Mullainathan’s computer, on the other hand, couldn’t see the defendant and it couldn’t hear anything that was said in the courtroom. All it had was the defendant’s age and rap sheet. It had a fraction of the information available to the judge—and it did a much better job at making bail decisions.
In my second book, Blink, I told the story of how orchestras made much smarter recruiting decisions once they had prospective hires audition behind a screen. Taking information away from the hiring committee made for better judgments. But that was because the information gleaned from watching someone play is largely irrelevant. If you’re judging whether someone is a good violin player, knowing whether that person is big or small, handsome or homely, white or black isn’t going to help. In fact, it will probably only introduce biases that will make your job even harder.
But when it comes to a bail decision, the extra information the judge has sounds like it should be really useful. In an earlier case in Solomon’s courtroom, a young man in basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt was charged with getting into a fight with someone, then buying a car with the man’s stolen credit card. In asking for bail, the district attorney pointed out that he had failed to appear for his court date after two previous arrests. That’s a serious red flag. But not all “FTAs” are identical. What if the defendant was given the wrong date? What if he would lose his job if he took off work that day, and decided it wasn’t worth it? What if his child was in the hospital? That’s what the defendant’s lawyer told the judge: Her client had a good excuse. The computer didn’t know that, but the judge did. How could that not help?
In a similar vein, Solomon said the thing he’s most alert to in bail cases is “mental illness with an allegation of violence.” Those kinds of cases are a judge’s worst nightmare. They let someone out on bail, then that person stops taking their medication and goes on to commit some horrible crime. “It’s shoot a cop,” Solomon said.
It’s drive a car into a minivan, killing a pregnant woman and her husband. It’s hurt a child. [It’s] shoving somebody in front of a subway train and killing them. It’s an awful situation at every possible angle.…No judge would ever want to be the one having made the release decision on that case.
Some of the clues to that kind of situation are in the defendant’s file: medical records, previous hospitalizations, some mention of the defendant’s being found not competent. But other clues are found only in the moment.
“You also will hear terms thrown around in the courtroom of ‘EDP’—emotionally disturbed person,” Solomon said.
That will come from either the police department who’s brought them in and handed you an envelope that’s from a doctor at a hospital where he’s been screened at a psychiatric ER prior to arraignment.…Other times, that information will get into the DA’s folder and the DA will ask questions.…That’s a fact for me to think about.
He’ll look at the defendant, in those cases—closely, carefully, searching for, as he put it,
sort of a glassy-eyed look, not being able to make eye contact. And not the adolescent unable to make eye contact because the frontal lobe hasn’t developed. I’m talking about the adult off their meds.…
Mullainathan’s machine can’t overhear the prosecutor talking about an EDP, and it can’t see that telltale glassy-eyed look. That fact should translate into a big advantage for Solomon and his fellow judges. But for some reason it doesn’t.
Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?
5.
Neville Chamberlain made his third and final visit to Germany at the end of September 1938, two weeks after his first visit. The meeting was in Munich at the Nazi Party’s offices—the Führerbau. Italian leader Benito Mussolini and French prime minister Édouard Daladier were also invited. The four of them met, with their aides, in Hitler’s private study. On the morning of the second day, Chamberlain asked Hitler if the two of them could meet alone. By this point, Chamberlain felt he had the measure of his adversary.
When Hitler had said his ambitions were limited to Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain believed that “Herr Hitler was telling the truth.” It was now just a matter of getting that commitment in writing.
Hitler took him to his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz. Chamberlain pulled out a piece of paper on which he had written a simple agreement and asked Hitler whether he would sign it. As the interpreter translated the words into German, “Hitler frequently ejaculated, ‘Ja! Ja!’ And at the end he said, ‘Yes I will certainly sign it,’” Chamberlain later wrote to one of his sisters. “‘When shall we do it?’ I said, ‘now,’ & we went at once to the writing table & put our signatures to the two copies which I had brought with me.”
That afternoon, Chamberlain flew home to a hero’s welcome. A crowd of journalists surged toward him. He took the letter from his breast pocket and waved it to the crowd. “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor Herr Hitler, and here is a paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.”
Then it was back to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street.
“My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
The crowd cheered.
“Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds.”
In March 1939, Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. It had taken him less than six months to break his agreement with Chamberlain. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and the world was at war.
We have, in other words, CIA officers who cannot make sense of their spies, judges who cannot make sense of their defendants, and prime ministers who cannot make sense of their adversaries. We have people struggling with their first impressions of a stranger. We have people struggling when they have months to understand a stranger. We have people struggling when they meet with someone only once, and people struggling when they return to the stranger again and again. They struggle with assessing a stranger’s honesty. They struggle with a stranger’s character. They struggle with a stranger’s intent.
It’s a mess.
6.
One last thing:
Take a look at the following word, and fill in the two blank letters. Do it quickly, without thinking.
G L _ _
This is called a word-completion task. Psychologists commonly use it to test things such as memory.
I completed G L _ _ as GLUM. Remember that. The next word is:
_ _TER
I completed that as HATER. Remember that too. Here are the rest of the words:
S_ _RE
P_ _ N
TOU_ _
ATT_ _ _
BO_ _
FL_ _ T
SL_ T
STR_ _ _
GO_ _
CHE_ _
_ _OR
SL_ _ _
SC _ _ _
_ _ NNER
B_ _ T
PO _ _ _
BA_ _
_RA_
_ _ _EAT