It began, as these things so often do, with a routine traffic stop on a quiet country road. A young woman named Sandra Bland, driving from Chicago to start a new job in Texas, failed to signal a lane change. A state trooper, Brian Encinia, pulled her over. At first, he was courteous. Then she lit a cigarette, and he asked her to put it out. “I'm in my car,” she replied, “why do I have to put out my cigarette?” From that moment, a minor interaction spiraled into a confrontation. “Step out of the car!” he ordered. She refused. He threatened to “light you up,” dragged her from the vehicle, and arrested her. Three days later, she was dead, having taken her own life in her jail cell. I want to understand what really happened by the side of the highway that day, because if we were more thoughtful about how we approach and make sense of strangers, she would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.
To begin, consider two puzzles. The first comes from a Cuban intelligence officer named Florentino Aspillaga, who defected to the United States in 1987. During his debriefing, he revealed a bombshell: nearly the entire roster of American spies inside Cuba were actually double agents, working for Fidel Castro all along. The CIA, one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world, had been played for a fool for years. They met these agents, vetted them, and believed them, yet they were utterly blind to the truth. Why can't we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?
The second puzzle comes from the eve of the Second World War. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, desperate to avoid conflict, flew to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler face-to-face. He spent hours with him, looked him in the eye, and took the measure of the man. “I got the impression,” Chamberlain wrote, “that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” He was catastrophically wrong. The people who saw Hitler for the monster he was, like Winston Churchill, were the ones who knew him only from a distance. It seems that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us *worse* at making sense of them. This is the paradox of the stranger problem: we believe that seeing people up close, in person, is the best way to understand them. But it's not.
Our first mistake is that we operate with a default to truth. Our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. Think of Ana Montes, the “Queen of Cuba,” a top analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who was, for sixteen years, a spy for Havana. Her colleagues had doubts; a counterintelligence officer even interviewed her after a colleague grew suspicious. But her explanations seemed plausible, and the idea that a star analyst could be a traitor seemed so remote that the doubts were explained away. We don't behave like scientists, gathering evidence before reaching a conclusion. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to a level where we can no longer dismiss them. This is not a flaw in our wiring; it is essential for society to function. But it means we are vulnerable to deception.
The only people who are not vulnerable are those who refuse to default to truth, figures like Harry Markopolos, the fraud investigator who uncovered Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme years before anyone else. Markopolos saw what no one else did because his default setting is suspicion. He assumes the worst in everyone. He is the Holy Fool, the outcast who sees the truth because he is not part of the social contract. We need people like him to sound the alarm. But we cannot all be Harry Markopolos. A world of universal suspicion would be a nightmare, a place where no one could trust, cooperate, or communicate. The price of defaulting to truth is that we are sometimes fooled. But the price of abandoning that trust is far higher.
Our second mistake is the illusion of transparency - the belief that a person's demeanor is a reliable window into their soul. We think we can read others from their facial expressions and body language, an idea reinforced by television shows where actors telegraph every emotion perfectly. But in real life, people are not transparent. When Amanda Knox's roommate was murdered in Italy, she did not act the way a grieving friend is “supposed” to act. She kissed her boyfriend, did cartwheels at the police station, and seemed cold. The Italian police saw her strange behavior and concluded she was a killer. They mistook her mismatched demeanor for guilt. The truth is, the link between how we feel on the inside and how we appear on the outside is often tenuous. A person who looks guilty might just be an innocent person who acts guilty.
This problem becomes nearly impossible when alcohol is involved. Consider the tragic case of Brock Turner, the Stanford University student convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, Emily Doe, behind a dumpster. They met at a fraternity party, both blind drunk. Alcohol creates a state of myopia, narrowing our mental field of vision to only the most immediate cues and obliterating the long-term considerations that guide our character. In that state, two people can become distorted versions of themselves. For Doe, extreme intoxication led to a blackout, erasing her memory and her ability to consent. For Turner, myopia erased his ability to correctly interpret her state. How can we determine consent when the two people negotiating it are so far from their true selves?
Finally, we fail to appreciate the profound importance of context. We think of suicide as an act of profound, unshakable despair. But is it? When the poet Sylvia Plath took her life in 1962, she did so by putting her head in an oven filled with toxic town gas, the most common method of suicide in England at the time. A few years later, England switched to non-lethal natural gas, and the suicide rate plummeted. The impulse to die, it turns out, is often coupled to a specific, available means. Take away the means, and the impulse often fades. The same is true of crime. Criminologists have discovered that crime is not spread evenly across a city; it is intensely concentrated on a few specific street corners. Behavior is coupled to place.
These three principles - default to truth, transparency, and coupling - bring us back to that roadside in Texas. Officer Brian Encinia was a product of a new style of policing born from the Kansas City experiments, which taught officers to abandon the default to truth and use traffic stops to search for bigger crimes. He was trained to look for “curiosity ticklers” and read demeanor as a sign of intent. He saw Sandra Bland's agitation not as the understandable frustration of a troubled woman, but as a sign of a threat. He was operating on the illusion of transparency.
Worse, he ignored the context. Proactive, aggressive policing was designed for crime-ridden hot spots, but Encinia was patrolling a quiet country road next to a university. He was using a hot-spot tool in a cold spot, magnifying the risk of a tragic misunderstanding. He saw a stranger and, armed with a set of flawed assumptions, failed to understand her. The death of Sandra Bland was not just the failure of one police officer. It was a failure of all of us, a tragic consequence of our collective ignorance about how to talk to strangers.
