Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

A student named Meredith Kercher was murdered in the Italian city of Perugia in 2007. While there was significant evidence indicating that a man named Rudy Guede was responsible for the murder, the investigation instead focused on Kercher’s roommate, Amanda Knox. The police had no physical evidence implicating Knox but rather based their suspicions on her unusual behavior following the crime. They made the mistake of assuming that people are transparent.

While we tend to default to truth when judging a person’s honesty, their demeanor can also play an important role. If someone acts confident, we are more inclined to believe they are telling the truth. If someone acts nervous and rambles, we are more inclined to believe they are lying. The problem is that these behaviors are simply stereotypes of how honest and dishonest people behave. Some people are “matched,” such as a person who fidgets and blushes when they lie, but other people are “mismatched.” Bernie Madoff and Adolf Hitler, for instance, were liars who had the demeanors of honest people.

Gladwell argues that Knox was also mismatched. Rather than appearing sad in the wake of Kercher’s death, Knox came across as indifferent, flippant, and angry at times. She did not behave the way the police thought grieving people ought to behave, and as a result she spent years in prison for a crime she did not commit. Knox is far from the only person to suffer for being different. Cases like hers happen all the time. Research by Tim Levine has indicated that trained interrogators are particularly good at spotting when “matched” people are being honest or dishonest, but they perform extraordinarily badly on “mismatched” people.

In 2015, two people attested that they witnessed a student named Brock Turner raping an unconscious woman at Stanford University. Both Turner and the victim (known by the alias Emily Doe) were drunk when that they met, but the case rested on whether Doe had been so drunk that she was incapable of consenting when Turner initiated sex with her. He was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison. Gladwell notes that cases of sexual assault are particularly complex because of the widely varying conceptions of what does or does not constitute consent. Alcohol complicates matters even further. Reading another person’s intentions is difficult enough when sober but becomes all the more difficult when inebriated.

The psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs argue that alcohol causes myopia. This involves “narrow[ing] our emotional and mental fields of vision” so that we are far more focused on the here and now (207), while any long-term considerations fade into the background. By removing those constraints on our behavior, Gladwell believes that alcohol temporarily “obliterates our true self” (210). This does not necessarily mean that it is a disinhibiting agent—a study of a small Bolivian community found that although community members drank heavily and frequently, their town suffered from none of the social ills typically associated with alcohol. Rather, alcohol-induced myopia means that we are reshaped according to our surroundings. The Bolivian community did not have problems because they drank in a controlled and predictable environment.

When the surroundings are the “hypersexualized chaos of a frat party” (232), however, alcohol can transform people’s behavior for the worse. A sexually aggressive person may control their impulses when sober but not when alcohol is thrown into the mix. Gladwell believes that until we recognize the fundamental role alcohol plays in many sexual assault cases, the pain and suffering experienced by Emily Doe will be repeated again and again.