Talking to Strangers

1. Rudy Guede, a “shady” character with a criminal history, murdered Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student, on November 1, 2007. Guede had been spending time around Kercher’s house in Perugia, Italy, around the time of her murder. The crime scene was covered in his DNA, and he fled Italy for Germany immediately after investigators discovered Kercher’s body. Despite the mountain of evidence against Guede, police focused their attention on Amanda Knox, Kercher’s roommate, and Knox’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. It was Knox who called the police after returning home one morning and finding blood in the house she shared with Kercher. Knox and Sollecito immediately became suspects and were charged with and convicted of Kercher’s murder. The case dominated the media.

In hindsight, it is ludicrous that Knox and Sollecito were ever convicted. There was neither physical evidence nor motive to tie them to the case. Knox was an average, if not slightly naïve, college-aged woman from Seattle. Yet, the Italian Supreme Court bought the prosecutor’s far-fetched scenarios of Knox and Sollecito’s involvement in “elaborate sex crimes,” and it took eight years for the pair to be exonerated. Gladwell forgoes a lengthy discussion of the many ways investigators botched their investigation into Kercher’s murder at the expense of Knox. To Gladwell, the Knox case is about transparency.  

2. Gladwell analyzes Knox’s case within the context of Tim Levine’s trivia game experiment. Levine’s findings in this experiment suggest people aren’t good at detecting deception. But why is this so? In Chapter Three, Gladwell identifies humanity’s tendency to be biased toward truth and willing to give others the benefit of the doubt as one explanation. But humanity’s inability to detect lies is more complicated than this. To illustrate his point, Gladwell describes the interview of one of Levine’s test subjects, a girl named Sally, whose face turned red when her interviewer asked her if she was telling the truth. Sally is lying. Another test subject, whom Gladwell calls “Nervous Nelly,” never stops fidgeting as she answers her interviewer’s question. Popular logic would suggest that Nervous Nelly, too, is lying. However, she’s actually telling the truth.

Levine’s findings identify two distinct groups of people. The first consists of interviewees whom 80 percent of judges judged incorrectly. The second consists of interviewees whom judges judged correctly 80 percent of the time. Gladwell categorizes these findings as an example of “transparency in action.” We tend to think that lying people behave nervously: they avoid eye contact, fidget, and look uncomfortable. In reality, this simply isn’t true. It confuses us, then, when truthful people act stereotypically suspicious, and vice versa. Gladwell concludes that people aren’t necessarily bad lie detectors—they’re simply bad at detecting lies “when the person we’re judging is mismatched.”

As an example, Gladwell describes financial journalist Michael Ocrant’s experience interviewing Bernie Madoff after Markopolos tipped him off to Madoff’s likely fraudulent activity. Ocrant recalls being struck by Madoff’s casual, calm demeanor during the interview. Madoff’s attitude made it impossible for Ocrant to believe he was guilty of the crimes of which Markopolos accused him. Gladwell reasons that this is because “Madoff was mismatched. He was a liar with the demeanor of an honest man.” Although Ocrant knew that Madoff was likely guilty, Madoff’s surprisingly calm attitude threw him off guard enough that he dropped his story.

3. To Gladwell, Amanda Knox is an apt example of the mismatched, of “the innocent person who acts guilty.” The media misunderstood and attacked Knox, fixating on her nickname, “Foxy Knoxy,” and pointing to her act of buying red lingerie the day after Meredith’s murder as evidence of sexual deviancy. In reality, Foxy Knoxy was a childhood nickname that referenced Knox’s agility on the soccer field, and she was buying underwear because she had no access to her personal belongings while police investigated her house as a crime scene. In reality, Knox was a nerdy, “quirky” young woman who had trouble fitting in.

The public further attacked Knox when her odd behavior in the aftermath of Meredith’s murder didn’t conform to common stereotypes of how people in grief or in shock are supposed to act. She was aloof and unaccepting of comfort. Other times, she was overly affectionate with Raffaele or inappropriately goofy. The lead investigator of the case, Edgardo Giobbi, claims that his team determined Knox’s guilt based on her “psychological and behavioral reaction during the interrogation.”

4. Levine’s findings also suggest that law enforcement agents aren’t any better at determining guilt or innocence based on behavior than laypeople. While law enforcement performed above average when determining the guilt or innocence of “matched” people, their judgement of mismatched people proved to be highly problematic. In fact, law enforcement correctly identified the guilt or innocence of mismatched people just 14 percent of the time. Gladwell wonders whether our inability to judge mismatched people can account for a fraction of wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice.