another unit. [To Bland] Get out of the car! Get out of the car now! Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You’re trying to give me a ticket for failure… Encinia: I said get out of the car! Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You just opened my— Encinia: I’m giving you a lawful order. I’m going to drag you out of here. Bland: So you’re threatening to drag me out of my own car? Encinia: Get out of the car! Bland: And then you’re going to [crosstalk] me? Encinia: I will light you up! Get out! Now! [Draws stun gun and points it at Bland.] Bland: Wow. Wow. [Bland exits car.] Encinia: Get out. Now. Get out of the car! Bland: For a failure to signal? You’re doing all of this for a failure to signal? Bland was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. 2. The Sandra Bland case came in the middle of a strange interlude in American public life. The interlude began in the late summer of 2014, when an eighteen-year-old black man named Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. He had just, allegedly, shoplifted a pack of cigars from a convenience store. The next several years saw one high-profile case after another involving police violence against black people. There were riots and protests around the country. A civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, was born. For a time, this was what Americans talked about. Perhaps you remember some of the names of those in the news. In Baltimore, a young black man named Freddie Gray was arrested for carrying a pocket knife and fell into a coma in the back of a police van. Outside Minneapolis, a young black man named Philando Castile was pulled over by a police officer and inexplicably shot seven times after handing over his proof of insurance. In New York City, a black man named Eric Garner was approached by a group of police officers on suspicion that he was illegally selling cigarettes, and was choked to death in the ensuing struggle. In North Charleston, South Carolina, a black man named Walter Scott was stopped for a nonfunctioning taillight, ran from his car, and was shot to death from behind by a white police officer. Scott was killed on April 4, 2015. Sandra Bland gave him his own episode of “Sandy Speaks.” Good morning, my beautiful Kings and Queens.… I am not a racist. I grew up in Villa Park, Illinois. I was the only black girl on an all-white cheerleading squad.… Black people, you will not be successful in this world until you learn how to work with white people. I want the white folks to really understand out there that black people are doing as much as we can…and we can’t help but get pissed off when we see situations where it’s clear that the black life didn’t matter. For those of you who question why he was running away, well goddamn, in the news that we’ve seen of late, you can stand there and surrender to the cops and still be killed. Three months later, she too was dead. Talking to Strangers is an attempt to understand what really happened by the side of the highway that day in rural Texas. Why write a book about a traffic stop gone awry? Because the debate spawned by that string of cases was deeply unsatisfying. One side made the discussion about racism—looking down at the case from ten thousand feet. The other side examined each detail of each case with a magnifying glass. What was the police officer like? What did he do, precisely? One side saw a forest, but no trees. The other side saw trees and no forest. Each side was right, in its own way. 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? There are bad cops. There are biased cops. Conservatives prefer the former interpretation, liberals the latter. In the end the two sides canceled each other out. Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things. I don’t want to move on to other things. 3. In the sixteenth century, there were close to seventy wars involving the nations and states of Europe. The Danes fought the Swedes. The Poles fought the Teutonic Knights. The Ottomans fought the Venetians. The Spanish fought the French—and on and on. If there was a pattern to the endless conflict, it was that battles overwhelmingly involved neighbors. You fought the person directly across the border, who had always been directly across your border. Or you fought someone inside your own borders: the Ottoman War of 1509 was between two brothers. Throughout the majority of human history, encounters—hostile or otherwise—were rarely between strangers. The people you met and fought often believed in the same God as you, built their buildings and organized their cities in the same way you did, fought their wars with the same weapons according to the same rules. But the sixteenth century’s bloodiest conflict fit none of those patterns. When the Spanish conquistador Hern?n Cort?s met the Aztec ruler Montezuma II, neither side knew anything about the other at all. Cort?s landed in Mexico in February of 1519 and slowly made his way inland, advancing on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitl?n. When Cort?s and his army arrived, they were in awe. Tenochtitl?n was an extraordinary sight—far larger and more impressive than any of the cities Cort?s and his men would have known back in Spain. It was a city on an island, linked to the mainland with bridges and crossed by canals. It had grand boulevards, elaborate aqueducts, thriving marketplaces, temples built in brilliant white stucco, public gardens, and even a zoo. It was spotlessly clean—which, to someone raised in the filth of medieval European cities, would have seemed almost miraculous. “When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments,” one of Cort?s’s officers, Bernal D?az del Castillo, recalled. “And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?… I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.” The Spanish were greeted at the gates of Tenochtitl?n by an assembly of Aztec chiefs, then taken to Montezuma. He was a figure of almost surreal grandeur, carried on a litter embroidered with gold and silver and festooned with flowers and precious stones. One of his courtiers advanced before the procession, sweeping the ground. Cort?s dismounted from his horse. Montezuma was lowered from his litter. Cort?s, like the Spaniard he was, moved to embrace the Aztec leader—only to be restrained by Montezuma’s attendants. No one embraced Montezuma. Instead, the two men bowed to each other. “Art thou not he? Art thou Montezuma?” Montezuma answered: “Yes, I am he.” No European had ever set foot in Mexico. No Aztec had ever met a European. Cort?s knew nothing about the Aztecs, except to be in awe of their wealth and the extraordinary city they had built. Montezuma knew nothing of Cort?s, except that he had approached the Aztec kingdom with great audacity, armed with strange weapons and large, mysterious animals—horses—that the Aztecs had never seen before. Is it any wonder why the meeting between Cort?s and Montezuma has fascinated historians for so many centuries? That moment—500 years ago—when explorers began traveling across oceans and undertaking bold expeditions in previously unknown territory, an entirely new kind of encounter emerged. Cort?s and Montezuma wanted to have a conversation, even though they knew nothing about the other. When Cort?s asked Montezuma, “Art thou he?,” he didn’t say those words directly. Cort?s spoke only Spanish. He had to bring two translators with him. One was an Indian woman named Malinche, who had been captured by the Spanish some months before. She knew the Aztec language Nahuatl and Mayan, the language of the Mexican territory where Cort?s had begun his journey. Cort?s also had with him a Spanish priest named Ger?nimo del Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked in the Yucat?n and learned Mayan during his sojourn there. So Cort?s spoke to Aguilar in Spanish. Aguilar translated into Mayan for Malinche. And Malinche translated the Mayan into Nahuatl for Montezuma—and when Montezuma replied, “Yes, I am,” the long translation chain ran in reverse. The kind of easy face-to-face interaction that each had lived with his entire life had suddenly become hopelessly complicated.1 Cort?s was taken to one of Montezuma’s palaces—a place that Aguilar described later as having “innumerable rooms inside, antechambers, splendid halls, mattresses of large cloaks, pillows of leather and tree fibre, good eiderdowns, and admirable white fur robes.” After dinner, Montezuma rejoined Cort?s and his men and gave a speech. Immediately, the confusion began. The way the Spanish interpreted Montezuma’s remarks, the Aztec king was making an astonishing concession: he believed Cort?s 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 Cort?s. You can imagine Cort?s’s reaction: this magnificent city was now effectively his. But is that really what Montezuma meant? Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, had a reverential mode. A royal figure such as Montezuma would speak in a kind of code, according to a cultural tradition in which the powerful projected their status through an elaborate false humility. The word in Nahuatl for a noble, the historian Matthew Restall points out, is all but identical to the word for child. When a ruler such as Montezuma spoke of himself as small and weak, in other words, he was actually subtly drawing attention to the fact that he was esteemed and powerful. “The impossibility of adequately translating such language is obvious,” Restall writes: The speaker was often obliged to say the opposite of what was really meant. True meaning was embedded in the use of reverential language. Stripped of these nuances in translation, and distorted through the use of multiple interpreters…not only was it unlikely that a speech such as Montezuma’s would be accurately understood, but it was probable that its meaning would be turned upside down. In that case, Montezuma’s speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender. You probably remember from high-school history how the encounter between Cort?s and Montezuma ended. Montezuma was taken hostage by Cort?s, then murdered. The two sides went to war. As many as twenty million Aztecs perished, either directly at the hands of the Spanish or indirectly from the diseases they had brought with them. Tenochtitl?n was destroyed. Cort?s’s foray into Mexico ushered in the era of catastrophic colonial expansion. And it also introduced a new and distinctly modern pattern of social interaction. 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 Cort?s 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. You will have heard of many of the examples—they are taken from the news. At Stanford University in northern California, a first-year student named Brock Turner meets a woman at a party, and by the end of the evening he is in police custody. At Pennsylvania State University, the former assistant coach of the school’s football team, Jerry Sandusky, is found guilty of pedophilia, and the president of the school and two of his top aides are found to be complicit in his crimes. You will read about a spy who spent years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon, about the man who brought down hedge-fund manager Bernie Madoff, about the false conviction of the American exchange student Amanda Knox, and about the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath. 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. At the end of the book I will come back to Sandra Bland, because there is something about the encounter by the side of the road that ought to haunt us. Think about how hard it was. Sandra Bland was not someone Brian Encinia knew from the neighborhood or down the street. That would have been easy: Sandy! How are you? Be a little more careful next time. Instead you have Bland from Chicago and Encinia from Texas, one a man and the other a woman, one white and one black, one a police officer and one a civilian, one armed and the other unarmed. They were strangers to each other. If we were more thoughtful as a society—if we were willing to engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers—she would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell. But to start, I have two questions—two puzzles about strangers—beginning with a story told by a man named Florentino Aspillaga years ago in a German debriefing room. 1 The idea that Montezuma considered Cort?s a god has been soundly debunked by the historian Camilla Townsend, among others. Townsend argues that it was probably just a misunderstanding, following from the fact that the Nahua used the word teotl to refer to Cort?s and his men, which the Spanish translated as god. But Townsend argues that they used that word only because they “had to call the Spaniards something, and it was not at all clear what that something should be.…In the Nahua universe as it had existed up until this point, a person was always labeled as being from a particular village or city-state, or, more specifically, as one who filled a given social role (a tribute collector, prince, servant). These new people fit nowhere.” Part One Spies and Diplomats: Two Puzzles CHAPTER ONE Fidel Castro’s Revenge 1. Florentino Aspillaga’s final posting was in Bratislava, in what was then Czechoslovakia. It was 1987, two years before the Iron Curtain fell. Aspillaga ran a consulting company called Cuba Tecnica, which was supposed to have something to do with trade. It did not. It was a front. Aspillaga was a high-ranking officer in Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence. Aspillaga had been named intelligence officer of the year in the Cuban spy service in 1985. He had been given a handwritten letter of commendation from Fidel Castro himself. He had served his country with distinction in Moscow, Angola, and Nicaragua. He was a star. In Bratislava, he ran Cuba’s network of agents in the region. But at some point during his steady ascent through the Cuban intelligence service, he grew disenchanted. He watched Castro give a speech in Angola, celebrating the Communist revolution there, and had been appalled by the Cuban leader’s arrogance and narcissism. By the time of his posting to Bratislava, in 1986, those doubts had hardened. He planned his defection for June 6, 1987. It was an elaborate inside joke. June 6 was the anniversary of the founding of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior—the all-powerful body that administered the country’s spy services. If you worked for the General Directorate of Intelligence, you would ordinarily celebrate on June 6. There would be speeches, receptions, ceremonies in honor of Cuba’s espionage apparatus. Aspillaga wanted his betrayal to sting. He met up with his girlfriend Marta in a park in downtown Bratislava. It was Saturday afternoon. She was Cuban as well, one of thousands of Cubans who were guest workers in Czech factories. Like all Cubans in her position, her passport was held at the Cuban government offices in Prague. Aspillaga would have to smuggle her across the border. He had a government-issued Mazda. He removed the spare tire from the trunk, drilled an air hole in the floor, and told her to climb inside. Eastern Europe, at that point, was still walled off from the rest of the continent. Travel between East and West was heavily restricted. But Bratislava was only a short drive from Vienna, and Aspillaga had made the trip before. He was well known at the border and carried a diplomatic passport. The guards waved him through. In Vienna, he and Marta abandoned the Mazda, hailed a taxi, and presented themselves at the gates to the United States Embassy. It was Saturday evening. The senior staff was all at home. But Aspillaga did not need to do much to get the guard’s attention: “I am a case officer from Cuban Intelligence. I am an intelligence comandante.” In the spy trade, Aspillaga’s appearance at the Vienna embassy is known as a walk-in. An official from the intelligence service of one country shows up, unexpectedly, on the doorstep of the intelligence service of another country. And Florentino “Tiny” Aspillaga was one of the great walk-ins of the Cold War. What he knew of Cuba—and its close ally, the Soviet Union—was so sensitive that twice after his defection his former employers at the Cuban spy service tracked him down and tried to assassinate him. Twice, he slipped away. Only once since has Aspillaga been spotted. It was by Brian Latell, who ran the CIA’s Latin American office for many years. Latell got a tip from an undercover agent who was acting as Aspillaga’s go-between. He met the go-between at a restaurant in Coral Gables, just outside Miami. There he was given instructions to meet in another location, closer to where Aspillaga was living under his new identity. Latell rented a suite in a hotel, somewhere anonymous, and waited for Tiny to arrive. “He’s younger than me. I’m seventy-five. He’s by now probably in his upper sixties,” Latell said, remembering the meeting. “But he’s had terrible health problems. I mean, being a defector, living with a new identity, it’s tough.” Even in his diminished state, though, it was obvious what Aspillaga must have been like as a younger man, Latell says: charismatic, slender, with a certain theatricality about him—a taste for risks and grand emotional gestures. When he came into the hotel suite, Aspillaga was carrying a box. He put it down on the table and turned to Latell. “This is a memoir that I wrote soon after I defected,” he said. “I want you to have this.” Inside the box, in the pages of Aspillaga’s memoir, was a story that made no sense. 2. After his dramatic appearance at the American embassy in Vienna, Aspillaga was flown to a debriefing center at a U.S. Army base in Germany. In those years, American intelligence operated out of the United States Interests Section in Havana, under the Swiss flag. (The Cuban delegation had a similar arrangement in the United States.) Before his debriefing began, Aspillaga said, he had one request: he wanted the CIA to fly in one of the former Havana station chiefs, a man known to Cuban intelligence as “el Alpinista,” the Mountain Climber. The Mountain Climber had served the agency all over the world. After the Berlin Wall fell, files retrieved from the KGB and the East German secret police revealed that they had taught a course on the Mountain Climber to their agents. His tradecraft was impeccable. Once, Soviet intelligence officers tried to recruit him: they literally placed bags of money in front of him. He waved them off, mocked them. The Mountain Climber was incorruptible. He spoke Spanish like a Cuban. He was Aspillaga’s role model. Aspillaga wanted to meet him face-to-face. “I was on an assignment in another country when I got a message to rush to Frankfurt,” the Mountain Climber remembers. (Though long retired from the CIA, he still prefers to be identified only by his nickname.) “Frankfurt is where we had our defector processing center. They told me a fellow had walked into an embassy in Vienna. He had driven out of Czechoslovakia with his girlfriend in the trunk of his car, walked in, and insisted on speaking to me. I thought it was kind of crazy.” El Alpinista went straight to the debriefing center. “I found four case officers sitting in the living room,” he remembers. “They told me Aspillaga was back in the bedroom making love with his girlfriend, as he had constantly since he arrived at the safe house. Then I went in and spoke to him. He was lanky, poorly dressed, as Eastern Europeans and Cubans tended to be back then. A little sloppy. But it was immediately evident that he was a very smart guy.” When he walked in, the Mountain Climber didn’t tell Aspillaga who he was. He was trying to be cagey; Aspillaga was an unknown quantity. But it was only a matter of minutes before Aspillaga figured it out. There was a moment of shock, laughter. The two men hugged, Cuban style. “We talked for five minutes before we started into the details. Whenever you are debriefing one of those guys, you need someone that proves their bona fides,” the Mountain Climber said. “So I just basically asked him what he could tell me about the [Cuban intelligence] operation.” It was then that Aspillaga revealed his bombshell, the news that had brought him from behind the Iron Curtain to the gates of the Vienna embassy. The CIA had a network of spies inside Cuba, whose dutiful reports to their case officers helped shape America’s understanding of its adversary. Aspillaga named one of them and said, “He’s a double agent. He works for us.” The room was stunned. They had no idea. But Aspillaga kept going. He named another spy. “He’s a double too.” Then another, and another. He had names, details, chapter and verse. That guy you recruited on the ship in Antwerp. The little fat guy with the mustache? He’s a double. That other guy, with a limp, who works in the defense ministry? He’s a double. He continued on like that until he had listed dozens of names—practically the entire U.S. roster of secret agents inside Cuba. They were all working for Havana, spoon-feeding the CIA information cooked up by the Cubans themselves. “I sat there and took notes,” the Mountain Climber said. “I tried not to betray any emotion. That’s what we’re taught. But my heart was racing.” Aspillaga was talking about the Mountain Climber’s people, the spies he’d worked with when he had been posted to Cuba as a young and ambitious intelligence officer. When he’d first arrived in Havana, the Mountain Climber had made a point of working his sources aggressively, mining them for information. “The thing is, if you have an agent who is in the office of the president of whatever country, but you can’t communicate with him, that agent is worthless,” the Mountain Climber said. “My feeling was, let’s communicate and get some value, rather than waiting six months or a year until he puts up someplace else.” But now the whole exercise turned out to have been a sham. “I must admit that I disliked Cuba so much that I derived much pleasure from pulling the wool over their eyes,” he said, ruefully. “But it turns out that I wasn’t the one pulling the wool over their eyes. That was a bit of a blow.” The Mountain Climber got on a military plane and flew with Aspillaga directly to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, DC, where they were met by “bigwigs” from the Latin American division. “In the Cuban section, the reaction was absolute shock and horror,” he remembers. “They simply could not believe that they had been had so badly, for so many years. It sent shock waves.” It got worse. When Fidel Castro heard that Aspillaga had informed the CIA of their humiliation, he decided to rub salt in the wound. First he rounded up the entire cast of pretend CIA agents and paraded them across Cuba on a triumphant tour. Then he released on Cuban television an astonishing eleven-part documentary entitled La Guerra de la CIA contra Cuba—The CIA’s War against Cuba. Cuban intelligence, it turned out, had filmed and recorded everything the CIA had been doing in their country for at least ten years—as if they were creating a reality show. Survivor: Havana Edition. The video was surprisingly high quality. There were close-up shots and shots from cinematic angles. The audio was crystal clear: the Cubans must have had advance word of every secret meeting place, and sent their technicians over to wire the rooms for sound. On the screen, identified by name, were CIA officers supposedly under deep cover. There was video of every advanced CIA gadget: transmitters hidden in picnic baskets and briefcases. There were detailed explanations of which park bench CIA officers used to communicate with their sources and how the CIA used different-colored shirts to secretly signal their contacts. A long tracking shot showed a CIA officer stuffing cash and instructions inside a large, plastic “rock”; another caught a CIA officer stashing secret documents for his agents inside a wrecked car in a junkyard in Pinar del Rio; in a third, a CIA officer looked for a package in long grass by the side of the road while his wife fumed impatiently in the car. The Mountain Climber made a brief cameo in the documentary. His successor fared far worse. “When they showed that TV series,” the Mountain Climber said, “it looked as though they had a guy with a camera over his shoulder everywhere he went.” When the head of the FBI’s office in Miami heard about the documentary, he called up a Cuban official and asked for a copy. A set of videotapes was sent over promptly, thoughtfully dubbed in English. The most sophisticated intelligence service in the world had been played for a fool. 3. This is what makes no sense about Florentino Aspillaga’s story. It would be one thing if Cuba had deceived a group of elderly shut-ins, the way scam artists do. But the Cubans fooled the CIA, an organization that takes the problem of understanding strangers very seriously. There were extensive files on every one of those double agents. The Mountain Climber says he checked them carefully. There were no obvious red flags. Like all intelligence agencies, the CIA has a division—counterintelligence—whose job it is to monitor its own operations for signs of betrayal. What had they found? Nothing.1 Looking back on the episode years later, all Latell could do was shrug and say that the Cubans must have been really good. “They did it exquisitely,” he said. I mean, Fidel Castro selected the doubles that he dangled. He selected them with real brilliance…Some of them were trained in theatrical deception. One of them posed as a na?f, you know…He was really a very cunning, trained intelligence officer…You know, he’s so goofy. How can he be a double? Fidel orchestrated all of this. I mean, Fidel is the greatest actor of them all. The Mountain Climber, for his part, argues that the tradecraft of the CIA’s Cuban section was just sloppy. He had previously worked in Eastern Europe, up against the East Germans, and there, he said, the CIA had been much more meticulous. But what was the CIA’s record in East Germany? Just as bad as the CIA’s record in Cuba. After the Berlin Wall fell, East German spy chief Markus Wolf wrote in his memoirs that by the late 1980s we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start. On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans. The supposedly meticulous Eastern Europe division, in fact, suffered one of the worst breaches of the entire Cold War. Aldrich Ames, one of the agency’s most senior officers responsible for Soviet counterintelligence, turned out to be working for the Soviet Union. His betrayals led to the capture—and execution—of countless American spies in Russia. El Alpinista knew him. Everyone who was high up at the agency did. “I did not have a high opinion of him,” the Mountain Climber said, “because I knew him to be a lazy drunkard.” But he and his colleagues never suspected that Ames was a traitor. “It was unthinkable to the old hands that one of our own could ever be beguiled by the other side the way Ames was,” he said. “We were all just taken aback that one of our own could betray us that way.” The Mountain Climber was one of the most talented people at one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world. Yet he’d been witness three times to humiliating betrayal—first by Fidel Castro, then by the East Germans, and then, at CIA headquarters itself, by a lazy drunk. And if the CIA’s best can be misled so completely, so many times, then what of the rest of us? Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? 1 The CIA makes a regular practice of giving its agents lie-detector tests—to guard against just the kind of treachery that Aspillaga was describing. Whenever one of the agency’s Cuban spies left the island, the CIA would meet them secretly in a hotel room and have them sit for a polygraph. Sometimes the Cubans would pass; the head of the polygraph division personally gave a clean bill of health to six Cuban agents who ended up being doubles. Other times, the Cubans would fail. But what happened when they did? The people running the Cuban section dismissed it. One of the CIA’s former polygraphers, John Sullivan, remembers being summoned to a meeting after his group gave the thumbs-down on a few too many Cuban assets. “They ambushed us,” Sullivan said. “We were berated unmercifully.