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 this beautiful, picturesque hilltop town in the middle of Italy. It was a particularly gruesome murder. Throat slit, semi-naked, blood everywhere. I mean, what more do you want in a story?”
Other signature crime stories, such as the O. J. Simpson and JonBenét Ramsey cases, are just as enthralling when you rediscover them five or ten years later. The Amanda Knox case is not. It is completely inexplicable in hindsight. There was never any physical evidence linking either Knox or her boyfriend to the crime. Nor was there ever a plausible explanation for why Knox—an immature, sheltered, middle-class girl from Seattle—would be interested in engaging in murderous sex games with a troubled drifter she barely knew. The police investigation against her was revealed as shockingly inept. The analysis of the DNA evidence supposedly linking her and Sollecito to the crime was completely botched. Her prosecutor was wildly irresponsible, obsessed with fantasies about elaborate sex crimes. Yet it took a ruling by the Italian Supreme Court, eight years after the crime, for Knox to be finally declared innocent. Even then, many otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people disagreed. When Knox was freed from prison, a large angry crowd gathered in the Perugia town square to protest her release. The Amanda Knox case makes no sense.
I could give you a point-by-point analysis of what was wrong with the investigation of Kercher’s murder. It could easily be the length of this book. I could also refer you to some of the most comprehensive scholarly analyses of the investigation’s legal shortcomings, such as Peter Gill’s meticulous “Analysis and Implications of the Miscarriages of Justice of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito” in the July 2016 issue of the criminology journal Forensic Science International, which includes paragraphs like this:
The amplified DNA product in sample B was also subjected to capillary gel electrophoresis. The electrophoretic graph showed peaks that were below the reporting threshold and allele imbalance at most loci. I counted only 6 alleles that were above the reporting threshold. The electrophoretic graph showed a partial DNA profile that was claimed to match Meredith Kercher. Consequently, sample B was borderline for interpretation.
But instead, let me give you the simplest and shortest of all possible Amanda Knox theories. Her case is about transparency. If you believe that the way a stranger looks and acts is a reliable clue to the way they feel—if you buy into the Friends fallacy—then you’re going to make mistakes. Amanda Knox was one of those mistakes.
2.
Let’s return, for a moment, to the theories of Tim Levine that I talked about in Chapter Three. Levine, as you will recall, set up a sting operation for college students. He gave them a trivia test to do. In the middle of it the instructor left the room, leaving the answers on her desk. Afterward, Levine interviewed the students and asked them point-blank whether they had cheated. Some lied. Some told the truth. Then he showed videos of those interviews to people and asked them if they could spot the students who were lying.
Social scientists have done versions of this kind of experiment for years. You have a “sender”—a subject—and a “judge,” and you measure how accurate the judge is at spotting the sender’s lies. What Levine discovered is what psychologists always find in these cases, which is that most of us aren’t very good at lie detection. On average, judges correctly identify liars 54 percent of the time—just slightly better than chance. This is true no matter who does the judging. Students are terrible. FBI agents are terrible. CIA officers are terrible. Lawyers are terrible. There may be a handful of “super-detectors” who beat the odds. But if there are, they are rare. Why?
The first answer is the one we talked about in Chapter Three. We’re truth-biased. For what turn out to be good reasons, we give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that the people we’re talking to are being honest. But Levine wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. The problem is clearly deeper than truth-default. In particular, he was struck by the finding that lies are most often detected only after the fact—weeks, months, sometimes years later.
For example, when Scott Carmichael said to Ana Montes during their first meeting, “Look, Ana. I have reason to suspect that you might be involved in a counterintelligence influence operation,” she just sat there looking at him like a deer in the headlights. In retrospect, Carmichael believed that was a red flag. If she had been innocent, she would have said something—cried out, protested. But Montes? She “didn’t do a freaking thing except sit there.”
In the moment, however, Carmichael missed that clue. Montes was uncovered only by chance, four years later. What Levine found is that we nearly always miss the crucial clues in the moment—and it puzzled him. Why? What happens at the moment someone tells a lie that specifically derails us? To find an answer, Levine went back to his tapes.