Talking To Strangers

Talking To Strangers helps you better understand and accurately judge the people you don’t know while staying patient and tolerant with others.

Who better to look to on the accuracy of making judgments than a bail judge? Solomon is one in New York City who makes a point to look at the people he sentences in the eye. After all, how can you know if a person is shady or not unless you can see it in their eyes?

Against artificial intelligence, however, Solomon and other judges did worse at assessing people that the computers. In a 2017 study, one Harvard economist fed his program the same information the judges got before making their decisions. The defendants that the judges gave bail were 25% more likely to go out and commit another crime than those the computer would have chosen.

We all think we can make a decision about someone just by looking at them. The truth is, we’re overconfident about this ability that doesn’t even exist.

Still think you’re the outlier? Wait until you hear about this next study. Back in 2001 a psychologist performed a study in which she had participants fill in missing letters for words, like “GL_ _.” Most people, when asked what their answers said about them, declared that what they wrote wasn’t an indication of how they were feeling.

But when the same group looked at answers that other participants shared, the story was different. They confidently declared, for example, that certain answers meant people were tired, or goal-oriented. Even with a tiny amount of information we think that we can make a decision about someone. Yet we hold firm that we ourselves are more complex than that.

Do you think you’d be able to spot a Cuban spy if you worked with one? Ana Montes worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and while there fed US secrets to Cuba. It was only after she was found out that the DIA realized the red flags were there all along. Montes’s reports often contained Cuban viewpoints. Sometimes she would take phone calls while a crisis was happening. Although there all along, nobody thought anything beyond a faint feeling of suspicion. It felt more likely that she was just weird than a spy. Everybody faces the same problem the DIA faced. Our default is to believe people are telling the truth, assuming it until we have enough evidence that they are lying. In a study by psychologist Tim Levine, participants were asked to tell who was lying in a mock scenario of people talking about a test they had taken. After multiple runs of the experiment, results continue to show that people can accurately…