…All these case officers were saying, ‘You guys just don’t know what you’re doing,’ et cetera, et cetera. ‘Mother Teresa couldn’t pass you.’ I mean, they were really very, very nasty about it.” But can you blame them? The case officers chose to replace one method of making sense of strangers (strapping them to a polygraph machine) with another: their own judgment. And that is perfectly logical. Polygraphy is, to say the least, an inexact art. The case officer would have had years of experience with the agent: met them, talked to them, analyzed the quality of the reports they filed. The assessment of a trained professional, made over the course of many years, ought to be more accurate than the results of a hurried meeting in a hotel room, right? Except that it wasn’t. “Many of our case officers think, ‘I’m such a good case officer, they can’t fool me,’” Sullivan said. “This one guy I’m thinking of in particular—and he was a very, very good case officer—they thought he was one of the best case officers in the agency.” He was clearly talking about the Mountain Climber. “They took him to the cleaners. They actually got him on film servicing a dead drop. It was crazy.” CHAPTER TWO Getting to Know der F?hrer 1. On the evening of August 28, 1938, Neville Chamberlain called his closest advisor to 10 Downing Street for a late-night strategy session. Chamberlain had been the British prime minister a little over a year. He was a former businessman, a practical and plainspoken man, whose interests and experience lay with domestic affairs. But now he faced his first foreign-policy crisis. It involved Adolf Hitler, who had been making increasingly bellicose statements about invading the Sudetenland, the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia. If Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, it would almost certainly mean a world war, which Chamberlain wanted desperately to avoid. But Hitler had been particularly reclusive in recent months, and Germany’s intentions were so opaque that the rest of Europe was growing nervous. Chamberlain was determined to resolve the impasse. He dubbed his idea, which he put to his advisors that night, Plan Z. It was top secret. Chamberlain would later write that the idea was “so unconventional and daring that it rather took [Foreign Secretary Lord] Halifax’s breath away.” Chamberlain wanted to fly to Germany and demand to meet Hitler face-to-face. One of the odd things about the desperate hours of the late 1930s, as Hitler dragged the world toward war, was how few of the world’s leaders really knew the German leader.1 Hitler was a mystery. Franklin Roosevelt, the American president throughout Hitler’s rise, never met him. Nor did Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader. Winston Churchill, Chamberlain’s successor, came close while researching a book in Munich in 1932. He and Hitler twice made plans to meet for tea, but on both occasions Hitler stood him up. The only people in England who spent any real amount of time with Hitler before the war were British aristocrats friendly to the Nazi cause, who would sometimes cross the Channel to pay their respects or join the F?hrer at parties. (“In certain moods he could be very funny,” the fascist socialite Diana Mitford wrote in her memoirs. She dined with him frequently in Munich. “He did imitations of marvelous drollery.”) But those were social calls. Chamberlain was trying to avert world war, and it seemed to him that he would benefit from taking the measure of Hitler for himself. Was Hitler someone who could be reasoned with? Trusted? Chamberlain wanted to find out. On the morning of September 14, the British ambassador to Germany sent a telegram to Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Would Hitler like to meet? Von Ribbentrop replied the same day: yes. Chamberlain was a masterly politician with a gift for showmanship, and he artfully let the news slip. He was going to Germany to see if he could avert war. Across Britain, there was a shout of celebration. Polls showed that 70 percent of the country thought his trip was a “good thing for peace.” The newspapers backed him. In Berlin, one foreign correspondent reported that he had been eating in a restaurant when the news broke, and the room had risen, as one, to toast Chamberlain’s health. Chamberlain left London on the morning of September 15. He’d never flown before, but he remained calm even as the plane flew into heavy weather near Munich. Thousands had gathered at the airport to greet him. He was driven to the train station in a cavalcade of fourteen Mercedes, then had lunch in Hitler’s own dining car as the train made its way into the mountains, toward Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. He arrived at five in the evening. Hitler came and shook his hand. Chamberlain would later report every detail of his first impressions in a letter to his sister Ida: Halfway down the steps stood the F?hrer bareheaded and dressed in a khaki-coloured coat of broadcloth with a red armlet and a swastika on it and the military cross on his breast. He wore black trousers such as we wear in the evening and black patent leather lace-up shoes. His hair is brown, not black, his eyes blue, his expression rather disagreeable, especially in repose and altogether he looks entirely undistinguished. You would never notice him in a crowd and would take him for the house painter he was. Hitler ushered Chamberlain upstairs to his study, with just an interpreter in tow. They talked, sometimes heatedly. “I am ready to face a world war!” Hitler exclaimed to Chamberlain at one point. Hitler made it plain that he was going to seize the Sudetenland, regardless of what the world thought. Chamberlain wanted to know whether that was all Hitler wanted. Hitler said it was. Chamberlain looked at Hitler long and hard and decided he believed him. In the same letter to his sister, Chamberlain wrote that he had heard back from people close to Hitler that the German leader felt he had had a conversation “with a man.” Chamberlain went on: “In short I had established a certain confidence which was my aim, and on my side in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” Chamberlain flew back to England the next morning. At Heston Airport, he gave a quick speech on the tarmac. “Yesterday afternoon I had a long talk with Herr Hitler,” he said. “I feel satisfied now that each of us fully understands what is in the mind of the other.” The two of them would meet again, he promised, only this time closer to England. “That is to spare an old man such another long journey,” Chamberlain said, to what those present remembered as “laughter and cheers.” 2. Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler are widely regarded as one of the great follies of the Second World War. Chamberlain fell under Hitler’s spell. He was outmaneuvered at the bargaining table. He misread Hitler’s intentions, and failed to warn Hitler that if he reneged on his promises there would be serious consequences. History has not been kind to Neville Chamberlain. But underneath those criticisms is a puzzle. Chamberlain flew back to Germany two more times. He sat with Hitler for hours. The two men talked, argued, ate together, walked around together. Chamberlain was the only Allied leader of that period to spend any significant time with Hitler. He made careful note of the man’s behavior. “Hitler’s appearance and manner when I saw him appeared to show that the storm signals were up,” Chamberlain told his sister Hilda after another of his visits to Germany. But then “he gave me the double handshake that he reserves for specially friendly demonstrations.” Back in London, he told his cabinet that he had seen in the F?hrer “no signs of insanity but many of excitement.” Hitler wasn’t crazy. He was rational, determined: “He had thought out what he wanted and he meant to get it and he would not brook opposition beyond a certain point.” Chamberlain was acting on the same assumption that we all follow in our efforts to make sense of strangers. We believe that the information gathered from a personal interaction is uniquely valuable. You would never hire a babysitter for your children without meeting that person first. Companies don’t hire employees blind. They call them in and interview them closely, sometimes for hours at a stretch, on more than one occasion. They do what Chamberlain did: they look people in the eye, observe their demeanor and behavior, and draw conclusions. He gave me the double handshake. Yet all that extra information Chamberlain gathered from his personal interactions with Hitler didn’t help him see Hitler more clearly. It did the opposite. Is this because Chamberlain was naive? Perhaps. His experience in foreign affairs was minimal. One of his critics would later compare him to a priest entering a pub for the first time, blind to the difference “between a social gathering and a rough house.” But this pattern isn’t confined to Chamberlain. It also afflicted Lord Halifax, who would go on to become Chamberlain’s foreign secretary. Halifax was an aristocrat, a superb student at Eton and Oxford. He served as Viceroy of India between the wars, where he negotiated brilliantly with Mahatma Gandhi. He was everything Chamberlain was not: worldly, seasoned, deeply charming, an intellectual—a man of such resolute religiosity that Churchill dubbed him the “Holy Fox.” Halifax went to Berlin in the fall of 1937 and met with the German leader at Berchtesgaden: he was the only other member of England’s ruling circle to have spent time with the F?hrer. Their meeting wasn’t some meaningless diplomatic reception. It began with Halifax mistaking Hitler for a footman and almost handing him his coat. And then Hitler was Hitler for five hours: sulking, shouting, digressing, denouncing. He talked about how much he hated the press. He talked about the evils of communism. Halifax listened to the performance with what another British diplomat at the time called a “mixture of astonishment, repugnance, and compassion.” Halifax spent five days in Germany. He met with two of Hitler’s top ministers—Hermann G?ring and Joseph Goebbels. He attended a dinner at the British Embassy, where he met a host of senior German politicians and businessmen. When he returned home, Halifax said that it was “all to the good making contact” with the German leadership, which is hard to dispute. That’s what a diplomat is supposed to do. He had gained valuable insights from their face-to-face encounter about Hitler’s bullying and volatility. But what was Halifax’s ultimate conclusion? That Hitler didn’t want to go to war, and was open to negotiating a peace. No one ever thought Halifax was naive, yet he was as deluded after meeting with Hitler as Chamberlain was. The British diplomat who spent the most time with Hitler was the ambassador to Germany, Nevile Henderson. He met Hitler repeatedly, went to his rallies. Hitler even had a nickname for Henderson, “The man with the carnation,” because of the flower the dapper Henderson always wore in his lapel. After attending the infamous Nuremberg Rally in early September 1938, Henderson wrote in his dispatch to London that Hitler seemed so abnormal that “he may have crossed the borderline into insanity.” Henderson wasn’t in Hitler’s thrall. But did he think Hitler had dishonorable intentions toward Czechoslovakia? No. Hitler, he believed, “hates war as much as anyone.” Henderson, too, read Hitler all wrong.2 The blindness of Chamberlain and Halifax and Henderson is not at all like Puzzle Number One, from the previous chapter. That was about the inability of otherwise intelligent and dedicated people to understand when they are being deceived. This is a situation where some people were deceived by Hitler and others were not. And the puzzle is that the group who were deceived are the ones you’d expect not to be, while those who saw the truth are the ones you’d think would be deceived. Winston Churchill, for example, never believed for a moment that Hitler was anything more than a duplicitous thug. Churchill called Chamberlain’s visit “the stupidest thing that has ever been done.” But Hitler was someone he’d only ever read about. Duff Cooper, one of Chamberlain’s cabinet ministers, was equally clear-eyed. He listened with horror to Chamberlain’s account of his meeting with Hitler. Later, he would resign from Chamberlain’s government in protest. Did Cooper know Hitler? No. Only one person in the upper reaches of the British diplomatic service—Anthony Eden, who preceded Halifax as foreign secretary—had both met Hitler and saw the truth of him. But for everyone else? 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. This could all be a coincidence, of course. Perhaps Chamberlain and his cohort, for whatever private reason, were determined to see the Hitler they wanted to see, regardless of the evidence of their eyes and ears. Except that the same puzzling pattern crops up everywhere. 3. The judge was middle-aged, tall, white-haired, with an accent that put his roots squarely in the borough of Brooklyn. Let’s call him Solomon. He had served on the bench in New York State for over a decade. He wasn’t imperious or intimidating. He was thoughtful, with a surprisingly gentle manner. This was a Thursday, which in his courtroom was typically a busy day for arraignments. The defendants were all people who had been arrested in the past twenty-four hours on suspicion of some kind of crime. They’d just spent a sleepless night in a holding cell and now they were being brought into the courtroom in handcuffs, one by one. They sat on a low bench behind a partition, just to Solomon’s left. When each case was called, the clerk would hand Solomon a file containing the defendant’s rap sheet, and he would start flipping through, bringing himself up to speed. The defendant would stand directly in front of Solomon, with his lawyer on one side and the district attorney on the other. The two lawyers would talk. Solomon would listen. Then he would decide if the defendant would be required to post bail, and if so, how much the bail should be. Does this perfect stranger deserve his freedom? The hardest cases, he said later, involved kids. A sixteen-year-old would come in charged with some horrible crime. And he would know that if he set bail high enough, the child would end up in a “cage” in the city’s notorious Rikers Island facility, where—he put it as delicately as he could—there’s basically “a riot waiting to happen at every turn.”3 Those cases got even harder when he looked up into the courtroom and saw the kid’s mom sitting in the gallery. “I have a case like this every day,” he said. He had taken up meditation. He found that made things easier. Solomon was faced day in, day out with a version of the same problem that had faced Neville Chamberlain and the British diplomatic service in the fall of 1938: he was asked to assess the character of a stranger. And the criminal justice system assumes, as Chamberlain did, that those kinds of difficult decisions are better made when the judge and the judged meet each other first. Later that afternoon, for example, Solomon was confronted with an older man with thinning, close-cropped hair. He was wearing blue jeans and a guayabera shirt and spoke only Spanish. He’d been arrested because of an “incident” involving the six-year-old grandson of his girlfriend. The boy told his father right away. The district attorney asked for $100,000 bail. There was no way the man had the resources to raise that amount. If Solomon agreed with the DA, the man in the guayabera would go straight to jail. On the other hand, the man denied everything. He had two previous criminal offenses—but they were misdemeanors, from many years ago. He had a job as a mechanic, which he would lose if he went to jail, and he had an ex-wife and a fifteen-year-old son whom he was supporting with that income. So Solomon had to think about that fifteen-year-old, relying on his father’s paycheck. He also surely knew that six-year-olds are not the most reliable of witnesses. So there was no way for Solomon to be sure whether this would all turn out to be a massive misunderstanding or part of some sinister pattern. In other words, the decision about whether to let the man in the guayabera go free—or to hold him in jail until trial—was impossibly difficult. And to help him make the right call, Solomon did what all of us would do in that situation: he looked the man right in the eyes and tried to get a sense of who he really was. So did that help? Or are judges subject to the same puzzle as Neville Chamberlain? 4. The best answer we have to that question comes from a study conducted by a Harvard economist, three elite computer scientists, and a bail expert from the University of Chicago. The group—and for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to it by the economist’s name, Sendhil Mullainathan—decided to use New York City as their testing ground. They gathered up the records of 554,689 defendants brought before arraignment hearings in New York from 2008 to 2013—554,689 defendants in all. Of those, they found that the human judges of New York released just over 400,000. Mullainathan then built an artificial intelligence system, fed it the same information the prosecutors had given judges in those arraignment cases (the defendant’s age and criminal record), and told the computer to go through those 554,689 cases and make its own list of 400,000 people to release. It was a bake-off: man versus machine. Who made the best decisions? Whose list committed the fewest crimes while out on bail and was most likely to show up for their trial date? The results weren’t even close. 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.4 To give you just one sense of the mastery of Mullainathan’s machine, it flagged 1 percent of all the defendants as “high risk.” These are the people the computer thought should never be released prior to trial. According to the machine’s calculations, well over half of the people in that high-risk group would commit another crime if let out on bail. When the human judges looked at that same group of bad apples, though, they didn’t identify them as dangerous at all. They released 48.5 percent of them! “Many of the defendants flagged by the algorithm as high risk are treated by the judge as if they were low risk,” Team Mullainathan concluded in a particularly devastating passage. “Performing this exercise suggests that judges are not simply setting a high threshold for detention but are mis-ranking defendants.…The marginal defendants they select to detain are drawn from throughout the entire predicted risk distribution.” Translation: the bail decisions of judges are all over the place. I think you’ll agree that this is baffling. When judges make their bail decisions, they have access to three sources of information. They have the defendant’s record—his age, previous offenses, what happened the last time he was granted bail, where he lives, where he works. They have the testimony of the district attorney and the defendant’s lawyer: whatever information is communicated in the courtroom. And they have the evidence of their own eyes. What is my feeling about this man before me? Mullainathan’s computer, on the other hand, couldn’t see the defendant and it couldn’t hear anything that was said in the courtroom. All it had was the defendant’s age and rap sheet. It had a fraction of the information available to the judge—and it did a much better job at making bail decisions. In my second book, Blink, I told the story of how orchestras made much smarter recruiting decisions once they had prospective hires audition behind a screen. Taking information away from the hiring committee made for better judgments. But that was because the information gleaned from watching someone play is largely irrelevant. If you’re judging whether someone is a good violin player, knowing whether that person is big or small, handsome or homely, white or black isn’t going to help. In fact, it will probably only introduce biases that will make your job even harder. But when it comes to a bail decision, the extra information the judge has sounds like it should be really useful. In an earlier case in Solomon’s courtroom, a young man in basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt was charged with getting into a fight with someone, then buying a car with the man’s stolen credit card. In asking for bail, the district attorney pointed out that he had failed to appear for his court date after two previous arrests. That’s a serious red flag. But not all “FTAs” are identical. What if the defendant was given the wrong date? What if he would lose his job if he took off work that day, and decided it wasn’t worth it? What if his child was in the hospital? That’s what the defendant’s lawyer told the judge: Her client had a good excuse. The computer didn’t know that, but the judge did. How could that not help? In a similar vein, Solomon said the thing he’s most alert to in bail cases is “mental illness with an allegation of violence.” Those kinds of cases are a judge’s worst nightmare. They let someone out on bail, then that person stops taking their medication and goes on to commit some horrible crime. “It’s shoot a cop,” Solomon said. It’s drive a car into a minivan, killing a pregnant woman and her husband. It’s hurt a child. [It’s] shoving somebody in front of a subway train and killing them. It’s an awful situation at every possible angle.…No judge would ever want to be the one having made the release decision on that case. Some of the clues to that kind of situation are in the defendant’s file: medical records, previous hospitalizations, some mention of the defendant’s being found not competent. But other clues are found only in the moment. “You also will hear terms thrown around in the courtroom of ‘EDP’—emotionally disturbed person,” Solomon said. That will come from either the police department who’s brought them in and handed you an envelope that’s from a doctor at a hospital where he’s been screened at a psychiatric ER prior to arraignment.…Other times, that information will get into the DA’s folder and the DA will ask questions.…That’s a fact for me to think about. He’ll look at the defendant, in those cases—closely, carefully, searching for, as he put it, sort of a glassy-eyed look, not being able to make eye contact. And not the adolescent unable to make eye contact because the frontal lobe hasn’t developed. I’m talking about the adult off their meds.… Mullainathan’s machine can’t overhear the prosecutor talking about an EDP, and it can’t see that telltale glassy-eyed look. That fact should translate into a big advantage for Solomon and his fellow judges. But for some reason it doesn’t. 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? 5. Neville Chamberlain made his third and final visit to Germany at the end of September 1938, two weeks after his first visit. The meeting was in Munich at the Nazi Party’s offices—the F?hrerbau. Italian leader Benito Mussolini and French prime minister ?douard Daladier were also invited. The four of them met, with their aides, in Hitler’s private study. On the morning of the second day, Chamberlain asked Hitler if the two of them could meet alone. By this point, Chamberlain felt he had the measure of his adversary. When Hitler had said his ambitions were limited to Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain believed that “Herr Hitler was telling the truth.” It was now just a matter of getting that commitment in writing. Hitler took him to his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz. Chamberlain pulled out a piece of paper on which he had written a simple agreement and asked Hitler whether he would sign it. As the interpreter translated the words into German, “Hitler frequently ejaculated, ‘Ja! Ja!’ And at the end he said, ‘Yes I will certainly sign it,’” Chamberlain later wrote to one of his sisters. “‘When shall we do it?’ I said, ‘now,’ and we went at once to the writing table and put our signatures to the two copies which I had brought with me.” That afternoon, Chamberlain flew home to a hero’s welcome. A crowd of journalists surged toward him. He took the letter from his breast pocket and waved it to the crowd. “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor Herr Hitler, and here is a paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.” Then it was back to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.” The crowd cheered. “Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds.” In March 1939, Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. It had taken him less than six months to break his agreement with Chamberlain. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and the world was at war. We have, in other words, CIA officers who cannot make sense of their spies, judges who cannot make sense of their defendants, and prime ministers who cannot make sense of their adversaries. 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. 6. One last thing: Take a look at the following word, and fill in the two blank letters. Do it quickly, without thinking. G L _ _ This is called a word-completion task. Psychologists commonly use it to test things such as memory. I completed G L _ _ as GLUM. Remember that. The next word is: _ _TER I completed that as HATER. Remember that too. Here are the rest of the words: S_ _RE P_ _ N TOU_ _ ATT_ _ _ BO_ _ FL_ _ T SL_ T STR_ _ _ GO_ _ CHE_ _ _ _OR SL_ _ _ SC _ _ _ _ _ NNER B_ _ T PO _ _ _ BA_ _ _RA_ _ _ _EAT I started out with GLUM and HATER and ended up with SCARE, ATTACK, BORE, FLOUT, SLIT, CHEAT, TRAP, and DEFEAT. That’s a pretty morbid and melancholy list. But I don’t think that says anything about the darkness of my soul. I’m not melancholy. I’m an optimist. I think that the first word, GLUM, popped into my head, and then I just continued in that vein. A few years ago, a team of psychologists led by Emily Pronin gave a group of people that same exercise. Pronin had them fill in the blank spaces. Then she asked them the same question: What do you think your choices say about you? For instance, if you completed TOU_ _ as TOUCH, does that suggest that you are a different kind of person than if you completed it as TOUGH? The respondents took the same position I did. They’re just words. “I don’t agree with these word-stem completions as a measure of my personality,” one of Pronin’s subjects wrote. And the others in the group agreed: “These word completions don’t seem to reveal much about me at all.…Random completions.” “Some of the words I wrote seem to be the antithesis of how I view the world. For instance, I hope that I am not always concerned about being STRONG, the BEST, or a WINNER.” “I don’t really think that my word completions reveal that much about me.… Occurred as a result of happenstance.” “Not a whole lot.… They reveal vocabulary.” “I really don’t think there was any relationship.… The words are just random.” “The words PAIN, ATTACK, and THREAT seem similar, but I don’t know that they say anything about me.” But then things got interesting. Pronin gave the group other people’s words. These were perfect strangers. She asked the same question. What do you think this stranger’s choices reveal? And this time Pronin’s panel completely changed their minds. “He doesn’t seem to read too much, since the natural (to me) completion of B_ _K would be BOOK. BEAK seems rather random, and might indicate deliberate unfocus of mind.” “I get the feeling that whoever did this is pretty vain, but basically a nice guy.” Keep in mind that these are the exact same people who just moments before had denied that the exercise had any meaning at all. “The person seems goal-oriented and thinks about competitive settings.” “I have a feeling that the individual in question may be tired very often in his or her life. In addition, I think that he or she might be interested in having close personal interactions with someone of the opposite sex. The person may also enjoy playing games.” The same person who said, “These word completions don’t seem to reveal much about me at all” turned around and said, of a perfect stranger: “I think this girl is on her period.…I also think that she either feels she or someone else is in a dishonest sexual relationship, according to the words WHORE, SLOT (similar to slut), CHEAT.” The answers go on and on like this. And no one seemed even remotely aware that they had been trapped in a contradiction. “I guess there is some relationship.