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