Look at the image (full image in article). What is happening here? Give it a real answer before you read on. Who are they, what is passing between them, where are they, why is this happening, and how does it end? You have a story now, and it feels like the obvious one. I have
You Don’t Have Small Cases Read More »
Every day we are bombarded with data and snippets of information and we are either told by someone what it means or we try our best to assign meaning and understanding to it. The problem is that we often do this without grasping the context of the information. Or worse, we’re operating within someone else’s
When Numbers Lie: A Recipe for Misunderstanding Read More »
Minimize what someone did, and they’ll confess — to the minimized version. The confession comes. Just not to what actually happened. And with it goes everything else: how it happened, why, what led to it, who else was involved, what else is out there. A confession to something that didn’t quite occur. Which leads us
The Problem with Confessions Read More »
14 micro-expressions. Out of 700 observations. Split evenly between truth-tellers and liars. That’s the entire empirical foundation for a growing industry of AI-powered deception detection tools. A recent deep learning paper on micro-expression recognition is genuinely impressive engineering. The researchers solved a real problem. But the frame around it is dangerous — and it’s the
The computer can see the micro-expression. That doesn’t mean we know what it means. Read More »
You’ve been in this situation: You need someone to tell you the truth, but they have every reason to lie or stay silent. So you try to extract a commitment: “Will you be honest with me?” They say yes, but it means nothing. Or you apply pressure, and they shut down. Or you try to
Cognitive Dissonance and an Impossible Choice Read More »
Standing in the woods with a buzzing chainsaw and sitting across from someone in a quiet interview room seem to have almost nothing in common. They have almost everything in common. I’ve spent more than twenty years doing one for a living and the other to stay warm (and sane), and somewhere along the way
Chainsawing and Intelligence Interviewing Read More »
You’re about to interview a 47-year-old male accused of sexually abusing multiple children over several years. The allegations are detailed. The victims are young. The evidence suggests a pattern of manipulation and grooming. You’ve reviewed the file. You know what he’s accused of. And you are about to walk into that interview room. Let me
When Your Values Walk into the Room Before You Do…and Create Havoc Read More »
Most difficult conversations fail before they even begin. Not because of what gets said, but because of what we’re trying to do when we’re saying it. In any conversation – whether you’re an FBI agent conducting a challenging interview, a manager addressing performance issues, or a parent talking to a teenager – you’re doing one
How We Fail at Difficult Conversations (And One Way to Succeed) Read More »
I recently worked with an ABC crew filming episodes for their series The Interrogation Room, analyzing high-profile interrogations. One case in particular – the Chris Watts interview – raised a question that’s relevant far beyond criminal investigation: What brings a seemingly normal person to make a catastrophically irrational decision? The easy answer is to label
In July 2010, I landed in Islamabad just minutes after AirBlue Flight 202 crashed into the nearby Margalla Hills, killing 152 people and leaving a scar in the mountainside that haunted me for the two years I was stationed in Pakistan. Every time I looked at that mark on the side of the mountain, I
Why We Get Risk So Wrong: The Control Paradox in Decision-Making Read More »