…He talks a lot about money and the BANK. A lot more correlation here.” “He seems to focus on competition and winning. This person could be an athlete or someone who is very competitive.” “It seems this individual has a generally positive outlook toward the things he endeavors. Most words, such as WINNER, SCORE, GOAL, indicate some sort of competitiveness, which combined with the jargon, indicate that he has some athletic competitive nature.” If the panel had seen my GLUM, HATER, SCARE, ATTACK, BORE, FLOUT, SLIT, CHEAT, TRAP, and DEFEAT, they would have worried for my soul. Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: 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. This is the problem at the heart of those first two puzzles. The officers on the Cuba desk of the CIA were sure they could evaluate the loyalty of their spies. Judges don’t throw up their hands at the prospect of assessing the character of defendants. They give themselves a minute or two, then authoritatively pass judgment. Neville Chamberlain never questioned the wisdom of his bold plan to avert war. If Hitler’s intentions were unclear, it was his job, as prime minister, to go to Germany and figure them out. 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. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy. 1 The one exception was Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. He met Hitler in 1937. He loved him. He compared him to Joan of Arc. 2 The Nazi official Henderson knew even better was G?ring, Hitler’s deputy. Henderson would go stag hunting with G?ring. They had long conversations. Henderson was convinced that G?ring wanted peace as well, and that underneath his Nazi bluster was a decent man. In a memoir of his time in Berlin, written just as war broke out, Henderson said that G?ring “loved animals and children; and, before ever he had one of his own, the top floor at Karinhall contained a vast playroom fitted up with every mechanical toy dear to the heart of a modern child. Nothing used to give him greater pleasure than to go and play there with them. The toys might, it is true, include models of airplanes dropping heavy bombs which exploded on defenseless towns or villages; but, as he observed when I reproached him on the subject, it was not part of the Nazi conception of life to be excessively civilized or to teach squeamishness to the young.” (In case you were wondering, that’s what Nazism was really аbout: tough-minded child-rearing.) 3 The law has since been changed. A defendant must be eighteen years old or above to be sent to Rikers. 4 Two technical points about the dueling lists of 400,000 defendants: When Mullainathan says that the computer’s list committed 25 percent fewer crimes than the judge’s list, he’s counting failure to appear for a trial date as a crime. Second, I’m sure you are wondering how Mullainathan could calculate, with such certainty, who would or wouldn’t end up committing a crime while out on pretrial release. It’s not because he has a crystal ball. It’s an estimate made on the basis of a highly sophisticated statistical analysis. Here’s the short version. Judges in New York City take turns doing bail hearings. Defendants are, essentially, randomly assigned to them for consideration. Judges in New York (as in all jurisdictions) vary dramatically in how likely they are to release someone, or how prohibitively high they set bail. Some judges are very permissive. Others are strict. So imagine that one set of strict judges sees 1,000 defendants and releases 25 percent of them. Another set of permissive judges sees 1,000 defendants, who are in every way equivalent to the other 1,000, and releases 75 percent of them. By comparing the crime rates of the released defendants in each group, you can get a sense of how many harmless people the strict judges jailed, and how many dangerous people the permissive judges set free. That estimate, in turn, can be applied to the machine’s predictions. When it passes judgment on its own 1,000 defendants, how much better is it than the strict judges on the one hand, and the permissive judges on the other? This sounds highly complicated, and it is. But it’s a well-established methodology. For a more complete explanation, I encourage you to read Mullainathan’s paper. Part Two Default to Truth CHAPTER THREE The Queen of Cuba 1. Let’s take a look at another Cuban spy story. In the early 1990s, thousands of Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled together crude boats—made of inner tubes and metal drums and wooden doors and any number of other stray parts—and set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety miles of the Florida Straits to the United States. By one estimate, as many as 24,000 people died attempting the journey. It was a human-rights disaster. In response, a group of Cuban emigr?s in Miami founded Hermanos al Rescate—Brothers to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift air force of single-engine Cessna Skymasters and took to the skies over the Florida Straits, searching for refugees from the air and radioing their coordinates to the Coast Guard. Hermanos al Rescate saved thousands of lives. They became heroes. As time passed, the emigr?s grew more ambitious. They began flying into Cuban airspace, dropping leaflets on Havana urging the Cuban people to rise up against Castro’s regime. The Cuban government, already embarrassed by the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose, coming to a head on February 24, 1996. That afternoon three Hermanos al Rescate planes took off for the Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets shot two of the planes out of the sky, killing all four people aboard. The response to the attack was immediate. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the Cuban government. A grave President Clinton held a press conference. The Cuban emigr? population in Miami was furious. The two planes had been shot down in international airspace, making the incident tantamount to an act of war. The radio chatter among the Cuban pilots was released to the press: “We hit him, cojones, we hit him.” “We retired them, cojones.” “We hit them.” “Fuckers.” “Mark the place where we retired them.” “This one won’t fuck with us anymore.” And then, after one of the MiGs zeroed in on the second Cessna: “Homeland or death, you bastards.” But in the midst of the controversy, the story suddenly shifted. A retired U.S. rear admiral named Eugene Carroll gave an interview to CNN. Carroll was an influential figure inside Washington. He had formerly served as the director of all U.S. armed forces in Europe, with 7,000 weapons at his disposal. Just before the Hermanos al Rescate shoot-down, Carroll said, he and a small group of military analysts had met with top Cuban officials. CNN: Admiral, can you tell me what happened on your trip to Cuba, who you spoke with and what you were told? Carroll: We were hosted by the Ministry of Defense. General Rosales del Toro.… We traveled around, inspected Cuban bases, Cuban schools, their partially completed nuclear power plant, and so on. In long discussions with General Rosales del Toro and his staff the question came up about these overflights from U.S. aircraft—not government aircraft, but private airplanes operating out of Miami. They asked us, “What would happen if we shot one of these down? We can, you know.” Carroll interpreted that question from his Cuban hosts as a thinly veiled warning. The interview continued: CNN: So when you returned, who did you relay this information to? Carroll: As soon as we could make appointments, we discussed the situation…with members of the State Department and members of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency—the DIA—is the third arm of the foreign intelligence triumvirate in the U.S. government, along with the CIA and the National Security Agency. If Carroll had met with the State Department and the DIA, he had delivered the Cuban warning about as high up in the American government as you could go. And did the State Department and DIA take those warnings to heart? Did they step in and stop Hermanos al Rescate from continuing their reckless forays into Cuban airspace? Obviously not.1 Carroll’s comments ricocheted around Washington, DC, policy circles. This was an embarrassing revelation. The Cuban shoot-down happened on February 24. Carroll’s warnings to the State Department and DIA were delivered on February 23. A prominent Washington insider met with U.S. officials the day before the crisis, explicitly warned them that the Cubans had lost patience with Hermanos al Rescate, and his warning was ignored. What began as a Cuban atrocity was now transformed into a story about American diplomatic incompetence. CNN: But what about the position that these were unarmed civilian planes? Carroll repeated what he had been told in Havana. Carroll: That is a very sensitive question. Where were they? What were they doing? I’ll give you an analogy. Suppose we had the planes flying over San Diego from Mexico, dropping leaflets and inciting against [California] Governor Wilson. How long would we tolerate these overflights after we had warned them against it? Fidel Castro wasn’t being invited onto CNN to defend himself. But he didn’t need to be. He had a rear admiral making his case. 2. The next three chapters of Talking to Strangers are devoted to the ideas of a psychologist named Tim Levine, who has thought as much about the problem of why we are deceived by strangers as anyone in social science. The second chapter looks at Levine’s theories through the story of Bernie Madoff, the investor who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The third examines the strange case of Jerry Sandusky, the Pennsylvania State University football coach convicted of sexual abuse. And this, the first, is about the fallout from that moment of crisis between the United States and Cuba in 1996. Does anything about Admiral Carroll and the Cuban shoot-downs strike you as odd? There are an awful lot of coincidences here. 1.The Cubans plan a deliberate murderous attack on U.S. citizens flying in international airspace. 2.It just so happens that the day before the attack, a prominent military insider delivers a stern warning to U.S. officials about the possibility of exactly that action. 3.And, fortuitously, that warning puts that same official, the day after the attack, in a position to make the Cuban case on one of the world’s most respected news networks. The timing of those three events is a little too perfect, isn’t it? If you were a public relations firm, trying to mute the fallout from a very controversial action, that’s exactly how you’d script it. Have a seemingly neutral expert available—right away—to say, “I warned them!” This is what a military counterintelligence analyst named Reg Brown thought in the days after the incident. Brown worked on the Latin American desk of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His job was to understand the ways in which the Cuban intelligence services were trying to influence American military operations. His business, in other words, was to be alert to the kinds of nuances, subtleties, and unexplained coincidences that the rest of us ignore, and Brown couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the Cubans had orchestrated the whole crisis. It turned out, for example, that the Cubans had a source inside Hermanos al Rescate—a pilot named Juan Pablo Roque. On the day before the attack, he had disappeared and resurfaced at Castro’s side in Havana. Clearly Roque told his bosses back home that Hermanos al Rescate had something planned for the 24th. That made it difficult for Brown to imagine that the date of the Carroll briefing had been chosen by chance. For maximum public relations impact, the Cubans would want their warning delivered the day before, wouldn’t they? That way the State Department and the DIA couldn’t wiggle out of the problem by saying that the warning was vague, or long ago. Carroll’s words were right in front of them on the day the pilots took off from Miami. So who arranged that meeting? Brown wondered. Who picked February 23? He did some digging, and the name he came up with startled him. It was a colleague of his at the DIA, a Cuban expert named Ana Belen Montes. Ana Montes was a star. She had been selected, repeatedly, for promotions and special career opportunities, showered with accolades and bonuses. Her reviews were glowing. She had come to the DIA from the Department of Justice, and in his recommendation, one of her former supervisors described her as the best employee he had ever had. She once got a medal from George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Her nickname inside the intelligence community was the “Queen of Cuba.” Weeks passed. Brown agonized. To accuse a colleague of treachery on the basis of such semi-paranoid speculation was an awfully big step, especially when the colleague was someone of Montes’s stature. Finally Brown made up his mind, taking his suspicions to a DIA counterintelligence officer named Scott Carmichael. “He came over and we walked in the neighborhood for a while during lunch hour,” Carmichael remembers of his first meeting with Reg Brown. “And he hardly even got to Montes. I mean most of it was listening to him saying, ‘Oh God.’ He was wringing his hands, saying, ‘I don’t want to do the wrong thing.’” Slowly, Carmichael drew him out. Everyone who worked on Cuba remembered the bombshell dropped by Florentino Aspillaga. The Cubans were good. And Brown had evidence of his own. He’d written a report in the late 1980s detailing the involvement of senior Cuban officials in international drug smuggling. “He identified specific senior Cuban officers who were directly involved,” Carmichael said, “and then provided the specifics. I mean, flights, the dates, times, the places, who did what to whom, the whole enchilada.” Then a few days before Brown’s report was released, the Cubans rounded up everyone he’d mentioned in his investigation, executed a number of them, and issued a public denial. “And Reg went, ‘What the fuck?’ There was a leak.” It made Brown paranoid. In 1994, two Cuban intelligence officers had defected and told a similar story: The Cubans had someone high inside American intelligence. So what was he to think? Brown said to Carmichael. Didn’t he have reason to be suspicious? Then he told Carmichael the other thing that had happened during the Hermanos al Rescate crisis. Montes worked at the DIA’s office on Bolling Air Force Base, in the Anacostia section of Washington, DC. When the planes were shot down, she was called in to the Pentagon: if you were one of the government’s leading Cuba experts, you were needed at the scene. The shoot-down happened on a Saturday. The following evening Brown happened to telephone, asking for Montes. “He said some woman answered the phone and told him that Ana had left,” Carmichael says. Earlier in the day, Montes had gotten a phone call—and afterward she’d been agitated. Then she’d told everyone in the situation room that she was tired, that there was nothing going on, that she was going home. Reg was just absolutely incredulous. This was just so counter to our culture that he couldn’t even believe it. Everybody understands that when a crisis occurs, you’re called in because you have some expertise that can add to the decision-making processes. And at the Pentagon, you were available until you were dismissed. It’s just understood. If somebody at that level calls you in, because all of a sudden those North Koreans have launched a missile at San Francisco, you don’t just decide to leave when you get tired and hungry. Everybody understands that. And yet she did that. And Reg was just, “What the hell?” In Brown’s thinking, if she really worked for the Cubans, they would have been desperate to hear from her: they would want to know what was happening in the situation room. Did she have a meeting that night with her handler? It was all a bit far-fetched, which is why Brown was so conflicted. But there were Cuban spies. He knew that. And here was this woman, taking a personal phone call and heading out the door in the middle of what was—for a Cuban specialist—just about the biggest crisis in a generation. And on top of that, she’s the one who had arranged the awfully convenient Admiral Carroll briefing? Brown told Carmichael that the Cubans had wanted to shoot down one of the Hermanos al Rescate planes for years. But they hadn’t, because they knew what a provocation that would be. It might serve as the excuse the United States needed to depose Fidel Castro or launch an invasion. To the Cubans it wasn’t worth it—unless, that is, they could figure out some way to turn public opinion in their favor. And so he finds out that Ana was not just one of the people in the room with Admiral Carroll, but she’s the one who organized it. He looked at that and went, “Holy shit, I’m looking at a Cuban counterintelligence influence operation to spin a story, and Ana is the one who led the effort to meet with Admiral Carroll. What the hell is that all about?” Months passed. Brown persisted. Finally, Carmichael pulled Montes’s file. She had passed her most recent polygraph with flying colors. She didn’t have a secret drinking problem, or unexplained sums in her bank account. She had no red flags. “After I had reviewed the security files and the personnel files on her, I thought, Reg is way off base here,” Carmichael said. “This woman is gonna be the next Director of Intelligence for DIA. She’s just fabulous.” He knew that in order to justify an investigation on the basis of speculation, he had to be meticulous. Reg Brown, he said, was “coming apart.” He had to satisfy Brown’s suspicions, one way or another—as he put it, to “document the living shit out of everything” because if word got out that Montes was under suspicion, “I knew I was gonna be facing a shit storm.” Carmichael called Montes in. They met in a conference room at Bolling. She was attractive, intelligent, slender, with short hair and sharp, almost severe features. Carmichael thought to himself, This woman is impressive. “When she sat down, she was sitting almost next to me, about that far away”—he held his hands three feet apart—“same side of the table. She crossed her legs. I don’t think that she did it on purpose, I think she was just getting comfortable. I happen to be a leg man—she couldn’t have known that, but I like legs and I know that I glanced down.” He asked her about the Admiral Carroll meeting. She had an answer. It wasn’t her idea at all. The son of someone she knew at DIA had accompanied Carroll to Cuba, and she’d gotten a call afterward. She said, “I know his dad, his dad called me, and he said, ‘Hey, if you want the latest scoop on Cuba, you should go see Admiral Carroll,’ and so I just called up Admiral Carroll and we looked at our schedules and decided the 23rd of February was the most convenient date that works for both of us, and that was it.” As it turned out, Carmichael knew the DIA employee she was talking about. He told her that he was going to call him up and corroborate her story. And she said, “Please do.” So what happened with the phone call in the situation room, he asked her? She said she didn’t remember getting a phone call, and to Carmichael it seemed as though she was being honest. It had been a crazy, hectic day, nine months before. What about leaving early? She said, “Well, yeah, I did leave.” Right away, she’s admitting to that. She’s not denying stuff, which might be a little suspicious. She said, “Yeah, I did leave early that day.” She says, “You know, it was on a Sunday, the cafeterias were closed. I’m a very picky eater, I have allergies, so I don’t eat stuff out of vending machines. I got there around six o’clock in the morning, it was about…eight o’clock at night. I’m starving to death, nothing was going on, they didn’t really need me, so I just decided I was going to get out of there. Go home and eat something.”2 That rang true to me. It did. After the interview, Carmichael set out to double-check her answers. The date of the briefing really did seem like a coincidence. Her friend’s son had gone to Cuba with Carroll. I learned that yeah, she does have allergies, she doesn’t eat out of vending machines, she’s very particular about what she eats. I thought, she’s there in the Pentagon on a Sunday. I’ve been there, the cafeteria’s not open. She went all day long without eating, she went home. I said, “Well, it kind of made sense.” What’d I have? I didn’t have anything. Oh well. Carmichael told Reg Brown not to worry. He turned his attention to other matters. Ana Montes went back to her office. All was forgotten and forgiven until one day in 2001, five years later, when it was discovered that every night Montes had gone home, typed up from memory all of the facts and insights she had learned that day at work, and sent it to her handlers in Havana. From the day she’d joined the DIA, Montes had been a Cuban spy. 3. In the classic spy novel, the secret agent is slippery and devious. We’re hoodwinked by the brilliance of the enemy. That was the way many CIA insiders explained away Florentino Aspillaga’s revelations: Castro is a genius. The agents were brilliant actors. In truth, however, the most dangerous spies are rarely diabolical. Aldrich Ames, maybe the most damaging traitor in American history, had mediocre performance reviews, a drinking problem, and didn’t even try to hide all the money he was getting from the Soviet Union for his spying. Ana Montes was scarcely any better. Right before she was arrested, the DIA found the codes she used to send her dispatches to Havana…in her purse. And in her apartment, she had a shortwave radio in a shoebox in her closet. Brian Latell, the CIA Cuba specialist who witnessed the Aspillaga disaster, knew Montes well. “She used to sit across the table from me at meetings that I convened, when I was [National Intelligence Officer],” Latell remembers. She wasn’t polished or smooth. He knew that she had a big reputation within the DIA, but to him, she always seemed a bit odd. I would try to engage her, and she would always give me these strange reactions.…When I would try to pin her down at some of these meetings that I convened, on—“What do you think Fidel’s motives are about this?”—she would fumble, in retrospect, the deer with the headlights in his eyes. She balked. Even physically she would show some kind of reaction that caused me to think, “Oh, she’s nervous because she’s just such a terrible analyst. She doesn’t know what to say.” One year, he says, Montes was accepted into the CIA’s Distinguished Analyst Program, a research sabbatical available to intelligence officers from across the government. Where did she ask to go? Cuba, of course. “She went to Cuba funded by this program. Can you imagine?” Latell said. If you were a Cuban spy, trying to conceal your intentions, would you request a paid sabbatical in Havana? Latell was speaking almost twenty years after it had happened, but the brazenness of her behavior still astounded him. She went to Cuba as a CIA distinguished intelligence analyst. Of course, they were delighted to have her, especially on our nickel, and I’m sure that they gave her all kinds of clandestine tradecraft training while she was there. I suspect—I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure—she met with Fidel. Fidel loved to meet with his principal agents, to encourage them, to congratulate them, to revel in the success they were having together against the CIA. When Montes came back to the Pentagon, she wrote a paper in which she didn’t even bother to hide her biases. There should have been all kinds of red flags raised and guns that went off when her paper was read by her supervisors, because she said things about the Cuban military that make absolutely no sense, except from [the Cubans’] point of view. But did anyone raise those red flags? Latell says he never once suspected she was a spy. “There were CIA officers of my rank, or close to my rank, who thought she was the best Cuban analyst there was,” he said. So he rationalized away his uneasiness. “I never trusted her, but for the wrong reasons, and that’s one of my great regrets. I was convinced that she was a terrible analyst on Cuba. Well, she was. Because she wasn’t working for us. She was working for Fidel. But I never connected the dots.” Nor did anyone else. Montes had a younger brother named Tito, who was an FBI agent. He had no idea. Her sister was also an FBI agent, who in fact played a key role in exposing a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. She had no idea. Montes’s boyfriend worked for the Pentagon as well. His specialty, believe it or not, was Latin American intelligence. His job was to go up against spies like his girlfriend. He had no idea. When Montes was finally arrested, the chief of her section called her coworkers together and told them the news. People started crying in disbelief. The DIA had psychologists lined up to provide on-site counseling services. Her supervisor was devastated. None of them had any idea. In her cubicle, she had a quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry V taped to her wall at eye level—for all the world to see. The king hath note of all that they intend, By interception Which they dream not of. Or, to put it a bit more plainly: The Queen of Cuba takes note of all that the U.S. intends, by means that all around her do not dream of. The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us. 4. Over the course of his career, the psychologist Tim Levine has conducted hundreds of versions of the same simple experiment. He invites students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test. What is the highest mountain in Asia? That kind of thing. If they answer the questions correctly, they win a cash prize. To help them out, they are given a partner. Someone they’ve never met before, who is, unknown to them, working for Levine. There’s an instructor in the room named Rachel. Midway through the test, Rachel suddenly gets called away. She leaves and goes upstairs. Then the carefully scripted performance begins. The partner says, “I don’t know about you, but I could use the money. I think the answers were left right there.” He points to an envelope lying in plain sight on the desk. “It’s up to them whether they cheat or not,” Levine explains. In about 30 percent of cases, they do. “Then,” Levine goes on, “we interview them, asking, ‘Did you cheat?’” 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.3 And at the core of that theory are the insights he gained from that first trivia-quiz study. I watched videotapes of a dozen or so of those post-experiment interviews with Levine in his office at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Here’s a typical one, featuring a slightly spaced-out young man. Let’s call him Philip. Interviewer: All right, so…have you played Trivial Pursuit games…before? Philip: Not very much, but I think I have. Interviewer: In the current game did you find the questions difficult? Philip: Yes, some were. I was like, “Well, what is that?” Interviewer: If you would scale them one to ten, if one was easy and ten was difficult, where do you think you would put them? Philip: I would put them [at] an eight. Interviewer: An eight. Yeah, they’re pretty tricky. Philip is then told that he and his partner did very well on the test. The interviewer asks him why. Philip: Teamwork. Interviewer: Teamwork? Philip: Yeah. Interviewer: OK, all right. Now, I called Rachel out of the room briefly. When she was gone, did you cheat? Philip: I guess. No. Philip slightly mumbles his answer. Then looks away. Interviewer: Are you telling the truth? Philip: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. When I interview your partner and I ask her, what is she going to say? At this point in the tape, there’s an uncomfortable silence, as if the student is trying to get his story straight. “He’s obviously thinking very hard,” Levine said. Philip: No. Interviewer: No? Philip: Yeah. Interviewer: OK, all right. Well, that’s all I need from you. Is Philip telling the truth? Levine has shown the Philip videotape to hundreds of people and nearly every viewer correctly pegs Philip as a cheater. As the “partner” confirmed to Levine, Philip looked inside the answer-filled envelope the minute Rachel left the room. In his exit interview, he lied. And it’s obvious. “He has no conviction,” Levine said. I felt the same thing. In fact, when Philip is asked, “Did you cheat?” and answers, “I guess. No,” I couldn’t contain myself, and I cried out, “Oh, he’s terrible.” Philip was looking away. He was nervous. He couldn’t keep a straight face. When the interviewer followed up with, “Are you telling the truth?” Philip actually paused, as if he had to think about it first. He was easy. But the more tapes we looked at, the harder it got. Here is a second case. Let’s call him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident. Interviewer: I have to ask, when Rachel left the room, did any cheating occur? Lucas: No. Interviewer: No? You telling me the truth? Lucas: Yes, I am. Interviewer: When I interview your partner and I ask her the same question, what do you think she’s going to say? Lucas: Same thing. “Everybody believes him,” Levine said. I believed him. Lucas was lying. Levine and I spent the better part of a morning watching his trivia-quiz videotapes. By the end, I was ready to throw up my hands. I had no idea what to make of anyone. 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. In one iteration of his experiment, Levine divided his tapes in half: twenty-two liars and twenty-two truth-tellers. On average, the people he had watch all forty-four videos correctly identified the liars 56 percent of the time. Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment. The average for all of them? 54 percent. Just about everyone is terrible: police officers, judges, therapists—even CIA officers running big spy networks overseas. Everyone. Why?4 Tim Levine’s answer is called the “Truth-Default Theory,” or TDT. Levine’s argument started with an insight that came from one of his graduate students, Hee Sun Park. It was right at the beginning of Levine’s research, when he was as baffled as the rest of his profession about why we are all so bad at something that, by rights, we should be good at. “Her big insight, the first one, was that the 54-percent deception-accuracy figure was averaging across truths and lies,” Levine said. “You come to a very different understanding if you break out…how much people are right on truths, and how much people are right on lies.” What he meant was this. If I tell you that your accuracy rate on Levine’s videos is right around 50 percent, the natural assumption is to think that you are just randomly guessing—that you have no idea what you are doing. But Park’s observation was that that’s not true. We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who are telling the truth. But we’re much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying. We go through all those videos, and we guess—“true, true, true”—which means we get most of the truthful interviews right, and most of the liars wrong. We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. Levine says his own experiment is an almost perfect illustration of this phenomenon. He invites people to play a trivia game for money. Suddenly the instructor is called out of the room. And she just happens to leave the answers to the test in plain view on her desk? Levine says that, logically, the subjects should roll their eyes at this point. These are college students. They’re not stupid. They’ve signed up for a psychological experiment. They’re given a “partner,” whom they’ve never met, who is egging them on to cheat. You would think that they might be even a little suspicious that things are not as they seem. But no! “Sometimes, they catch that the instructor leaving the room might be a setup,” Levine says. “The thing they almost never catch is that their partners are fake.…So they think that there might be hidden agendas. They think it might be a setup because experiments are setups, right? But this nice person they are talking and chatting to? Oh no.” They never question it. To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a “trigger.” A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. 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. This proposition sounds at first like the kind of hairsplitting that social scientists love to engage in. It is not. It’s a profound point that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Consider, for example, one of the most famous findings in all of psychology: Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. In 1961, Milgram recruited volunteers from New Haven to take part in what he said was a memory experiment. Each was met by a somber, imposing young man named John Williams, who explained that they were going to play the role of “teacher” in the experiment. Williams introduced them to another volunteer, a pleasant, middle-aged man named Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace, they were told, was to be the “learner.” He would sit in an adjoining room, wired to a complicated apparatus capable of delivering electrical shocks up to 450 volts. (If you’re curious about what 450 volts feels like, it’s just shy of the amount of electrical shock that leaves tissue damage.) The teacher-volunteer was instructed to give the learner a series of memory tasks, and each time the learner failed, the volunteer was to punish him with an ever-greater electrical shock, in order to see whether the threat of punishment affected someone’s ability to perform memory tasks. As the shocks escalated, Wallace would cry out in pain, and ultimately he started hammering on the walls. But if the “teacher” wavered, the imposing instructor would urge them on: “Please continue.” “The experiment requires that you continue.” “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” “You have no other choice, you must go on.” The reason the experiment is so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied. Sixty-five percent ended up administering the maximum dose to the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second World War—and the revelations about what German guards had been ordered to do in Nazi concentration camps—Milgram’s findings caused a sensation. But to Levine, there’s a second lesson to the experiment. The volunteer shows up and meets the imposing young John Williams. He was actually a local high-school biology teacher, chosen, in Milgram’s words, because he was “technical-looking and dry, the type you would later see on television in connection with the space program.” Everything Williams said during the experiment had been memorized from a script written by Milgram himself. “Mr. Wallace” was in fact a man named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Milgram liked him for the part of victim because he was “mild and submissive.” His cries of agony were taped and played over a loudspeaker. The experiment was a little amateur theatrical production. And the word amateur here is crucial. The Milgram experiment was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mr. Wallace, by Milgram’s own description, was a terrible actor. And everything about the experiment was, to put it mildly, more than a little far-fetched. The electric-shock machine didn’t actually give shocks. More than one participant saw the loudspeaker in the corner and wondered why Wallace’s cries were coming from there, not from behind the door to the room where Wallace was strapped in. And if the purpose of the experiment was to measure learning, why on earth did Williams spend the entire time with the teacher and not behind the door with the learner? Didn’t that make it obvious that what he really wanted to do was observe the person inflicting the pain, not the person receiving the pain? As hoaxes go, the Milgram experiment was pretty transparent. And just as with Levine’s trivia test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth. “I actually checked the death notices in the New Haven Register for at least two weeks after the experiment to see if I had been involved and a contributing factor in the death of the so-called learner—I was very relieved that his name did not appear,” one subject wrote to Milgram in a follow-up questionnaire. Another wrote, “Believe me, when no response came from Mr. Wallace with the stronger voltage I really believed the man was probably dead.” These are adults—not callow undergraduates—who were apparently convinced that a prestigious institution of higher learning would run a possibly lethal torture operation in one of its basements. “The experiment left such an effect on me,” another wrote, “that I spent the night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the fear that I might have killed that man in the chair.” But here’s the crucial detail. Milgram’s subjects weren’t hopelessly gullible. They had doubts—lots of doubts! In her fascinating history of the obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Perry interviews a retired toolmaker named Joe Dimow, who was one of Milgram’s original subjects. “I thought, ‘This is bizarre,’” Dimow told Perry. Dimow became convinced that Wallace was faking it. I said I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I had my suspicions about it. I thought, “If I’m right in my suspicions, then he [the learner] is in collusion with them; he must be. And I’m not delivering shocks at all. He’s just hollering out every once in a while.” But then Mr. Wallace came out of the locked room at the end of the experiment and put on a little act. He looked, Dimow remembers, “haggard” and emotional. “He came in with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping his face. He came up to me and he offered his hand to shake hands with me and he said, ‘I want to thank you for stopping it’.…When he came in, I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe it really was true.’” Dimow was pretty sure that he was being lied to. But all it took was for one of the liars to extend the pretense a little longer—look a little upset and mop his brow with a handkerchief—and Dimow folded his cards. Just look at the full statistics from the Milgram experiment: I fully believed the learner was getting painful shocks.56.1 percent Although I had some doubts, I believed the learner was probably getting the shocks.24 percent I just wasn’t sure whether the learner was getting the shocks or not.6.1 percent Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was probably not getting the shocks.11.4 percent I was certain the learner was not getting the shocks.2.4 percent Over 40 percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd—something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren’t enough to trigger them out of truth-default. That is Levine’s point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them. I’m going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it’s crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human. 5. Ana Belen Montes grew up in the affluent suburbs of Baltimore. Her father was a psychiatrist. She attended the University of Virginia, then received a master’s degree in foreign affairs from Johns Hopkins University. She was a passionate supporter of the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which the U.S. government was then working to overthrow, and her activism attracted the attention of a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In 1985 she made a secret visit to Havana. “Her handlers, with her unwitting assistance, assessed her vulnerabilities and exploited her psychological needs, ideology, and personal pathology to recruit her and keep her motivated to work for Havana,” the CIA concluded in a postmortem to her career. Her new compatriots encouraged her to apply for work in the U.S. intelligence community. That same year, she joined the DIA—and from there her ascent was swift. Montes arrived at her office first thing in the morning, ate lunch at her desk, and kept to herself. She lived alone in a two-bedroom condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. She never married. In the course of his investigation, Scott Carmichael—the DIA counterintelligence officer—collected every adjective used by Montes’s coworkers to describe her. It is an impressive list: shy, quiet, aloof, cool, independent, self-reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused, hardworking, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike, no-nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent. Ana Montes assumed that the reason for her meeting with Carmichael was that he was performing a routine security check. All intelligence officers are periodically vetted so that they can continue to hold a security clearance. She was brusque. “When she first came in she tried to blow me off by telling me—and it was true—she had just been named as the Acting Division Chief,” Carmichael remembered. “She had a ton of responsibilities, meetings and things to do, and she just didn’t have a lot of time.” Carmichael is a disarmingly boyish man, with fair hair and a substantial stomach. He looks, by his own estimation, like the late comedian and actor Chris Farley. She must have thought she could bully him. “I dealt with it the way you normally do,” he remembers: The first time you just acknowledge it. You say, “Oh, I understand. Yeah, I heard that, congratulations, great. I understand you’ve got a limited amount of time.” And then you just kind of ignore it, because if it takes you twelve days, it takes twelve days. You don’t let them go. But then she hit me with it again.…She really made a point of it. I hadn’t even settled in yet and she said, “Oh, but seriously, I’ve gotta leave by two,” or something like that, “because I’ve got all these things to do.” I’m like, “What the fuck?” That’s what I’m thinking.…I didn’t lose my temper, but I lost my patience. “Look, Ana. I have reason to suspect that you might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation. We need to sit down and talk about this.” Bam! Right between the eyes. Montes had been, by that point, a Cuban spy for nearly her entire government career. She had met with her handlers at least 300 times, handing over so many secrets that she ranks as one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history. She had secretly visited Cuba on several occasions. After her arrest, it was discovered that Fidel Castro had personally given her a medal. Through all of that, there hadn’t been even a whiff of suspicion. And suddenly, at the start of what she thought was a routine background check, a funny-looking Chris Farley character was pointing the finger at her. She sat there in shock. “She was just looking at me like a deer looking at the headlights, waiting for me to say another word, just waiting.” When Carmichael looked back on that meeting years later, he realized that was the first clue he had missed: her reaction made no sense. I just didn’t pick up on the fact that she never said, “What are you talking about?” Nothing like that. She didn’t say a freaking word. She just sat there and was listening. If I’d been astute, I’d have picked up on that. No denial, no confusion, no anger. Anybody who has been told they’re suspected of murder or something.…If they’re completely innocent it’s like, “What do you mean?” They’re going to say, “Wait a minute, you just accused me of some…I want to know what the fuck this is all about.” Eventually, they’ll get in your face, they’ll really get in your face. Ana didn’t do a freaking thing except sit there. Carmichael had doubts, right from the beginning. But doubts trigger disbelief only when you can’t explain them away. And he could easily explain them away. She was the Queen of Cuba, for goodness’ sake. How could the Queen of Cuba be a spy? He had said that line to her—“I have reason to suspect that you might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation”—only because he wanted her to take the meeting seriously. “I was anxious to get into it and get to the next step. Like I said, I’m just patting myself on the back: ‘That worked, that shut her up. I’m not going to hear any more of that crap anymore. Now, let’s get to this, get this done.’ That’s why I missed it.” They talked about the Admiral Carroll briefing. She had a good answer. They talked about why she abruptly left the Pentagon that day. She had an answer. She was being flirty, a little playful. He began to relax. He looked down at her legs again. Ana started doing this thing. She’s got her legs crossed and she’s bouncing her toe, like that. I don’t know if it was conscious…but what I do know is, that catches your eye.…We got more comfortable with one another, and she became just a little bit more flirty. Flirty? I don’t know, but cute sometimes in some of her responses to questions. They talked about the phone call. She said she never got a phone call, or at least she didn’t remember getting one. It should have been another red flag: the people who were with her that day in the situation room distinctly remembered her getting a phone call. But then again, it had been a long and stressful day. They had all been in the middle of an international crisis. Maybe they had confused her with someone else. There was one other thing—another moment when Carmichael saw something in her reaction that made him wonder. Near the end of the interview, he asked Montes a series of questions about what happened after she left the Pentagon that day. It was a standard investigative procedure. He just wanted as complete a picture as possible of her movements that evening. He asked her what she did after work. She said she drove home. He asked her where she parked. She said in the lot across the street. He asked her if she saw anyone else as she was parking. Did she say hello to anyone? She said no. I said, “OK, well, so what’d you do? You parked your car and you walked across the street”—and while I’m doing this is when the change of demeanor occurred. Keep in mind, I’d been talking to her for almost two hours and by that time, Ana and I were almost like buddies, not that close, but we have a great rapport going. She’s actually joking about stuff and making funny remarks every once in a while about stuff—it’s that casual and that warm, if you will. Then all of a sudden, this huge change came over her. You could see it, one minute she’s just almost flirting and stuff, having a good time.…All of a sudden she changed. It’s like a little kid who has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and he’s got it behind his back, and Mom says, “What do you have?” She was looking at me and denying, but…with that look like, “What do you know? How do you know? Are you going to catch me? I don’t want to get caught.” After her arrest, investigators discovered what had really happened that night. The Cubans had an arrangement with her: if she ever spotted one of her old handlers on the street, it meant that her spymasters urgently needed to talk to her in person. She should keep walking and meet them the following morning at a prearranged site. That night, when she got home from the Pentagon, she saw one of her old handlers standing by her apartment building. So when Carmichael asked her, pointedly, “Who did you see? Did you see anyone as you came home?” she must have thought that he knew about the arrangement—that he was on to her. She was scared to fucking death. She thought I knew it and I didn’t. I had no idea, I didn’t know what I had. I knew I had something, I knew there was something. After the interview, I would look back on it…and what did I do? I did the same thing every human being does.…I rationalized it away. I thought, Well, maybe she’s been seeing a married guy…and she didn’t want to tell me. Or maybe she’s a lesbian or something and she was hooking up with a girlfriend that she doesn’t want us to know [about], and she’s worried about that. I started thinking about all these other possibilities and I sort of accepted it, just enough so that I wouldn’t keep going crazy. I accepted it. 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. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all. He did what Truth-Default Theory would predict any of us would do: he operated from the assumption that Ana Montes was telling the truth, and—almost without realizing it—worked to square everything she said with that assumption. We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high. Carmichael was nowhere near that point. The simple truth, Levine argues, is that lie detection does not—cannot—work the way we expect it to work. In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time. You ask your husband if he is having an affair, and he says no, and you believe him. Your default is that he is telling the truth. And whatever little inconsistencies you spot in his story, you explain away. But three months later you happen to notice an unusual hotel charge on his credit-card bill, and the combination of that and the weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious phone calls pushes you over the top. That’s how lies are detected. This is the explanation for the first of the puzzles, why the Cubans were able to pull the wool over the CIA’s eyes for so long. That story is not an indictment of the agency’s competence. It just reflects the fact that CIA officers are—like the rest of us—human, equipped with the same set of biases to truth as everyone else. Carmichael went back to Reg Brown and tried to explain. I said, “Reg, I realize what it looks like to you, I understand your reasoning that you think that this is a deliberate influence operation. Looks like it. But if it was, I can’t point a finger [to] it to say she was part of a deliberate effort. It just doesn’t make any sense.…At the end of the day, I just had to close out the case.” 6. Four years after Scott Carmichael’s interview with Ana Montes, one of his colleagues at the DIA met an analyst for the National Security Agency at an interagency meeting. The NSA is the third arm of the U.S. intelligence network, along with the CIA and the DIA. They are the code-breakers, and the analyst said that her agency had had some success with the codes that the Cubans were using to communicate with their agents. The codes were long rows of numbers, broadcast at regular intervals over shortwave radio, and the NSA had managed to decode a few snippets. They had given the list of tidbits to the FBI two and a half years before, but had heard nothing back. Out of frustration, the NSA analyst decided to share a few details with her DIA counterpart. The Cubans had a highly placed spy in Washington whom they called “Agent S,” she said. Agent S had an interest in something called a “safe” system. And Agent S had apparently visited the American base at Guant?namo Bay in the two-week time frame from July 4 to July 18, 1996. The man from the DIA was alarmed. “SAFE”5 was the name of the DIA’s internal computer-messaging archive. That strongly suggested that Agent S was at the DIA, or at least closely affiliated with the DIA. He came back and told his supervisors. They told Carmichael. He was angry. The FBI had been working on a spy case potentially involving a DIA employee for two and a half years, and they hadn’t told him? He was the DIA’s counterintelligence investigator! He knew exactly what he had to do—a search of the DIA computer system. Any Department of Defense employee who travels to Guant?namo Bay needs to get approval. They need to send two messages through the Pentagon system, asking first for permission to travel and then for permission to talk to whomever they wish to interview at the base. “Okay, so two messages,” Carmichael said. He guessed that the earliest anyone traveling to Guant?namo Bay in July would apply for their clearances was April. So he had his search parameters: travel-authority and security-clearance requests from DIA employees regarding Guant?namo Bay made between April 1 and July 18, 1996. He told his coworker, “Gator” Johnson, to run the same search simultaneously. Two heads would be better than one. What [the computer system] did back in those days, it would set up a hit file. It would electronically stack up all your messages and tell you, “You’ve got X number of hits.” I can hear Gator over there…I can hear him tapping away and I knew he hadn’t even finished his query yet and I already had my hit file to go through, so I thought, I’m going through them real quickly, just to see if any [name] pops out at me, and that’s when I’m pretty sure it was the twentieth one hit me. It was Ana B. Montes. The game was fucking over, and I mean it was over in a heartbeat.…I was really stunned—speechless stunned. I could have fallen out of my chair. I literally backed up—I was on wheels—I was literally distancing myself from this bad news.…I literally backed up all the way to the end of my cubicle and Gator is still going dink-pink-tink-tink. I said, “Oh shit.” 1 The State Department had informed Hermanos al Rescate, through official channels, that any flight plan with Cuba as a destination was unacceptable. But clearly those warnings weren’t working. CNN: Admiral, the State Department had issued other warnings to Brothers to the Rescue about this, haven’t they? Carroll: Not effective ones.…They know that [Brothers] have been filing flight plans that were false and then going to Cuba, and this was part of the Cuban resentment, was that the government wasn’t enforcing its own regulations. 2 This was in fact true. Montes strictly controlled her diet, at one point limiting herself to “eating only unseasoned boiled potatoes.” CIA-led psychologists later concluded she had borderline OCD. She also took very long showers with different types of soap and wore gloves when she drove her car. Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that people would explain away their suspicions about her often-strange behavior. 3 Levine’s theories are laid out in his book, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2019). If you want to understand how deception works, there is no better place to start. 4 In my book Blink, I wrote of Paul Ekman’s claim that a small number of people are capable of successfully detecting liars. For more on the Ekman-Levine debate, see the extended commentary in the Notes. 