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