5 SAFE stands for Security Analyst File Environment. I love it when people start with the acronym and work backward to create the full name. CHAPTER FOUR The Holy Fool 1. In November 2003, Nat Simons, a portfolio manager for the Long Island–based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, wrote a worried email to several of his colleagues. Through a complicated set of financial arrangements, Renaissance found itself with a stake in a fund run by an investor in New York named Bernard Madoff, and Madoff made Simons uneasy. If you worked in the financial world in New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, chances are you’d heard of Bernard Madoff. He worked out of an elegant office tower in Midtown Manhattan called the Lipstick Building. He served on the boards of a number of important financial-industry associations. He moved between the monied circles of the Hamptons and Palm Beach. He had an imperious manner and a flowing mane of white hair. He was reclusive, secretive. And that last fact was what made Simons uneasy. He’d heard rumors. Someone he trusted, he wrote in the group email, “told us in confidence that he believes that Madoff will have a serious problem within a year.” He went on: “Throw in that his brother-in-law is his auditor and his son is also high up in the organization, and you have the risk of some nasty allegations, the freezing of accounts, etc.” The next day Henry Laufer, one of the firm’s senior executives, wrote back. He agreed. Renaissance, he added, had “independent evidence” that something was amiss with Madoff. Then Renaissance’s risk manager, Paul Broder—the person responsible for making sure the fund didn’t put its money anywhere dangerous—weighed in with a long, detailed analysis of the trading strategy that Madoff claimed to be using. “None of it seems to add up,” he concluded. The three of them decided to conduct their own in-house investigation. Their suspicions deepened. “I came to the conclusion that we didn’t understand what he was doing,” Broder would say later. “We had no idea how he was making his money. The volume numbers that he suggested he was doing [were] not supported by any evidence we could find.” Renaissance had doubts. So did Renaissance sell off its stake in Madoff? Not quite. They cut their stake in half. They hedged their bets. Five years later, after Madoff had been exposed as a fraud—the mastermind of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history—federal investigators sat down with Nat Simons and asked him to explain why. “I never, as the manager, entertained the thought that it was truly fraudulent,” Simons said. He was willing to admit that he didn’t understand what Madoff was up to, and that Madoff smelled a little funny. But he wasn’t willing to believe that he was an out-and-out liar. Simons had doubts, but not enough doubts. He defaulted to truth. The emails written between Simons and Laufer were discovered during a routine audit by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency responsible for monitoring the hedge-fund industry. It wasn’t the first time the SEC had run across doubts about Madoff’s operations. Madoff claimed to follow an investment strategy linked to the stock market, which meant that like any other market-based strategy, his returns ought to go up and down as the market went up and down. But Madoff’s returns were rock steady—which defied all logic. An SEC investigator named Peter Lamore once went to see Madoff to get an explanation. Madoff’s answer was that, essentially, he could see around corners; he had an infallible “gut feel” for when to get out of the market just before a downswing, and back into the market just before an upswing. “I asked him repeatedly,” Lamore recalled later: I thought his gut feel was, you know, strange, suspicious. You know, I kept trying to press him. I thought there was something else…I thought, you know, he was getting some sort of insight into the overall broad market that other people weren’t getting. So I repeatedly sort of pressed him on that. I asked Bernie repeatedly over and over again, and at some point, I mean, I’m not sure what else to do. Lamore took his doubts to his boss, Robert Sollazzo, who had doubts too. But not enough doubts. As the SEC postmortem on the Madoff case concluded, “Sollazzo did not find that Madoff’s claim to be trading on ‘gut feel’ was ‘necessarily…ridiculous.’” The SEC defaulted to truth, and the fraud continued. Across Wall Street, in fact, countless people who had had dealings with Madoff thought that something didn’t quite add up about him. Several investment banks steered clear of him. Even the real-estate broker who rented him his office space thought he was a bit off. But no one did anything about it, or jumped to the conclusion that he was history’s greatest con man. In the Madoff case, everyone defaulted to truth—everyone, that is, except one person. In early February 2009—just over a month after Madoff turned himself in to authorities—a man named Harry Markopolos testified at a nationally televised hearing before Congress. He was an independent fraud investigator. He wore an ill-fitting green suit. He spoke nervously and tentatively, with an upstate New York accent. No one had ever heard of him. “My team and I tried our best to get the SEC to investigate and shut down the Madoff Ponzi scheme with repeated and credible warnings to the SEC that started in May 2000,” Markopolos testified to a rapt audience. Markopolos said that he and a few colleagues put together charts and graphs, ran computer models, and poked around in Europe, where Madoff was raising the bulk of his money: “We knew then that we had provided enough red flags and mathematical proofs to the SEC for them where they should have been able to shut him down right then and there at under $7 billion.” When the SEC did nothing, Markopolos came back in October 2001. Then again in 2005, 2007, and 2008. Each time he got nowhere. Reading slowly from his notes, Markopolos described years of frustration. I gift-wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them, and somehow they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities. 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. Midway through the hearing, one of the congressmen asked Markopolos if he would come to Washington and run the SEC. In the aftermath of one of the worst financial scandals in history, the feeling was that Harry Markopolos was someone we could all learn from. Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free. Or is it? Here we come to the second, crucial component of Tim Levine’s ideas about deception and truth-default. 2. Harry Markopolos is wiry and energetic. He’s well into middle age, but looks much younger. He’s compelling and likable, a talker—although he tells awkward jokes that sometimes stop conversation. He describes himself as obsessive: the sort to wipe down his keyboard with disinfectant after he opens his computer. He is what’s known on Wall Street as a quant, a numbers guy. “For me, math is truth,” he says. When he analyzes an investment opportunity or a company, he prefers not to meet any of the principals personally; he doesn’t want to make the Neville Chamberlain error. I want to hear and see what they’re saying remotely through their public appearances, through their financial statements, and then I want to analyze that information mathematically using these simple techniques.…I want to find the truth. I don’t want to have a favorable opinion of somebody who glad-hands me, because that could only negatively affect my case. Markopolos grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, the child of Greek immigrants. His family ran a chain of Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips outlets. “My uncles, they would chase after the people that did the dine and dash. They would go out there and catch them, make them pay,” he remembers. I saw my dad get in fights with customers, chasing customers down. I saw people stealing silverware. Not even silverware—tableware.…I remember one guy, he’s huge, and he is eating off of other people’s plates that have left the counter, and my uncle says, “You can’t do that.” And the guy says, “Yes I can, they didn’t eat the food.” So my uncle goes to the other side of the counter, picks this guy up by his beard and lifts him up and he keeps lifting him up.…And I’m thinking, my uncle’s dead. This guy was like six foot six. My uncle’s going to be killed. Fortunately, other customers in the restaurant stood up. Otherwise I think my uncle would’ve been a dead man. The standard immigrant-entrepreneur story is about the redemptive power of grit and ingenuity. To hear Markopolos tell it, his early experiences in the family business taught him instead how dark and dangerous the world was: I saw a lot of theft in the Arthur Treacher’s. And so I became fraud-aware at a formative age, in my teens and early twenties. And I saw what people are capable of doing, because when you run a business, five to six percent of your revenues are going to be lost to theft. That’s the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ statistics. I didn’t know the statistics when I was a young ’un. That organization didn’t exist. But I saw it. I saw our chicken and shrimp sprout legs and walk out the back door on a regular basis. They would throw cases of that stuff in the back of their cars. That was the employees. When Harry Markopolos was in business school, one of his professors gave him an A. But Markopolos double-checked the formula the professor used to calculate grades and realized that there had been a mistake. He had actually earned an A-minus. He went to the professor and complained. In his first job out of business school, he worked for a brokerage selling over-the-counter stocks, and one of the rules of that marketplace is that the broker must report any trade within ninety seconds. Markopolos discovered that his new employer was waiting longer than ninety seconds. He reported his own bosses to the regulators. Nobody likes a tattletale, we learn as children, understanding that sometimes pursuing what seems fair and moral comes with an unacceptable social cost. If Markopolos was ever told that as a child, he certainly didn’t listen. Markopolos first heard about Madoff in the late 1980s. The hedge fund he worked for had noticed Madoff’s spectacular returns, and they wanted Markopolos to copy Madoff’s strategy. Markopolos tried. But he couldn’t figure out what Madoff’s strategy was. Madoff claimed to be making his money based on heavy trading of a financial instrument known as a derivative. But there was simply no trace of Madoff in those markets. “I was trading huge amounts of derivatives every year, and so I had relationships with the largest investment banks that traded derivatives,” Markopolos remembers. So I called the people that I knew on the trading desks: “Are you trading with Madoff?” They all said no. Well, if you are trading derivatives, you pretty much have to go to the largest five banks to trade the size that he was trading. If the largest five banks don’t know your trades and are not seeing your business, then you have to be a Ponzi scheme. It’s that easy. It was not a hard case. All I had to do was pick up the phone, really. At that point, Markopolos was precisely where the people at Renaissance would be several years later. He had done the math, and he had doubts. Madoff’s business didn’t make sense. The difference between Markopolos and Renaissance, however, is that Renaissance trusted the system. 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? As Nat Simons, the Renaissance executive, said later, “You just assume that someone was paying attention.” Renaissance Technologies, it should be pointed out, was founded in the 1980s by a group of mathematicians and code-breakers. Over its history, it has probably made more money than any other hedge fund in history. Laufer, the Renaissance executive to whom Simons turned for advice, has a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University and has written books and articles with titles such as Normal Two-Dimensional Singularities and “On Minimally Elliptic Singularities.” The people at Renaissance are brilliant. Yet in one crucial respect, they were exactly like the students in Levine’s experiment who watched the instructor leave, spotted the envelope with the answers lying conspicuously on the desk, but couldn’t quite make the leap to believe that it was all a setup. But not Markopolos. He was armed with all the same facts but none of the faith in the system. To him, dishonesty and stupidity are everywhere. “People have too much faith in large organizations,” he said. “They trust the accounting firms, which you should never trust because they’re incompetent. On a best day they’re incompetent, on a bad day they’re crooked, and aiding and abetting the fraud, looking the other way.” He went on. “I think the insurance industry is totally corrupt. They’ve had no oversight forever, and they’re dealing with trillions in assets and liabilities.” He thought between 20 and 25 percent of public companies were cheating on their financial statements. “You want to talk of another fraud?” he said at one point, out of the blue. He had just published a memoir and was now in the habit of scrutinizing his royalty statements. He called them “Chinese batshit.” The crooks he investigates, he said, have financial statements “more believable than my publisher’s.” He said the one fact he keeps in mind whenever he goes to the doctor’s office is that forty cents of every health-care dollar goes to either fraud or waste. Whoever is treating me, I make sure I tell them that I’m a white-collar-criminal investigator, and I let them know that there’s a lot of fraud in medicine. I tell them that statistic. I do that so they don’t mess with me or my family. There is no high threshold in Markopolos’s mind before doubts turn into disbelief. He has no threshold at all. 3. In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the “Holy Fool.” 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. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted. In one Russian fable, a Holy Fool looks at a famous icon of the Virgin Mary and declares it the work of the devil. It’s an outrageous, heretical claim. But then someone throws a stone at the image and the facade cracks, revealing the face of Satan. Every culture has its version of the Holy Fool. In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous children’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the king walks down the street in what he has been told is a magical outfit. No one says a word except a small boy, who cries out, “Look at the king! He’s not wearing anything at all!” The little boy is a Holy Fool. The tailors who sold the king his clothes told him they would be invisible to anyone unfit for their job. The adults said nothing, for fear of being labeled incompetent. The little boy didn’t care. The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution—and, in many cases, the support of their peers—in the service of exposing fraud and deceit. What sets the Holy Fool apart is a different sense of the possibility of deception. In real life, Tim Levine reminds us, lies are rare. And those lies that are told are told by a very small subset of people. That’s why it doesn’t matter so much that we are terrible at detecting lies in real life. Under the circumstances, in fact, defaulting to truth makes logical sense. If the person behind the counter at the coffee shop says your total with tax is $6.74, you can do the math yourself to double-check their calculations, holding up the line and wasting thirty seconds of your time. Or you can simply assume the salesperson is telling you the truth, because on balance most people do tell the truth. That’s what Scott Carmichael did. He was faced with two alternatives. Reg Brown said that Ana Montes was behaving suspiciously. Ana Montes, by contrast, had a perfectly innocent explanation for her actions. On one hand was the exceedingly rare possibility that one of the most respected figures at the DIA was a spy. On the other hand was the far more likely scenario that Brown was just being paranoid. Carmichael went with the odds: that’s what we do when we default to truth. Nat Simons went with the odds as well. Madoff could have been the mastermind of the greatest financial fraud in history, but what were the chances of that? The Holy Fool is someone who doesn’t think this way. The statistics say that the liar and the con man are rare. But to the Holy Fool, they are everywhere. 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. Levine argues that over the course of evolution, human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behaviors of those around you. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. As he puts it, the trade-off between truth-default and the risk of deception is a great deal for us. What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. Sure, we get deceived once in a while. That is just the cost of doing business. That sounds callous, because it’s easy to see all the damage done by people like Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff. Because we trust implicitly, spies go undetected, criminals roam free, and lives are damaged. 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.1 4. In the summer of 2002, Harry Markopolos traveled to Europe. He and a colleague were looking for investors for a new fund they were starting. He met with asset managers in Paris and Geneva and all the centers of capital across Western Europe, and what he learned stunned him. Everyone had invested with Madoff. If you stayed in New York and talked to people on Wall Street, it was easy to think that Madoff was a local phenomenon, one of many money managers who served the wealthy of the East Coast. But Madoff, Markopolos realized, was international. The size of his fraudulent empire was much, much larger than Markopolos had previously imagined. It was then that Markopolos came to believe his life was in danger. Countless powerful and wealthy people out there had a deep-seated interest in keeping Madoff afloat. Was that why his repeated entreaties to regulators went nowhere? Markopolos’s name was known to prominent people at the SEC. Until the Ponzi scheme was publicly exposed, he could not be safe. He decided that the next logical step was to approach New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who had shown himself to be one of the few elected officials interested in investigating Wall Street. But he needed to be careful. Spitzer came from a wealthy New York City family. Was it possible that he, too, had invested with Madoff? Markopolos learned that Spitzer was going to be in Boston giving a speech at the John F. Kennedy Library. He printed out his documents on clean sheets of paper, removing all references to himself, and put them in a plain brown 9x12 envelope. Then, to be safe, he put that envelope inside a larger plain brown envelope. He wore a pair of gloves, so he left no fingerprints on the documents. He put on extra-heavy clothing, and over that the biggest coat he owned. He did not want to be recognized. He made his way to the JFK Library and sat unobtrusively to one side. Then, at the end of the speech, he went up to try to give the documents to Spitzer personally. But he couldn’t get close enough—so instead he handed them to a woman in Spitzer’s party, with instructions to pass them along to her boss. “I’m sitting there, and I have the documents,” Markopolos remembers. I’m going to hand them to him, but after the event, I give it to a woman to hand it to Eliot Spitzer because I can’t get to him. He’s just surrounded by people. Then he heads out the back door. I think he’s going to go to the restroom and go to have dinner next door, all right? I’m not invited to the dinner. He’s heading out the back door to get in a limo to the airport to catch the last shuttle flight to New York.…Eliot never got my package. It is worth mentioning that at the time Markopolos was president of the Boston Security Analysts Society, a trade group with a membership of 4,000 professionals. He didn’t have to show up incognito at Spitzer’s speech, wearing a bulky overcoat and clutching a sheaf of documents wrapped inside two plain brown envelopes. He could have just called Spitzer’s office directly and asked for a meeting. I asked him about that: Markopolos: That’s another regret of mine. I hold myself responsible for that. Spitzer was the guy. I should’ve just called him. Maybe I would’ve gotten through, maybe I wouldn’t have, but I think I would have. MG: You had standing. You were— Markopolos: President of the Security Analysts.…If the past president or current president…calls the boss and says, “I have the biggest scheme ever. It’s right in your backyard,” I think I would’ve gotten in. MG: Why don’t you think you did that? Markopolos: Woulda, coulda, shouldas. Regrets, you know. There’s no perfect investigation and I made my share of mistakes, too. I should have. Markopolos sees his mistake now, with the benefit of over a decade of hindsight. But in the midst of things, the same brilliant mind that was capable of unraveling Madoff’s deceptions was incapable of getting people in positions of responsibility to take him seriously. That’s the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters. As Levine writes: Being deceived once in a while is not going to prevent us from passing on our genes or seriously threaten the survival of the species. Efficient communication, on the other hand, has huge implications for our survival. The trade-off just isn’t much of a trade-off. Markopolos’s communication at the library was, to put it mildly, not efficient. The woman he gave the envelope to, by the way? She wasn’t one of Spitzer’s aides. She worked for the JFK Library. She had no more special access to Spitzer than he did. And even if she had, she would’ve almost certainly seen it as her responsibility to protect a public figure like Spitzer from mysterious men in double-size overcoats clutching plain brown envelopes. 5. After his failures with the SEC, Markopolos began carrying a Smith and Wesson handgun. He went to see the local police chief in the small Massachusetts town where he lived. Markopolos told him of his work against Madoff. His life was in danger, he said, but he begged him not to put that fact in the precinct log. The chief asked him if he wanted to wear body armor. Markopolos declined. He had spent seventeen years in the Army Reserves and knew something about lethal tactics. His assassins, he reasoned, would be professionals. They would give him two shots to the back of the head. Body armor wouldn’t matter. Markopolos installed a high-tech alarm system in his house. He replaced the locks. He made sure to take a different route home every night. He checked his rearview mirror. When Madoff turned himself in, Markopolos thought—for a moment—that he might finally be safe. But then he realized that he had only replaced one threat with another. Wouldn’t the SEC now be after his files? After all, he had years of meticulously documented evidence of, at the least, their incompetence and, at the most, their criminal complicity. If they came for him, he concluded, his only hope would be to hold them off as long as possible, until he could get help. He loaded up a twelve-gauge shotgun and added six more rounds to the stock. He hung a bandolier of twenty extra rounds on his gun cabinet. Then he dug out his gas mask from his army days. What if they came in using tear gas? He sat at home, guns at the ready—while the rest of us calmly went about our business. 1 But wait. Don’t we want counterintelligence officers to be Holy Fools? Isn’t this just the profession where having someone who suspects everyone makes sense? Not at all. One of Scott Carmichael’s notorious predecessors was James Angleton, who ran the counterintelligence operations of the CIA during the last decades of the Cold War. Angleton became convinced there was a Soviet mole high inside the agency. He launched an investigation that eventually covered 120 CIA officials. He couldn’t find the spy. In frustration, Angleton ordered many in the Soviet division to pack their bags. Hundreds of people—Russian specialists with enormous knowledge and experience of America’s chief adversary—were shipped elsewhere. Morale plummeted. Case officers stopped recruiting new agents. Ultimately, one of Angleton’s senior staffers looked at the crippling costs of more than a decade of paranoia and jumped to the final, paranoid conclusion: if you were the Soviet Union and you wanted to cripple the CIA, the most efficient way to do that would be to have your mole lead a lengthy, damaging, exhaustive hunt for a mole. Which meant the mole must be Angleton. The final casualty of James Angleton’s witch hunt? James Angleton. He was pushed out of the CIA in 1974, after thirty-one years. Had Scott Carmichael behaved like James Angleton and suspected everyone of being a spy, the DIA would have collapsed in a cloud of paranoia and mistrust like the CIA’s Soviet division. CHAPTER FIVE Case Study: The Boy in the Shower 1. Prosecution: When you were a graduate assistant in 2001, did something occur that was unusual? McQueary: Yes. P: Could you tell the jury about that occurrence? March 21, 2017. Dauphin County Courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The witness is Michael McQueary, former quarterback turned assistant coach of the Pennsylvania State University football team: strapping, self-confident, with close-cropped hair the color of paprika. His interrogator is the Deputy Attorney General for the state of Pennsylvania, Laura Ditka. McQueary: One night I made my way to the football building—Lasch Football Building—and proceeded to one of the locker rooms in the building.…I opened the locker room door. I heard showers running, heard slapping sounds, and entered another doorway that was already propped up open. My locker, in an aisle of lockers, was immediately to my right. Turned to my locker, and obviously I knew someone was in the locker room taking a shower. And the slapping sounds alerted me that something more than just a shower was going on. At that point, Ditka stops him. What time of day was it? McQueary says, 8:30 at night on a Friday. That corner of the campus is quiet. The Lasch Building is all but deserted. The doors are locked. P: OK. I interrupted you. I wanted to ask you another question. You’ve described something as slapping sounds. You aren’t talking about like clapping, like applause? McQueary: No, no. P: You were talking about a different kind of sound? McQueary: Yes. McQueary said he looked over his right shoulder to a mirror on the wall, which allowed him to see, at an angle, into the shower. He saw a man, naked, standing behind someone he called a “minor individual.” P: Were you able to make—you say a minor individual. Are we talking about a seventeen- or sixteen-year-old, or somebody who appeared younger? McQueary: Oh, younger. P: OK. What would be the estimation of the age of the boy you saw? McQueary: Roughly ten to twelve years old. P: OK. Were they clothed or unclothed? McQueary: Unclothed, naked. P: Did you see any movement? McQueary: Slow, very subtle movement, but hardly any. P: OK. But slow, subtle movement that you saw, what kind of movement was it? What was moving? McQueary: It was Jerry behind the boy, right up against him. P: Skin to skin? McQueary: Yes, absolutely. P: Stomach to back? McQueary: Yes. The “Jerry” McQueary was referring to was Jerry Sandusky, who had then just retired as defensive coordinator of the Penn State football team. Sandusky was a beloved figure at football-obsessed Penn State. McQueary had known him for years. McQueary ran upstairs to his office and called his parents. “He’s tall and he’s a pretty strapping guy, and he’s not a scaredy-cat. But he was shaken,” McQueary’s father told the court after his son finished his testimony. “He was clearly shaken. His voice wasn’t right. Enough that his mom picked it up on the phone without ever seeing him. She said, ‘There’s something wrong, John.’” After McQueary saw Sandusky in the shower in February 2001, he went to see his boss, Joe Paterno, the legendary head coach of the Penn State football team. P: Did you explain to him that Jerry Sandusky was naked in the shower? McQueary: Yes, absolutely. P: Did you explain to him that there was skin-on-skin contact with the boy? McQueary: I believe so, yes, ma’am. P: And did you explain to him you heard these slapping sounds? McQueary: Yes. P: Okay. What was—I’m not asking you what he said. What was his reaction? What was his demeanor? McQueary: Saddened. He kind of slumped back in his chair and put his hand up on his face, and his eyes just kind of went sad. Paterno told his boss, the athletic director at Penn State, Tim Curley. Curley told another senior administrator at the university, Gary Schultz. Curley and Schultz then told the school’s president, Graham Spanier. An investigation followed. In due course, Sandusky was arrested, and at his trial an extraordinary story emerged. Eight young men testified that Sandusky had abused them hundreds of times over the years, in hotel rooms and locker-room showers, and even in the basement of his home while his wife was upstairs. Sandusky was convicted of forty-five counts of child molestation. Penn State paid over $100 million in settlements to his victims.1 He became—as the title of one book about the case reads—“the most hated man in America.” 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. Why did it take so long? After Sandusky was put behind bars, the spotlight fell on the leadership of Penn State University. Joe Paterno, the school’s football coach, resigned in disgrace and died shortly thereafter. A statue of him that had been erected just a few years before was taken down. Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, the two senior university administrators McQueary had met with, were charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and failure to report a case of child abuse.2 Both went to jail. And in the scandal’s final, devastating conclusion, prosecutors turned their attention to the university’s president, Graham Spanier. He had led the school for sixteen years and had transformed its academic reputation. He was beloved. In November 2011, he was fired. Six years later, he was convicted of child endangerment.3 At the height of the controversy, Sandusky gave an interview to NBC sports anchor Bob Costas. Costas: You say you’re not a pedophile. Sandusky: Right. Costas: But you’re a man who, by his own admission, has showered with young boys. Highly inappropriate.…Multiple reports of you getting into bed with young boys who stayed at your house in a room in the basement. How do you account for these things? And if you’re not a pedophile, then what are you? Sandusky: Well, I’m a person that has taken a strong interest…I’m a very passionate person in terms of trying to make a difference in the lives of some young people. I worked very hard to try to connect with them… Costas: But isn’t what you’re just describing the classic M.O. of many pedophiles?… Sandusky: Well—you might think that. I don’t know. Sandusky laughs nervously, launches into a long defensive explanation. And then: Costas: Are you sexually attracted to young boys—to underage boys? Sandusky: Am I sexually attracted to underage boys? A pause. Costas: Yes. Another pause. Sandusky: Sexually attracted, you know, I—I enjoy young people. I—I love to be around them. I—I—but no, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys. Graham Spanier let that man roam free around the Penn State campus. But here’s my question, in light of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff and Harry Markopolos and every bit of evidence marshaled by Tim Levine about how hard it is for us to overcome our default to truth: do you think that if you were the president of Penn State, confronted with the same set of facts and questions, you would have behaved any differently? 2. Jerry Sandusky grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania. His father headed the local community recreation center, running sports programs for children. The Sanduskys lived upstairs. Their house was filled with baseball bats and basketballs and footballs. There were children everywhere. As an adult, Sandusky re-created the world of his childhood. Sandusky’s son E.J. once described his father as “a frustrated playground director.” Sandusky would organize kickball games in the backyard and, E.J. said, “Dad would get every single kid involved. We had the largest kickball games in the United States—kickball games with forty kids.” Sandusky and his wife, Dottie, adopted six children and were foster parents to countless more. “They took in so many foster children that even their closest friends could not keep track of them all,” Joe Posnanski wrote in a biography of Sandusky’s boss, Joe Paterno. “Children constantly surrounded Sandusky, so much so that they became part of his persona.” Sandusky was a goofball and a cutup. Much of Sandusky’s autobiography—titled, incredibly, Touched—is devoted to stories of his antics: the time he smeared charcoal over the handset of his chemistry teacher’s phone, the time he ran afoul of a lifeguard for horseplay with his children in a public pool. Four and a half pages alone are devoted to water-balloon fights that he orchestrated while in college. “Wherever I went, it seemed like trouble was sure to follow,” Sandusky wrote. “I live a good part of my life in a make-believe world,” he continues. “I enjoyed pretending as a kid, and I love doing the same as an adult with these kids. Pretending has always been part of me.” In 1977, Sandusky founded a charity called the Second Mile. It was a recreational program for troubled boys. Over the years, thousands of children from impoverished and unsettled homes in the area passed through the program. Sandusky took his Second Mile kids to football games. He wrestled with them. He would give them gifts, write them letters, take them on trips, and bring them into his home. Many of the boys were being raised by single mothers. He tried to be the father they didn’t have. “If Sandusky did not have such a human side, there would be a temptation around [Penn State] to canonize him,” a writer for Sports Illustrated said, upon Sandusky’s retirement from the Penn State football-coaching staff. Here, from the same era, is part of an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer: In more than one motel hallway, whenever you encountered him and offered what sounded like even the vaguest sort of compliment, he would blush and an engaging, lopsided grin of modesty would wrap its way around his face. He isn’t in this business for recognition. His defense plays out in front of millions. But when he opens the door and invites in another stray, there is no audience. The ennobling measure of the man is that he has chosen the work that is done without public notice. The first questions about Sandusky’s conduct emerged in 1998. A Second Mile boy came home from a day with Sandusky, and his mother saw that he had wet hair. The boy said he had worked out with Sandusky, and then the two had taken a shower in the locker room. The boy said that Sandusky had wrapped his arms around him and said, “I’m gonna squeeze your guts out.” Then he lifted him up to “get the soap out of his hair,” with the boy’s feet touching Sandusky’s thigh.4 The mother told her son’s psychologist, Alycia Chambers, about what happened. But she was unsure what to make of the incident. “Am I overreacting?” she asked Chambers. Her son, meanwhile, saw nothing amiss. He described himself as the “luckiest boy in the world” because when he was with Sandusky he got to sit on the sidelines at Penn State football games. The case was closed. The next reported incident happened ten years later, involving a boy named Aaron Fisher, who had been in the Second Mile program since fourth grade. He came from a troubled home. He had gotten to know Sandusky well, and spent multiple nights at Sandusky’s home. His mother thought of Sandusky as “some sort of angel.” But in November 2008, when he was fifteen, Fisher mentioned to his mother that he felt uneasy about some of Sandusky’s behavior. Sandusky would hold him tightly and crack his back. He would wrestle with him in a way that felt odd. Fisher was referred to a child psychologist named Mike Gillum, a believer in the idea that victims of sexual abuse sometimes bury their experiences so deep that they can be retrieved only with great care and patience. He was convinced that Sandusky had sexually abused Fisher, but that Fisher couldn’t remember it. Fisher met with his therapist repeatedly, sometimes daily, for months, with Gillum encouraging and coaxing Fisher. As one of the police investigators involved in the case would say later, “It took months to get the first kid [to talk] after it was brought to our attention. First it was, ‘Yeah, he would rub my shoulders,’ then it just took repetition and repetition, and finally we got to the point where he would tell us what happened.” By March 2009, Fisher would nod in answer to the question of whether he had had oral sex with Sandusky. By June, he would finally answer, “Yes.” Here we have two complaints against Sandusky in the span of decade. Neither, however, led to Sandusky’s apprehension. Why? Once again, because of default to truth. Did doubt and suspicions rise to the level where they could no longer be explained away in the 1998 case of the boy in the shower? Not at all. The boy’s psychiatrist wrote a report on the case arguing that Sandusky’s behavior met the definition of a “likely pedophile’s pattern of building trust and gradual introduction of physical touch, within a context of a ‘loving,’ ‘special’ relationship.” Note the word likely. Then a caseworker assigned to the incident by the Department of Public Welfare in Harrisburg investigated, and he was even less certain. He thought the incident fell into a “gray” area concerning “boundary issues.” The boy was then given a second evaluation by a counselor named John Seasock, who concluded, “There seems to be no incident which could be termed as sexual abuse, nor did there appear to be any sequential pattern of logic and behavior which is usually consistent with adults who have difficulty with sexual abuse of children.” Seasock didn’t see it at all. He said someone should talk to Sandusky about how to “stay out of such gray-area situations in the future.” The caseworker and a local police detective met with Sandusky. Sandusky told them he had hugged the boy but that there “wasn’t anything sexual about it.” He admitted to showering with other boys in the past. He said, “Honest to God, nothing happened.” And remember, the boy himself also said nothing happened. So what do you do? You default to truth. Aaron Fisher’s story was just as ambiguous.5 What Fisher remembered, during all those conversations with his therapist and sessions with the grand jury, kept changing. Once he said the oral sex stopped in November 2007; another time he said it started in the summer of 2007 and continued until September 2008; another time he said it started in 2008 and continued into 2009. He said that he had performed oral sex on Sandusky many times. A week later he said he had done it only once, and then five months later he denied ever having done it at all. Fisher testified about Sandusky before a grand jury twice in 2009, but it seems the grand jury didn’t find him credible. They declined to indict Sandusky. The police began systematically interviewing other boys who had been in the Second Mile program, looking for victims. They came up empty. This went on for two years. The prosecutor leading the case was ready to throw in the towel. You have a grown man who likes to horse around with young boys. Some people had doubts about Sandusky. But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion. Then, out of the blue, in November 2010, the prosecutor’s office received an anonymous email: “I am contacting you regarding the Jerry Sandusky investigation,” the email read. “If you have not yet done so, you need to contact and interview Penn State football assistant coach Mike McQueary. He may have witnessed something involving Jerry Sandusky and a child.” No more troubled teenagers with uncertain memories. With Michael McQueary, the prosecution finally had the means to make its case against Sandusky and the leadership of the university. A man sees a rape, tells his boss, and nothing happens—for eleven years. If you read about the Sandusky case at the time, that is the version you probably heard, stripped of all ambiguity and doubt. “You know, there’s a saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely,” the prosecutor, Laura Ditka, said in her closing argument at Spanier’s trial. “And I would suggest to you that Graham Spanier was corrupted by his own power and blinded by his own media attention and reputation; and he’s a leader that failed to lead.” At Penn State, the final conclusion was that blame for Sandusky’s crimes went all the way to the top. Spanier made a choice, Ditka said: “We’ll just keep it a secret,” she imagined him saying to Curley and Schultz. “We won’t report it. We won’t tell any authorities.” If only things were that simple. 3. Michael McQueary is six foot five. When he started as quarterback for Penn State, his weight was listed as 225 pounds. At the time of the shower incident, he was twenty-seven years old, in the physical prime of his life. Sandusky was thirty years older, with a laundry list of medical ailments. First question: If McQueary was absolutely sure he witnessed a rape, why didn’t he jump in and stop it? In Part Three of Talking to Strangers, I’m going to tell the story of an infamous sexual-assault case at Stanford University. It was discovered when two graduate students were cycling at midnight through the campus and saw a young man and woman lying on the ground. The man was on top, making thrusting movements. The woman was still. The two students approached the couple. The man ran. The students gave chase. There were enough suspicious facts about that situation to trigger the grad students out of the default assumption that the encounter on the ground was innocent. McQueary faced a situation that was—in theory, at least—a good deal more suspicious. It was not two adults. It was a man and a boy, both naked. But McQueary didn’t step in. He backed away, ran upstairs, and called his father. His father told him to come home. Then his father asked a family friend, a medical doctor by the name of Jonathan Dranov, to come over and hear Michael’s story. This is Dranov, under oath, describing what McQueary told him: He said that he heard sounds, sexual sounds. And I asked him what he meant. And he just said, “Well, you know, sounds, sexual sounds.” Well, I didn’t know exactly what he was talking [about]. He didn’t become any more graphic or detail[ed than] that, but as I pressed him, it was obvious that he didn’t have anything more he was going to say about it at the time. I asked him what he saw. He said he didn’t see anything, but again he was shaken and nervous. Dranov is a physician. He has a duty to report any child abuse he becomes aware of. Second question: So why doesn’t Dranov go to the authorities when he hears McQueary’s story? He was asked about this during the trial. Defense: Now, you specifically pressed him that night and you wanted to know what specifically he had seen, but my understanding is he did not tell you what he had seen. Correct? Dranov: That’s correct. D: All right. He told—but you left that meeting with the impression that he heard sexual sounds. Correct? Dranov: What he interpreted as sexual sounds. What he interpreted as sexual sounds. D: And your—your plan that you presented to him or proposed to him was that he should tell his boss, Joe Paterno. Correct? Dranov: That’s correct. D: You did not tell him to report to Children and Youth Services. Correct? Dranov: That’s correct. Q: You did not tell him that he should report to the police. Correct? Dranov: That’s correct. D: You did not tell him that he should report to campus security. Correct? Dranov: That’s correct… D: You did not think it was appropriate for you to report it based on hearsay. Correct? Dranov: That’s correct. D: And indeed, the reason that you did not tell Mike McQueary to report to Children and Youth Services or the police is because you did not think that what Mike McQueary reported to you was inappropriate enough for that sort of report. Correct? Dranov: That’s correct. Dranov listens to McQueary’s story, in person, on the night it happened, and he isn’t convinced. Things get even more complicated. McQueary originally said he saw Sandusky in the showers on Friday, March 1, 2002. It was spring break. He remembered the campus being deserted, and said that he went to see Paterno the following day—Saturday, March 2. But when investigators went back through university emails, they discovered that McQueary was confused. The date of his meeting with Paterno was actually a year earlier—Saturday, February 10, 2001—which would suggest the shower incident happened the evening before: Friday, February 9. But this doesn’t make sense. McQueary remembers the campus as being deserted the night he saw Sandusky in the showers. But on that Friday evening in February, the Penn State campus was anything but deserted. Penn State’s hockey team was playing West Virginia at the Greenberg Pavilion next door, in a game that started at 9:15 p.m. There would have been crowds of people on the sidewalk, filing into the arena. And a five-minute walk away, at the Bryce Jordan Center, the popular Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies was playing. On that particular evening, that corner of the Penn State campus was a madhouse. John Ziegler, a journalist who has written extensively about the Penn State controversy, argues that the only plausible Friday night in that immediate time frame when the campus would have been deserted is Friday, December 29, 2000—during Christmas break. If Ziegler is right—and his arguments are persuasive—that leads to a third question: If McQueary witnessed a rape, why would he wait as long as five weeks—from the end of December to the beginning of February—to tell anyone in the university administration about it?6 The prosecution in the Sandusky case pretended that these uncertainties and ambiguities didn’t exist. They told the public that everything was open-and-shut. The devastating 23-page indictment handed down in November of 2011 states that the “graduate assistant”—meaning McQueary—“saw a naked boy…with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.” Then the next day McQueary “went to Paterno’s home, where he reported what he had seen.” But neither of those claims matches the facts, does it? When McQueary read those words in the indictment, he emailed Jonelle Eshbach, the lead prosecutor in the case. He was upset. “I feel my words were slightly twisted and not totally portrayed accurately in the presentment,” he wrote. “I want to make sure that you have the facts again in case I have not been clear.” Then: “I cannot say 1000 percent sure that it was sodomy. I did not see insertion. It was a sexual act and / or way over the line in my opinion, whatever it was.” He wanted to correct the record. “What are my options as far as a statement from me goes?” he asked Eshbach. Think about how McQueary must have felt as he read the way Eshbach had distorted his words. He had seen something he thought was troubling. For five weeks, as he wrestled with his conscience, he must have been in agony. What did I see? Should I say something? What if I’m wrong? Then he read the indictment, and what did he find? That the prosecutors, in order to serve their own ends, had turned gray into black and white. And what did that make him? A coward who witnessed a rape, ran away to call his parents, and never told the police. “My life has drastically, drastically changed,” he wrote to Eshbach. The Sandusky who took showers with young boys late at night was a stranger to McQueary, and Eshbach had refused to acknowledge how difficult it is to make sense of a stranger. “My family’s life has drastically changed,” McQueary went on. “National media and public opinion has totally in every single way ruined me. For what?” 4. It is useful to compare the Sandusky scandal to a second, even more dramatic child-molestation case that broke a few years later. It involved a doctor at Michigan State named Larry Nassar. Nassar served as the team physician for the USA Gymnastics women’s national team. He was bespectacled, garrulous, a little awkward. He seemed harmless. He doted on his patients. He was the kind of person you could call on at 2 a.m., and he would come running. Parents loved him. He treated hips and shins and ankles and the myriad other injuries that result from the enormous stress that competitive gymnastics puts on young bodies. Nassar’s specialty was the treatment of what is known as “pelvic-floor dysfunction,” which involved him inserting his fingers into the vagina of a patient to massage muscles and tendons that had been shortened by the physical demands of gymnastics training. He did the pelvic-floor procedure repeatedly and enthusiastically. He did it without consent, without wearing gloves, and when it wasn’t necessary. He would massage his patients’ breasts. He would penetrate them anally with his fingers for no apparent reason. He used a medical procedure as the cover for his own sexual gratification. He was convicted on federal charges in the summer of 2017 and will spend the rest of his life in prison. As sexual-abuse scandals go, the Nassar case is remarkably clear-cut. This is not a matter of “he said, she said.” The police retrieved the hard drive from Nassar’s computer and found a library of child pornography—37,000 images in all, some of them unspeakably graphic. He had photographs of his young patients as they sat in his bathtub taking ice baths prior to treatment. He didn’t have just one accuser, telling a disputed story. He had hundreds of accusers, telling remarkably similar stories. Here is Rachael Denhollander, whose allegations against Nassar proved critical to his conviction. At age fifteen, when I suffered from chronic back pain, Larry sexually assaulted me repeatedly under the guise of medical treatment for nearly a year. He did this with my own mother in the room, carefully and perfectly obstructing her view so she would not know what he was doing. Denhollander had evidence, documentation. When I came forward in 2016, I brought an entire file of evidence with me.…I brought medical records from a nurse practitioner documenting my graphic disclosure of abuse…I had my journals showing the mental anguish I had been in since the assault.…I brought a witness I had disclosed it to…I brought the evidence of two more women unconnected to me who were also claiming sexual assault. The Nassar case was open-and-shut. Yet how long did it take to bring him to justice? Years. Larissa Boyce, another of Nassar’s victims, said that Nassar abused her in 1997, when she was sixteen. And what happened? Nothing. Boyce told the Michigan State gymnastics coach, Kathie Klages. Klages confronted Nassar. Nassar denied everything. Klages believed Nassar, not Boyce. The allegations raised doubts, but not enough doubts. The abuse went on. At Nassar’s trial, in a heartrending moment, Boyce addressed Nassar directly: “I dreaded my next appointment with you because I was afraid that Kathie was going to tell you about my concerns,” she said. And unfortunately, I was right. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, and overwhelmed that I had talked to Kathie about this. I vividly remember when you walked into that room, closed the door behind you, pulled up your stool and sat down in front of me, and said, “So, I talked to Kathie.” As soon as I heard those words, my heart sank. My confidence had been betrayed. I wanted to crawl into the deepest, darkest hole and hide. Over the course of Nassar’s career as a sexual predator, there were as many as fourteen occasions in which people in positions of authority were warned that something was amiss with him: parents, coaches, officials. Nothing happened. In September 2016 the Indianapolis Star published a devastating account of Nassar’s record, supported by Denhollander’s accusations. Many people close to Nassar backed him even after this. Nassar’s boss, the Dean of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State, allegedly told students, “This just goes to show that none of you learned the most basic lesson in medicine, Medicine 101.…Don’t trust your patients. Patients lie to get doctors in trouble.” Kathie Klages had the gymnasts on her team sign a card for Nassar: “Thinking of you.” It took the discovery of Nassar’s computer hard drive, with its trove of appalling images, to finally change people’s minds. When scandals like this break, one of our first inclinations is to accuse those in charge of covering for the criminal—of protecting him, or deliberately turning a blind eye, or putting their institutional or financial interests ahead of the truth. We look for a conspiracy behind the silence. But the Nassar case reminds us how inadequate that interpretation is. Many of Nassar’s chief defenders were the parents of his patients. They weren’t engaged in some kind of conspiracy of silence to protect larger institutional or financial interests. These were their children. Here is one gymnast’s mother—a medical doctor herself, incidentally—in an interview for Believed, a brilliant podcast about the Nassar scandal. The woman was in the room while Nassar treated her daughter, sitting a few feet away. And I remember out of the corner of my eye seeing what looked to be potentially an erection. And I just remember thinking, “That’s weird. That’s really weird. Poor guy.” Thinking, like, that would be very strange for a physician to get an erection in a patient’s room while giving her an exam… But at the time, when you’re in the room, and he’s doing this procedure, you just think he’s being a good doctor and doing his best for your child. He was that slick. He was that smooth. In another instance, a young girl goes to see Nassar with her father. Nassar puts his fingers inside her, with her dad sitting in the room. Later that day, the gymnast tells her mother. Here is the mother looking back on the moment: I remember it like it was five seconds ago. I’m in the driver’s seat, she’s in the passenger seat, and she said, “Larry did something to me today that made me feel uncomfortable.” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” “Well, he…touched me.” And I said, “Well, touched you where?” And she said, “Down there.” And the whole time you know what she’s saying but you’re trying to rationalize that it can’t be that. She called her husband and asked him if he had left the room at any time during the appointment? He said he hadn’t. And…God forgive me, I dropped it. I filed it back in the parenting filing cabinet until 2016. After a while, the stories all start to sound the same. Here’s another parent: And she’s sitting in the car very quiet and depressed and saying, “Dad, he’s not helping my back pain. Let’s not go anymore.” But this is Larry. This is the gymnastics doctor. If he can’t cure her, nobody will cure her. Only God has more skills than Larry. “Be patient, honey. It’s gonna take time. Good things take time.” That’s what we always taught our kids. So, I would say, “OK. We’re gonna go again next week. We’re gonna go again the following week. And then you will start seeing the progress.” She said, “OK, Dad. You know. I trust your judgment.” 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. Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine. Is Ana Montes the most highly placed Cuban spy in history, or was Reg Brown just being paranoid? Default to truth biases us in favor of the most likely interpretation. Scott Carmichael believed Ana Montes, right up to the point where believing her became absolutely impossible. The parents did the same thing, not because they were negligent but because this is how most human beings are wired. Many of the women he had abused, in fact, defended Nassar. They couldn’t see past default to truth either. Trinea Gonczar was treated 856 times by Nassar during her gymnastics career. When one of her teammates came to Gonczar and said that Nassar had put his fingers inside her, Gonczar tried to reassure her: “He does that to me all the time!” When the Indianapolis Star broke the Nassar story, Gonczar stood by him. She was convinced he would be exonerated. It was all a big mix-up. When did she finally change her mind? Only when the evidence against Nassar became overwhelming. At Nassar’s trial, when Gonczar joined the chorus of his victims in testifying against him, she finally gave in to her doubts: I had to make an extremely hard choice this week, Larry. I had to choose whether [to] continue supporting you through this or to support them: the girls. I choose them, Larry. I choose to love them and protect them. I choose to stop caring for you and supporting you. I choose to look you in the face and tell you that you hurt us, you hurt me…I hope you will see it from me in my eyes today that I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. I hope you cry like we cry. I hope you feel bad for what you’ve done. I hope more than anything, each day these girls can feel less pain. I hope you want that for us, but this is goodbye to you, Larry, and this time it’s time for me to close the door. It’s time for me to stand up for these little girls and not stand behind you anymore, Larry. Goodbye, Larry. May God bless your dark, broken soul. I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default to truth? Default to truth operates even in a case where the perpetrator had 37,000 child-porn images on his hard drive, and where he had been accused countless times, by numerous people, over the course of his career. The Nassar case was open-and-shut—and still there were doubts. Now imagine the same scenario, only in a case that isn’t open-and-shut. That’s the Sandusky case. 5. After the accusations against Sandusky were made public, one of his staunchest defenders was a former Second Mile participant named Allan Myers. When the Pennsylvania police were interviewing former Second Mile kids in an attempt to corroborate the allegations against Sandusky, they contacted Myers, and he was adamant. “Myers said that he does not believe the allegations that have been made, and that the accuser…is only out to get some money,” the police report read. “Myers continues to be in touch with Sandusky one to two times a week by telephone.” Myers told the police that he had showered in the locker room with Sandusky many times after workouts and nothing untoward had ever happened. Two months later, Myers went further. He walked into the offices of Sandusky’s attorney and made a stunning revelation. After reading the details of McQueary’s story, he realized that he had been the boy in the shower that night. Curtis Everhart, an investigator for Sandusky’s lawyer, wrote a synopsis of his interview with Myers. It is worth quoting at length: I asked the specific question: “Did Jerry ever touch you in a manner that you felt to be improper, or caused you to feel concern about his invading your personal space?” Myers answered with a very pronounced, “Never ever did anything like that ever occur.” Myers stated, “Never in my life while with Jerry did I ever [feel] uncomfortable or violated. I think of Jerry as the father I never had.”…Myers stated on Senior Night at a West Branch High School football game, “I asked Jerry to walk onto the field with my mother. It was announced on the loudspeaker ‘Father Jerry Sandusky’ along with my mother’s name. “I invited Jerry and Dottie to my wedding. Why would I ask Jerry, my father figure at Senior Night, ask Jerry and Dottie to be at my wedding, and the school asked me to ask Jerry to speak at my graduation, which he did, if there was a problem.…Why would I travel to games, go to his house, and make all the trips if Jerry had assaulted me? If that had happened, I would want to be as far away from him as possible.” Myers described the night in question clearly: Myers stated he and Jerry had just finished a workout and went into the shower area to shower and leave. “I would usually work out one or two days a week, but this particular night is very clear in my mind. We were in the shower and Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other trying to sting each other. I would slap the walls and would slide on the shower floor, which I am sure you could have heard from the wooden locker area. While we were engaged in fun as I have described, I heard the sound of a wooden locker door close, a sound I have heard before. I never saw who closed the locker. The grand jury report says Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. This is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.” A few weeks later, however, Myers signed up with a lawyer who represented a number of alleged Sandusky victims. Myers then made a statement to police in which he completely changed his tune. He was one of Sandusky’s victims, he now said. You can be forgiven if you find this confusing. The boy in the shower was the most important witness in the whole case. Prosecutors had been searching high and low for him, because he would be the final nail in Sandusky’s coffin. So finally he surfaces, denies anything happened, then almost immediately flips, saying actually something did happen. So did Myers become the key prosecution witness in the Sandusky trial? That would make sense. He was the most important piece in the whole puzzle. No! The prosecution left him at home because they had no confidence in his story.7 The only time Myers ever appeared in court was to testify at Sandusky’s appeal. Sandusky had asked for him to testify, in the vain hope that Myers would revert to his original position and say that nothing happened in the shower. Myers did not. Instead, as Sandusky’s lawyers read back to Myers each of the statements he had made less than a year before about Sandusky’s innocence, Myers sat there stone-faced and shrugged at everything, including a picture of him standing happily next to Sandusky. Who are the people in the photo? he was asked. Myers: That’s myself and your client. Defense: And when was that picture taken? If you know. Myers: That I do not remember. It was a picture of Myers and Sandusky at Myers’s wedding. In all, he said he didn’t recall thirty-four times. Then there was Brett Swisher Houtz, a Second Mile child with whom Sandusky had been very close. He was probably the most devastating witness at Sandusky’s trial. Houtz told of being repeatedly assaulted and abused—of dozens of lurid sexual encounters with Sandusky during his teenage years, in showers and saunas and hotel rooms. Prosecution: Mr. Houtz, can you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury approximately how many times the defendant in either the East Area locker room or the Lasch Building shower…put his penis in your mouth? Houtz: It would have to be forty times at least. P: Did you want him to do it— Houtz: No. P: —on any of those occasions? Houtz: No. Then Sandusky’s wife, Dottie, was called to the stand. She was asked when she and her husband last saw Brett Houtz. D. Sandusky: I think it was three years ago, or two years ago. I’m not sure. The stories Houtz told of his abuse were alleged to have happened in the 1990s. Dottie Sandusky was saying that two decades after being brutally and repeatedly victimized, Houtz decided to drop by for a visit. Defense: Can you tell us about that? D. Sandusky: Yeah. Jerry got a phone call. It was Brett. He said, I want to come over. I want to bring my girlfriend and my baby for you to see. The baby was like two years old. And they came over and my friend Elaine Steinbacher was there, and we went and got Kentucky Fried Chicken and had dinner. And it was a very pleasant visit. This is a much more perplexing example than Trinea Gonczar in the Nassar case. Gonczar never denied that something happened in her sessions with Nassar. She chose to interpret his actions as benign—for entirely understandable reasons—up until the point when she listened to the testimony of her fellow gymnasts at Nassar’s trial. Sandusky, by contrast, wasn’t practicing some ambiguous medical procedure. He is supposed to have engaged in repeated acts of sexual violence. And his alleged victims didn’t misinterpret what he was doing to them. They acted as if nothing had ever happened. They didn’t confide in their friends. They didn’t write anguished accounts in their journals. They dropped by, years later, to show off their babies to the man who raped them. They invited their rapist to their weddings. One victim showered with Sandusky and called himself the “luckiest boy in the world.” Another boy emerged with a story, after months of prodding by a therapist, that couldn’t convince a grand jury. Sexual-abuse cases are complicated, wrapped in layers of shame and denial and clouded memories, and few high-profile cases were as complicated as Jerry Sandusky’s. Now think about what that complication means for those who must make sense of all that swirling contradiction. There were always doubts about Sandusky. But how do you get to enough doubts when the victims are happily eating Kentucky Fried Chicken with their abuser? 6. So: McQueary goes to see his boss, Joe Paterno on a Saturday. An alarmed Paterno sits down with Tim Curley and Gary Schultz the following day, Sunday. They immediately call the university’s counsel and then brief the university president, Graham Spanier, on Monday. Then Curley and Schultz call in Mike McQueary. You can only imagine what Curley and Schultz are thinking as they listen to him: If this really was a rape, why didn’t you break it up? If what you saw was so troubling, why didn’t anyone—including your family friend, who is a doctor—tell the police? And if you—Mike McQueary—were so upset about what you saw, why did you wait so long to tell us? Curley and Schultz then call the university’s outside counsel. But McQueary hasn’t given them much. They instinctively reach—as we all do—for the most innocent of explanations: Maybe Jerry was just being goofy Jerry. Here is the Penn State lawyer, Wendell Courtney, recounting his conversation with Gary Schultz. Courtney: I asked at some point along the way whether this horseplay involving Jerry and a young boy, whether there was anything sexual in nature. And he indicated to me that there was not to his knowledge.…My vision, at least when it was being described to me and talking with Mr. Schultz, was that it was, you know, a young boy with the showers on, a lot of water in the shower area, group shower area just kinda, you know, running and sliding on the floor… Prosecution: Are you sure he didn’t say slapping sound or anything sexual in nature at all? Courtney: I am quite positive he never said to me slapping sounds or anything sexual in nature that was reported going on in the shower. Courtney said he thought about it and considered the worst-case scenario. This was, after all, a man and a boy in the shower after hours. But then he thought of what he knew of Jerry Sandusky “as someone that goofed around with Second Mile kids all the time in public,” and he defaulted to that impression.8 Schultz and his colleague Tim Curley then go to see university president Spanier. Prosecution: You did tell Graham Spanier it was “horseplay”? Schultz: Yeah. P: When did you tell him that? Schultz: Well, the first—first report that we got that was passed on to us is “horsin’ around.” Jerry Sandusky was seen in the shower horsin’ around with a kid.…And I think that word was repeated to President Spanier that, you know…that he was horsin’ around. Spanier listened to Curley and Schultz and asked two questions. “Are you sure that’s how it was described to you, as ‘horsing around’?” They said yes. Then Spanier asked again: “Are you sure that’s all that was said to you?” They said yes. Spanier barely knew Sandusky. Penn State has thousands of employees. One of them—now retired—was spotted in a shower? “I remember, for a moment, sort of figuratively scratching our heads and thinking about what’s an appropriate way to follow up on ‘horsing around,’” Spanier said later. “I had never gotten a report like that before.” If Harry Markopolos had been president of Penn State during the Sandusky case, of course, he would never have defaulted like this to the most innocent of explanations. A man in a shower? With a boy? The kind of person who saw through Madoff’s deceit a decade before anyone else would have leaped at once to the most damning conclusion: How old was the kid? What were they doing there at night? Wasn’t there a weird case with Sandusky a couple of years ago? But Graham Spanier is not Harry Markopolos. He opted for the likeliest explanation—that Sandusky was who he claimed to be. Does he regret not asking one more follow-up question, not quietly asking around? Of course he does. But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency. Spanier behaved no differently from the Mountain Climber and Scott Carmichael and Nat Simons and Trinea Gonczar and virtually every one of the parents of the gymnasts treated by Larry Nassar. Weren’t those parents in the room when Nassar was abusing their own children? Hadn’t their children said something wasn’t right? Why did they send their child back to Nassar, again and again? Yet in the Nassar case no one has ever suggested that the parents of the gymnasts belong in jail for failing to protect their offspring from a predator. We accept the fact that being a parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around your child. If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure. 7. Tim Curley and Gary Schultz were charged first. Two of the most important officials at one of the most prestigious state universities in the United States were placed under arrest. Spanier called his senior staff together for an emotional meeting. He considered Penn State to be a big family. These were his friends. When they told him the shower incident was probably just horseplay, he believed they were being honest. “You’re going to find that everyone is going to distance themselves from Gary and Tim,” he said. But he would not. Every one of you in here has worked with Tim and Gary for years. Some of you, for thirty-five or forty years, because that’s how long Tim and Gary, respectively, were at the university.…You’ve worked with them every day of your life, and I have for the last sixteen years.…If any of you operate according to how we have always agreed to operate at this university—honestly, openly, with integrity, always doing what’s in the best interests of the university—if you were falsely accused of something, I would do the same thing for any of you in here. I want you to know that.…None of [you] should ever fear doing the right thing, or being accused of wrongdoing when [you] knew [you] were doing the right thing…because this university would back them up.9 This is why people liked Graham Spanier. It’s why he had such a brilliant career at Penn State. It’s why you and I would want to work for him. We want Graham Spanier as our president—not Harry Markopolos, armed to the teeth, waiting for a squad of government bureaucrats to burst through the front door. This is the first of the ideas to keep in mind when considering the death of Sandra Bland. We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they 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. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. 1 At the time, that was a record amount for a U.S. university in a sexual-abuse case. That record was soon broken, however, in the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University, where damages paid by the school may end up being $500 million. 2 Charges also included perjury (which was quickly dropped) and child endangerment. Eventually the two men pled guilty only to “child endangerment” so that all other charges could be dropped. 3 Just as this book was going to press, Spanier’s conviction was thrown out by a federal judge, the day before he was to finally report to prison. Whether or not the prosecution will appeal the ruling is—as we are going to press—unknown. 4 This was not unusual for Sandusky. He showered all the time after workouts with Second Mile boys, and loved playing locker-room games. “What happened is…the horsing around would lead to him starting like a soap battle,” one former Second Miler testified at the Sandusky trial. “There was soap dispensers beside each one of the showers, and he would pump his hand full of soap and basically throw it.” 5 The idea that traumatic memories are repressed and can be retrieved only under the direction of therapy is—to say the least—controversial. See the Notes for a further discussion of this. 6 The evidence gathered by Ziegler on this point is compelling. For example, when Dranov testified in the Spanier trial, he said he had met with Gary Schultz on an entirely separate matter late that February, and had brought up the issue of Sandusky “since this was maybe three months after the incident and we hadn’t heard any follow-up.” Will we ever know the exact date? Probably not. Ziegler is the most vociferous of those who believe that Sandusky was wrongfully accused. See also: Mark Pendergrast, The Most Hated Man in America. Some of Ziegler’s arguments are more convincing than others. For a longer discussion of the Sandusky skeptics, see the Notes. 7 The prosecution’s report on Allan Myers is a doozy. An investigator named Michael Corricelli spoke to Myers’s lawyer, who told him that Myers now claimed to have been raped repeatedly by Sandusky. His lawyer produced a three-page account allegedly written by Myers detailing his abuse at the hands of Sandusky. The prosecution team read the account and suspected that it hadn’t been written by Myers at all but rather by his lawyer. Finally the prosecution gave up, and walked away from one of the most important figures in the entire case. 8 Courtney had doubts about Sandusky’s innocence. But in the end Sandusky’s cover story was just too convincing. Someone that goofed around with Second Mile kids all the time in public. Curley then called the executive director of the Second Mile, John Raykovitz. Raykovitz promised to have a word with Sandusky and tell him not to bring any more boys on campus. “I can only speak for myself, but I thought Jerry had a boundary issue, judgment issue, that needed to be addressed,” Curley explained. Sandusky needed to be careful, he felt, or people would think he was a pedophile. “I told him,” Raykovitz said, “that it would be more appropriate—if he was going to shower with someone after a workout—that he wear swim trunks. And I said that because…that was the time when there was a lot of stuff coming out about Boy Scouts and church and things of that nature.” 9 This is not a literal transcription of what Spanier said, but rather a paraphrase, based on his recollections. Part Three Transparency CHAPTER SIX The Friends Fallacy 1. By its fifth season, Friends was well on its way to becoming one of the most successful television shows of all time. It was one of the first great “hang-out comedies.” Six friends—Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross—live in a chaotic jumble in downtown Manhattan, couple and decouple, flirt and fight but mostly just talk, endlessly and hilariously. The season begins with Ross getting married to a non-Friends outsider. By midseason the relationship will be over, and by season’s end he will be back in the arms of Rachel. Phoebe gives birth to triplets and takes up with a police officer. And, most consequentially, Monica and Chandler fall in love—a development that creates an immediate problem, because Monica is Ross’s sister and Chandler is Ross’s best friend, and neither of them has the courage to tell Ross what is happening. At the beginning of episode fifteen—titled “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey”—Chandler and Monica’s subterfuge falls apart. Ross looks out his window at the apartment across the way and spots his sister Monica in a romantic embrace with Chandler. He’s thunderstruck. He runs to Monica’s apartment and tries to barge in, but the chain is on her door. So he sticks his face into the six-inch gap. “Chandler! Chandler! I saw what you were doing through the window. I saw what you were doing to my sister, now get out here!” Chandler, alarmed, tries to escape out the window. Monica holds him back. “I can handle Ross,” she tells him. She opens the door to her brother. “Hey, Ross. What’s up, bro?” Ross runs inside, lunges at Chandler, and starts to chase him around the kitchen table, shouting: “What the hell are you doing?!” Chandler hides behind Monica. Joey and Rachel rush in. Rachel: Hey, what’s going on? Chandler: Well, I think—I think—Ross knows about me and Monica. Joey: Dude, he’s right there. Ross: I thought you were my best friend! This is my sister! My best friend, and my sister! I cannot believe this. Did you follow all that? A standard Friends season had so many twists and turns of plot—and variations of narrative and emotion—that it seems as though viewers would need a flowchart to make sure they didn’t lose their way. In reality, however, nothing could be further from the truth. If you’ve ever watched an episode of Friends, you’ll know that it is almost impossible to get confused. The show is crystal clear. How clear? I think you can probably follow along even if you turn off the sound. 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. 2. To test this idea about the transparency of Friends, I contacted a psychologist named Jennifer Fugate, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Fugate is an expert in FACS, which stands for Facial Action Coding System.1 In FACS, every one of the forty-three distinctive muscle movements in the face is assigned a number, called an “action unit.” People like Fugate who are trained in FACS can then look at someone’s facial expressions and score them, just as a musician can listen to a piece of music and translate it into a series of notes on the page. So, for example, take a look at this photo: That’s called a Pan-Am smile—the kind of smile a flight attendant gives you when he or she is trying to be polite. When you give that kind of smile, you pull up the corners of your lips, using what’s called the zygomaticus major muscle, but leave the rest of your face impassive. That’s why the smile looks fake: It’s a smile without any kind of facial elaboration. In the FACS, the Pan-Am smile using the zygomaticus major is scored as AU 12. Now take a look at this: This is what’s called a Duchenne smile. It’s what a genuine smile looks like. In technical terms, it’s AU 12 plus AU 6—meaning that it is a facial movement involving the outer portion of the orbicularis oculi muscle, raising the cheeks and creating those telltale crow’s-feet around the eyes. FACS is an extraordinarily sophisticated tool. It involves cataloging—in exacting detail—thousands of muscular movements, some of which may appear on the face for no more than a fraction of a second. The FACS manual is over five hundred pages long. If Fugate had done a FACS analysis of the entire “Girl Who Hits Joey” episode, it would have taken her days, so I asked her to focus just on that opening scene: Ross sees Chandler and Rachel embracing, then rushes over in anger. Here’s what she found. When Ross looks through the cracked door and sees his sister in a romantic embrace with his best friend, his face shows action units 10 16 25 26: That’s the upper-lip raiser (levator labii superioris, caput infraorbitalis), the lower-lip depressor (depressor labii), parted lips (depressor labii, relaxed mentalis or orbicularis oris), and jaw drop (relaxed temporal and internal pterygoid). In the FACS system, muscular movements are also given an intensity measure from A to E, with A being mildest and E strongest. All of Ross’s four muscle movements, in that moment, are Es. If you go back and watch that Friends episode, and freeze the screen at the moment when Ross looks through the door frame, you’ll see exactly what the FACS coders are describing. He has an unmistakable look on his face of anger and disgust. Ross then rushes into Monica’s apartment. The tension in the scene is accelerating, and so are Ross’s emotions. Now his face reads: 4C 5D 7C 10E 16E 25E 26E. Again, four Es! “[AU] 4 is a brow-lowerer,” Fugate explains. That’s what you do when you furrow your brow. Seven is an eye squint. It’s called “lid-tightener.” He’s kind of scowling and closing his eyes at the same time, so that’s a stereotypic anger. Then the 10 in this case is very classic for disgust. You kind of lift your upper lip, not really moving the nose, but it gives the appearance that the nose is being turned up. The 16 sometimes happens with that. That’s a lower-lip depressor. That’s when you push your bottom lip down so that you can see your bottom teeth. Monica, at the door, tries to pretend nothing is amiss. She smiles at her brother. But it’s a Pan-Am smile, not a Duchenne smile: some 12 and the barest, least-plausible whisper of 6. Ross chases Chandler around the kitchen table. Chandler hides behind Monica, and as Ross approaches, he says: “Look, we’re not just messing around. I love her. OK? I’m in love with her.” Then Monica reaches and takes Ross’s hand. “I’m so sorry that you had to find out this way. I’m sorry. But it’s true, I love him too.” There’s a long silence as Ross stares at the two of them, processing a storm of competing emotions. Then he bursts into a smile, hugs them both, and repeats himself, only this time happily: “My best friend, and my sister! I’m so happy!” As Monica breaks the news to her brother, Fugate scores her as 1C 2D 12D. The 1 and 2, in combination, are sadness: She’s raised the inner and outer parts of her eyebrows. 12D, of course, is the emotionally incomplete Pan-Am smile. “She kind of gives—as strange as that sounds—an indicator of sadness,” Fugate said, “but then happiness. I think it kind of makes sense, because she’s apologizing, but then she’s showing Ross that she’s actually okay with this.” Ross looks at his sister for a long beat. His face scores classic sadness. Then his face subtly shifts to 1E 12D. He’s giving back to his sister the exact same mix of emotions she gave to him: sadness combined with the beginnings of happiness. He’s losing his sister. But at the same time, he wants her to know that he appreciates her joy. Fugate’s FACS analysis tells us that the actors in Friends make sure that every emotion their character is supposed to feel in their heart is expressed, perfectly, on their face. That’s why you can watch the scene with the sound turned off and still follow along. 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. Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor. 3. The idea of transparency has a long history. In 1872, thirteen years after first presenting his famous treatise on evolution, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Smiling and frowning and wrinkling our noses in disgust, he argued, were things that every human being did as part of evolutionary adaptation. Accurately and quickly communicating our emotions to one another was of such crucial importance to the survival of the human species, he argued, that the face had developed into a kind of billboard for the heart. 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. The bail hearings described in Chapter Two are likewise an exercise in transparency. The judge does not correspond with the parties in a court case by email or call them up on the telephone. Judges believe that it’s crucial to look at the people they are judging. A Muslim woman in Michigan was the plaintiff in a lawsuit a few years ago, and she came to court wearing the traditional niqab, a veil covering all but her eyes. The judge asked her to take it off. She refused. So the judge dismissed her case. He didn’t think he could fairly adjudicate a disagreement between two parties when he couldn’t see one of them. He told her: One of the things that I need to do as I am listening to testimony is I need to see your face and I need to see what’s going on. And unless you take that off, I can’t see your face and I can’t tell whether you’re telling me the truth or not, and I can’t see certain things about your demeanor and temperament that I need to see in a court of law.2 Do you think the judge was right? I’m guessing many of you do. We wouldn’t spend as much time as we do looking at people’s faces if we didn’t think there was something valuable to be learned. In novels, we read that “his eyes widened in shock” or “her face fell in disappointment,” and we accept without question that faces really do fall and eyes really do widen in response to the feelings of shock and disappointment. We can watch Ross’s 4C 5D 7C 10E 16E 25E 26E and know what it means—with the sound off—because thousands of years of evolution have turned 4C 5D 7C 10E 16E 25E 26E into the expression human beings make when filled with shock and anger. We believe someone’s demeanor is a window into their soul. But that takes us back to Puzzle Number Two. Judges in bail hearings have a window into the defendant’s soul. Yet they are much worse at predicting who will reoffend than Sendhil Mullainathan’s computer, which has a window into no one’s soul. If real life were like Friends, judges would beat computers. But they don’t. So maybe real life isn’t like Friends. 4. The cluster of islands known as the Trobriands lies 100 miles east of Papua New Guinea, in the middle of the Solomon Sea. The archipelago is tiny, home to 40,000 people. It’s isolated and tropical. The people living there fish and farm much as their ancestors did thousands of years ago, and their ancient customs have proven remarkably durable, even in the face of the inevitable encroachments of the 21st century. In the same way that carmakers take new models to the Arctic to test them under the most extreme conditions possible, social scientists sometimes like to “stress test” hypotheses in places such as the Trobriands. If something works in London or New York and it works in the Trobriands, you can be pretty sure you’re onto something universal—which is what sent two Spanish social scientists to the Trobriand Islands in 2013. Sergio Jarillo is an anthropologist. He had worked in the Trobriands before and knew the language and culture. Carlos Crivelli is a psychologist. He spent the earliest part of his career testing the limits of transparency. Once he examined dozens of videotapes of judo fighters who had just won their matches to figure out when, exactly, they smiled. Was it at the moment of victory? Or did they win, then smile? Another time he watched videotapes of people masturbating to find out what their faces looked like at the moment of climax. Presumably an orgasm is a moment of true happiness. Is that happiness evident and observable in the moment? In both cases, it wasn’t—which didn’t make sense if our emotions are really a billboard for the heart. These studies made Crivelli a skeptic, so he and Jarillo decided to put Darwin to the test. Jarillo and Crivelli started with six headshots of people looking happy, sad, angry, scared, and disgusted—with one final picture of someone with a neutral expression. Before they left for the Trobriands, the two men took their pictures to a primary school in Madrid and tried them out on a group of children. They put all six photos before a child and asked, “Which of these is the sad face?” Then they went to the second child and asked, “Which of these is the angry face?” and so on, cycling through all six pictures over and over again. Here are the results. The children had no difficulty with the exercise: Then Jarillo and Crivelli flew to the Trobriand Islands and repeated the process. The Trobrianders were friendly and cooperative. They had a rich, nuanced language, which made them an ideal test case for a study of emotion. Jarillo explained, To say that something has really surprised you in a positive way, they say, it “has enraptured my mind,” or it has “caught my mind.” Then when you repeat that, you say, “Has this thing caught your mind?” And they say, “Well, no, this one is more like it has taken my stomach away.” These were not people, in other words, who would be flummoxed by being asked to make sense of the emotional truth of something. If Darwin was correct, the Trobrianders should be as good as the schoolchildren in Madrid at making sense of people’s faces. Emotions are hardwired by evolution. That means people in the middle of the Solomon Sea must have the same operating system as people in Madrid. Right? Wrong. Take a look at the following chart, which compares the success rate of the Trobrianders with the success rate of the ten-year-olds at the Madrid school. The Trobrianders struggled. The “emotional labels” down the left side of the chart are the pictures of people making different kinds of faces that Jarillo and Crivelli showed their subjects. The labels across the top are how the subjects identified those pictures. So 100 percent of the 113 Spanish schoolchildren identified the happiness face as a happiness face. But only 58 percent of the Trobrianders did, while 23 percent looked at a smiling face and called it “neutral.” And happiness is the emotion where there is the most agreement between the Trobrianders and the Spanish children. On everything else, the Trobrianders’ idea of what emotion looks like on the outside appears to be totally different from our own. “I think the thing that surprised us the most is the fact that what we think of in western societies is a face of fear, of somebody who’s scared, turns out to be recognized in the Trobriand Islands more as a threat,” Crivelli said. To demonstrate, he mimed what is known as the gasping face: wide-open eyes, the face from Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. “In our culture, my face would be like, ‘I’m scared; I’m scared of you.’” Crivelli went on. “In their culture, that…is the face of somebody who’s trying to scare somebody else.…It’s the opposite [of what it means to us].” The sensation of fear, for a Trobriand Islander, is not any different from the fear that you or I feel. They get the same sick feeling in the pit of their stomach. But for some reason they don’t show it the same way we do. Anger was just as bad. You would think—wouldn’t you?—that everyone in the world would know what an angry face looks like. It’s such a fundamental emotion. This is anger, right? The hard eyes. The tight mouth. But anger baffled the Trobrianders. Just look at the scores for the angry face. Twenty percent called it a happy face. Seventeen percent called it a sad face. Thirty percent called it a fearful face. Twenty percent thought it was a sign of disgust—and only seven percent identified it the way that nearly every Spanish schoolchild had. Crivelli said: They gave lots of different descriptors.…They would just say, like, “They’re frowning.” Or they’d use one of these proverbs that say…it means his brow is dark, which obviously can translate as “He’s frowning.” They wouldn’t infer that that means that this person is angry. To make sure the Trobrianders weren’t some kind of special case, Jarillo and Crivelli then traveled to Mozambique to study a group of isolated subsistence fishermen known as the Mwani. Once again, the results were dismal. The Mwani did marginally better than chance with the smiling faces, but they seemed baffled by sad faces and angry faces. Another group, led by Maria Gendron, traveled to the mountains of northwest Namibia to see whether the people there could accurately sort photographs into piles according to the emotional expression of the subject. They couldn’t. Even historians have now gotten into the act. If you could go into a time machine and show the ancient Greeks and Romans pictures of modern-day people grinning broadly, would they interpret that expression the same way we do? Probably not. As classicist Mary Beard writes in her book, Laughter in Ancient Rome: This is not to say that Romans never curled up the edges of their mouths in a formation that would look to us much like a smile; of course they did. But such curling did not mean very much in the range of significant social and cultural gestures in Rome. Conversely, other gestures, which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance. If you staged a screening of that Friends episode for the Trobriand Islanders, they would see Ross confronting Chandler and think Chandler was angry and Ross was scared. They would get the scene completely wrong. And if you threw a Friends premiere in ancient Rome for Cicero and the emperor and a bunch of their friends, they would look at the extravagant grimaces and contortions on the faces of the actors and think: What on earth? 5. OK. So what about within a culture? If we limit ourselves to the developed world—and forget about outliers and ancient Rome—do the rules of transparency now work? No, they don’t. Imagine the following scenario. You’re led down a long, narrow hallway into a dark room. There you sit and listen to a recording of a Franz Kafka short story, followed by a memory test on what you’ve just heard. You finish the test and step back into the corridor. But while you were listening to Kafka, a team has been hard at work. The corridor was actually made of temporary partitions. Now they’ve been moved to create a wide-open space. The room has bright-green walls. A single light bulb hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a bright red chair. And sitting in the chair is your best friend, looking solemn. You come out, thinking you’re going to be heading down the same narrow hallway, and BOOM—a room where a room isn’t supposed to be. And your friend, staring at you like a character in a horror film. Would you be surprised? Of course you would. And what would your face look like? Well, you wouldn’t look the same as a Trobriand Islander would in that situation, nor a citizen of ancient Rome. But within our culture, in this time and place, what surprise looks like is well established. There’s a perfect example of it in that same Friends episode. Ross’s roommate, Joey, rushes into Monica’s apartment and discovers two of his best friends trying to kill each other, and his face tells you everything you need to know: AU 1 2 (eyebrows shooting up) plus AU 5 (eyes going wide) plus AU 25 26, which is your jaw dropping. You’d make the Joey face, right? Wrong. Two German psychologists, Achim Sch?tzwohl and Rainer Reisenzein, created this exact scenario and ran sixty people through it. On a scale of one to ten, those sixty rated their feelings of surprise, when they opened the door after their session with Kafka, at 8.14. They were stunned! And when asked, almost all of them were convinced that surprise was written all over their faces. But it wasn’t. Sch?tzwohl and Reisenzein had a video camera in the corner, and they used it to code everyone’s expressions the same way Fugate had coded the Friends episode. In only 5 percent of the cases did they find wide eyes, shooting eyebrows, and dropped jaws. In 17 percent of the cases they found two of those expressions. In the rest they found some combination of nothing, a little something, and things—such as knitted eyebrows—that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with surprise at all.3 “The participants in all conditions grossly overestimated their surprise expressivity,” Sch?tzwohl wrote. Why? They “inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event from…folk-psychological beliefs about emotion-face associations.” Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we glean from cultural sources such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in real life. 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.” Sch?tzwohl 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.” I don’t think that this mistake—expecting what is happening on the outside to perfectly match what is going on inside—matters with our friends. Part of what it means to get to know someone is to come to understand how idiosyncratic their emotional expressions can be. My father was once in the shower in a vacation cottage that my parents had rented when he heard my mother scream. He came running to find a large young man with a knife to my mother’s throat. What did he do? Keep in mind that this is a seventy-year-old man, naked and dripping wet. He pointed at the assailant and said in a loud, clear voice: “Get out NOW.” And the man did. On the inside, my father was terrified. The most precious thing in his life—his beloved wife of half a century—was being held at knifepoint. But I doubt very much that fear showed on his face. His eyes didn’t go wide with terror, and his voice didn’t jump an octave. If you knew my father, you would have seen him in other stressful situations, and you would have come to understand that the “frightened” face, for whatever reason, was simply not part of his repertoire. In crisis, he turned deadly calm. But if you didn’t know him, what would you have thought? Would you have concluded that he was cold? Unfeeling? When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea—a stereotype—for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often. By the way, do you know how the Trobrianders show surprise? When Crivelli showed up, he had a little Apple iPod, and the islanders gathered around in admiration. “They were approaching me. I was showing them.…They were freaking out, but they were not doing it like, ‘Gasp!’” He mimed a perfect AU 1 2 5. “No. They were doing this.” He made a noise with his tongue against his palate. “They were going click, click, click.” 6. 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. Solomon: So while I guess there’s a sliver of my brain that’s saying, “Oh, yeah. Well, it’d be easier not to look,” I have the person looking at me and me looking at them. Having their family in the audience waving to me during the defense argument, you know, and he has three family members back here. It should be.…You should know that you’re impacting a person. It shouldn’t be taken lightly. 1 It was developed by legendary psychologist Paul Ekman, whom I wrote about in my second book, Blink. See the Notes for an explanation of how my views on Ekman’s work have evolved since then. 2 The plaintiff was Ginnah Muhammad. Her reply: “Well, first of all, I’m a practicing Muslim, and this is my way of life, and I believe in the Holy Koran, and God is first in my life. I don’t have a problem with taking my veil off if it’s a female judge, so I want to know, do you have a female that I could be in front of? Then I have no problem. But otherwise, I can’t follow that order.” 3 The 17 percent figure includes the three people (5 percent) who displayed all three expressions. Only seven people showed exactly two expressions. Also, although the vast majority of people believed they had expressed their surprise, one unusually self-aware person said he did not think his surprise had shown at all. CHAPTER SEVEN A (Short) Explanation of the Amanda Knox Case 1. On the night of November 1, 2007, Meredith Kercher was murdered by Rudy Guede. After a mountain of argumentation, speculation, and controversy, his guilt is a certainty. Guede was a shady character who had been hanging around the house in the Italian city of Perugia, where Kercher, a college student, was living during a year abroad. Guede had a criminal history. He admitted to being in Kercher’s house the night of her murder—and could give only the most implausible reasons for why. The crime scene was covered in his DNA. After her body was discovered, he immediately fled Italy for Germany. But Rudy Guede was not the exclusive focus of the police investigation—nor anything more than an afterthought in the tsunami of media attention that followed the discovery of Kercher’s body. The focus was instead on Kercher’s roommate. Her name was Amanda Knox. She came home one morning and found blood in the bathroom. She and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, called the police. The police came and found Kercher dead in her bedroom; within hours they added Knox and Sollecito to their list of suspects. The crime, the police believed, was a drug- and alcohol-fueled sex game gone awry, featuring Guede, Sollecito, and Knox. The three were arrested, charged, convicted, and sent to prison—with every step of the way chronicled obsessively by the tabloid press. “A murder always gets people going. Bit of intrigue. Bit of mystery. A whodunit,” British journalist Nick Pisa says in the documentary Amanda Knox—one of a vast library of books, academic essays, magazine articles, movies, and news shows spawned by the case. “And we have here this beautiful, picturesque hilltop town in the middle of Italy. It was a particularly gruesome murder. Throat slit, semi-naked, blood everywhere. I mean, what more do you want in a story?” Other signature crime stories, such as the O. J. Simpson and JonBen?t Ramsey cases, are just as enthralling when you rediscover them five or ten years later. The Amanda Knox case is not. It is completely inexplicable in hindsight. There was never any physical evidence linking either Knox or her boyfriend to the crime. Nor was there ever a plausible explanation for why Knox—an immature, sheltered, middle-class girl from Seattle—would be interested in engaging in murderous sex games with a troubled drifter she barely knew. The police investigation against her was revealed as shockingly inept. The analysis of the DNA evidence supposedly linking her and Sollecito to the crime was completely botched. Her prosecutor was wildly irresponsible, obsessed with fantasies about elaborate sex crimes. Yet it took a ruling by the Italian Supreme Court, eight years after the crime, for Knox to be finally declared innocent. Even then, many otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people disagreed. When Knox was freed from prison, a large angry crowd gathered in the Perugia town square to protest her release. The Amanda Knox case makes no sense. I could give you a point-by-point analysis of what was wrong with the investigation of Kercher’s murder. It could easily be the length of this book. I could also refer you to some of the most comprehensive scholarly analyses of the investigation’s legal shortcomings, such as Peter Gill’s meticulous “Analysis and Implications of the Miscarriages of Justice of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito” in the July 2016 issue of the criminology journal Forensic Science International, which includes paragraphs like this: 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. Interviewer: Okay. The moment Levine asks the question “Did any cheating occur?” Sally’s arms and face begin to turn a bright red. Calling it an embarrassed blush doesn’t quite do it justice. Sally gives a whole new meaning to the expression “caught red-handed.” Then comes the critical question: What will your partner say? Blushing Sally can’t even come up with a convincing “She’ll agree with me.” She hems and haws and says, weakly, “Probably…the same answer.” Probably? Blushing Sally is lying, and everyone called in to judge the tape realizes she’s lying. Here’s the next tape Levine showed me. It’s of a woman who spent the entire interview obsessively playing with her hair. Let’s call her Nervous Nelly. Interviewer: Now, Rachel had to get called out of the room. Did any cheating occur when she was gone? Nervous Nelly: Actually my partner did want to look at the scores, and I said no—was like, “I want to see how many we got right”—because I don’t cheat. I think it’s wrong, so I didn’t. I told her no. I was like, “I don’t want to do that.” But she did say, “Well, we’ll just look at one.” I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” I don’t know if that was part of it or not, but no, we didn’t do that. Interviewer: OK, so are you telling me the truth about the cheating? Nervous Nelly: Yeah, we didn’t—she wanted…my partner honestly said, “We’ll just look at one.” I was like, “No, that’s not cool, I don’t want to do that.” The only thing I said was, “I’m surprised they left all the money in here.” I honestly don’t steal or cheat, I’m a good person like that. I was just kind of surprised, because normally when people leave money behind, you are going to take it—that’s just what everybody does. But no, we didn’t cheat. We didn’t steal anything. The twirling of the hair never stops. Nor do the halting, overly defensive, repetitive explanations, nor the fidgeting and the low-level agitation. Interviewer: OK, so when I call in your partner for an interview, what is she going to say to that question? Nervous Nelly: I think she’ll say that she wanted to look. Interviewer: OK. Nervous Nelly: If she says otherwise, then that’s not cool at all, because I said, “No, I don’t want to cheat at all.” She just said, “Why not just look at one?” She said, “Well, the answers are right there,” and I was like, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not who I am. It’s not what I do.” I was convinced Nervous Nelly was lying. You would conclude the same, if you saw her in action. Everybody thought Nervous Nelly was lying. But she wasn’t! When her partner reported back to Levine, he confirmed everything Nervous Nelly said. Levine found this pattern again and again. In one experiment, for instance, there was a group of interviewees whom 80 percent of the judges got wrong. And another group whom more than 80 percent got right. So what’s the explanation? Levine argues that this is the assumption of transparency in action. We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight countries around the world, 63 percent of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was “gaze aversion.” We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes. This is—to put it mildly—nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that 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. Blushing Sally matches. She acts like 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 and she couldn’t get access to her clothes. She wasn’t a femme fatale.2 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. Since I didn’t really fit in, I acted like myself, which pretty much made sure I never did.” Matched people conform with our expectations. Their intentions are consistent with their behavior. The mismatched are confusing and unpredictable: “I’d do things that would embarrass most teenagers and adults—walking down the street like an Egyptian or an elephant—but that kids found fall-over hilarious.” Kercher’s murder changed the way Kercher’s circle of friends behaved. They wept quietly, hushed their voices, murmured their sympathies. Knox didn’t. Just listen to a handful of quotations that I’ve taken—at random—from the British journalist John Follain’s Death in Perugia. Believe me, there are more like this. Here is Follain describing what happened when Kercher’s friends met up with Knox and Sollecito at the police station the day after the murder. “Oh Amanda. I’m so sorry!” Sophie exclaimed, as she instinctively put her arms around her and gave her a bear hug. Amanda didn’t hug Sophie back. Instead, she stiffened, holding her arms down by her sides. Amanda said nothing. Surprised, Sophie let go of her after a couple of seconds and stepped back. There was no trace of emotion on Amanda’s face. Raffaele walked up to Amanda and took hold of her hand; the couple just stood there, ignoring Sophie and gazing at each other. Then: Amanda sat with her feet resting on Raffaele’s lap…the two caressed and kissed each other; sometimes they’d even laugh. How could Amanda act like that? Sophie asked herself. Doesn’t she care? Then: Most of Meredith’s friends were in tears or looked devastated, but Amanda and Raffaele made smacking noises with their lips when they kissed or sent kisses to each other. And then: “Let’s hope she didn’t suffer,” Natalie said. “What do you think? They cut her throat, Natalie. She fucking bled to death!” Amanda retorted. Amanda’s words chilled Natalie; she was surprised both by Amanda talking of several killers, and by the coldness of her tone. Natalie thought it was as if Meredith’s death didn’t concern her. In an interview with Knox, Diane Sawyer of ABC News brought up that last exchange in the police station, where Knox snapped at Kercher’s friend and said, “She fucking bled to death.” Knox: Yeah. I was angry. I was pacing, thinking about what Meredith must have been through. Sawyer: Sorry about that now? Knox: I wish I could’ve been more mature about it, yeah. In a situation that typically calls for a sympathetic response, Knox was loud and angry. The interview continues: Sawyer: You can see that this does not look like grief. Does not read as grief. The interview was conducted long after the miscarriage of justice in the Kercher case had become obvious. Knox had just been freed after spending four years in an Italian prison for the crime of not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered. Yet what does Diane Sawyer say to her? She scolds her for not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered. In the introduction to the interview, the news anchor says that Knox’s case remains controversial because, in part, “her pleas for innocence seemed to many people more cold and calculating than remorseful”—which is an even more bizarre thing to say, isn’t it? Why would we expect Knox to be remorseful? We expect remorse from the guilty. Knox didn’t do anything. But she’s still being 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 far different from her own. But that’s not what we get. Instead, the people charged with making determinations of innocence and guilt seem to be as bad as or even worse than the rest of us when it comes to the hardest cases. Is this part of the reason for wrongful convictions? Is the legal system constitutionally incapable of delivering justice to the mismatched? When a judge makes a bail decision and badly underperforms a computer, is this why? Are we sending perfectly harmless people to prison while they await trial simply because they don’t look right? We all accept the flaws and inaccuracies of institutional judgment when we believe that those mistakes are random. But Tim Levine’s research suggests that they aren’t random—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. The Amanda Knox story deserves to be retold not because it was a once-in-a-lifetime crime saga—a beautiful woman, a picturesque Italian hilltop town, a gruesome murder. It deserves retelling because it happens all the time. “Her eyes didn’t seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved,” one of Meredith Kercher’s friends said. Amanda Knox heard years of this—perfect strangers pretending to know who she was based on the expression on her face. “There is no trace of me in the room where Meredith was murdered,” Knox says, at the end of the Amanda Knox documentary. “But you’re trying to find the answer in my eyes.…You’re looking at me. Why? These are my eyes. They’re not objective evidence.” 1 Here’s another example: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two Chechen brothers who planted a series of deadly bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013. The chief issue in Tsarnaev’s trial was whether he would escape the death penalty. The prosecutor, Nadine Pellegrini, argued strongly that he shouldn’t, because he felt no remorse for his actions. At one point Pellegrini showed the jury a photograph of Tsarnaev in his cell, giving the finger to the video camera in the corner. “He had one last message to send,” she said, calling Tsarnaev “unconcerned, unrepentant, and unchanged.” In Slate magazine, on the eve of the verdict, Seth Stevenson wrote: And though it’s risky to read too deeply into slouches and tics, Tsarnaev certainly hasn’t made much effort to appear chastened or regretful before the jury. The closed-circuit cameras that were broadcasting from the courtroom to the media room Tuesday were not high-resolution enough that I can 100 percent swear by this, but: I’m pretty sure that after Pellegrini showed that photo of him flipping the bird, Tsarnaev smirked. Sure enough, Tsarnaev was found guilty and sentenced to death. Afterward, ten members of the twelve-person jury said they believed he had felt no remorse. But as psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett points out, all of this discussion of whether Tsarnaev did or did not regret his actions is a perfect example of the pitfalls of transparency. The jury assumed that whatever Tsarnaev felt in his heart would be automatically posted on his face, in a way that matched American ideas about how emotions are supposed to be displayed. But Tsarnaev wasn’t American. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Barrett writes: In the Boston Marathon Bombing case, if Tsarnaev felt remorse for his deeds, what would it have looked like? Would he have openly cried? Begged his victims for forgiveness? Expounded on the error of his ways? Perhaps, if he were following American stereotypes for expressing remorse, or if this were a trial in a Hollywood movie. But Tsarnaev is a young man of Muslim faith from Chechnya.…Chechen culture expects men to be stoic in the face of adversity. If they lose a battle, they should bravely accept defeat, a mindset known as the “Chechen wolf.” So if Tsarnaev felt remorse, he might well have remained stony-faced. 2 Knox’s list of lovers wasn’t what it seemed, either. In an effort to intimidate her, the Italian police lied to Knox and told her she was HIV positive. Knox, afraid and alone in her cell, wrote a list of her past sexual partners to work out how this could possibly be true. 3 There is an endless amount of this kind of thing. For the prosecutor in the case, the telling moment was when he took Knox into the kitchen to look at the knife drawer, to see if anything was missing. “She started hitting the palms of her hands on her ears. As if there was the memory of a noise, a sound, a scream. Meredith’s scream. Undoubtedly, I started to suspect Amanda.” Or this: At dinner with Meredith’s friends in a restaurant, Amanda suddenly burst into song. “But what drew laughs in Seattle got embarrassed looks in Perugia,” she writes. “It hadn’t dawned on me that the same quirks my friends at home found endearing could actually offend people who were less accepting of differences.” 4 “What’s compelling to me about Amanda Knox is that it was her slight offness that did her in, the everyday offness to be found on every schoolyard and in every workplace,” the critic Tom Dibblee wrote in perceptive essays about the case. “This is the slight sort of offness that rouses muttered suspicion and gossip, the slight sort of offness that courses through our daily lives and governs who we choose to affiliate ourselves with and who we choose to distance ourselves from.”