Blink: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

In the South Bronx, on a street called Wheeler Avenue, there was a Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo. Late on the night of February 3, 1999, Diallo was standing outside his apartment building, looking out at the street. Meanwhile, four plainclothes police officers were driving by Diallo’s building. When they saw Diallo, they thought that he might be a burglar trying to break into the apartment, based on the way he kept looking to the left and the right, and he supposedly fit the description of a reported serial rapist who’d been seen in the neighborhood. So they stopped their car and asked to speak to him. Diallo, who stuttered and spoke poor English, didn’t respond right away. Diallo may have thought that the officers were criminals—indeed, one of Diallo’s friends had recently been attacked by a group of armed robbers. Diallo ran into his building, away from the police officers. The officers yelled for Diallo to stop running, but Diallo did not. The officers ran into the building and chased Diallo toward his apartment. At this time, one of the police officers reports, Diallo seemed to be carrying an object that resembled a gun (the object turned out to be his wallet). The police officer opened fire on Diallo. The other officers, who were coming around the corner, heard gunfire, thought that their partner might be in trouble, and fired their own guns at Diallo, ultimately killing him.

The most common kinds of snap judgments we make are snap judgments about other people. For the most part, humans are good at making these kinds of snap judgments—humans are adept at reading subtle facial cues and picking up on subtle displays of emotion. Clearly, the four plainclothes officers who shot at Diallo made a series of bad snap judgments: they judged Diallo to be a criminal, believed that he was going to shoot at them with a gun, etc. In the end, however, a jury acquitted the four plainclothes police officers, on the basis that they had made some bad but forgivable mistakes in judgment that night. The jury’s decision outraged many people, who interpreted Diallo’s death as a textbook example of police racism.

It seems wrong to say that the four police officers killed Diallo because of a simple misunderstanding—after all, the officers had three or four “misunderstandings” in a row, beginning with their judgment that Diallo was a criminal, and ending with their tragic belief that Diallo had a gun. But it also seems wrong to say that the officers killed Diallo because they were murderous racists: indeed, none of the officers had any previous history of overtly racist behavior. As we will see in this chapter, Diallo’s death falls in the “grey area” between deliberate and accidental behavior.

In order to understand Diallo’s death, we’ll need to understand the “affect theory” developed by Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, two of the most important psychologists of the 20th century. Tomkins taught at Harvard throughout the 1920s and 30s; during this time, he developed a complex affect theory—in other words, a theory that humans display their innermost emotions through subtle facial expressions. Many years later, Tomkins became a mentor to the young Paul Ekman, who shared Tomkins fascination with the hidden language of the human face. Together, Tomkins and Ekman studied facial expressions by videotaping thousands of subjects from around the world. Gradually, Ekman and Tomkins found a sophisticated way to analyze facial expressions.

Gladwell met with Ekman, now in his sixties, to discuss the “taxonomy of facial expressions.” Ekman explains that there are at least 43 distinct “action units”—in other words, 43 different facial muscle movements. These action units can be combined in hundreds of different ways to produce different emotional “affects.” For example, the normal human affect for fear is a combination of action units one, two, four, five, and twenty: inner and outer brow raised, raised eyelids, dropped jaw, wrinkled nose, stretched upper lip. Ekman and Tomkins’s research has thousands of applications—for example, the animators for the movie Toy Story used action unit research to draw characters with realistic expressions.

Ekman has reached some other surprising conclusions about the human face. Usually, people think of the face as expressing an internal emotional state; for example, we smile because we are happy, not the other way around. But Ekman’s research suggests that sometimes, people feel happier when they’re made to smile. Ekman also learned that people communicate through “microexpressions”—facial affects that only last for a tiny fraction of a second. For example, Ekman studied footage of the trial of the famous Soviet spy Harold Philby. When the prosecution questioned Philby about his espionage activity, Philby tried to affect a look of confidence and security as he denied his crimes—but, Ekman discovered, Philby’s face betrayed smugness, fear, and distress for a few crucial milliseconds, foreshadowing the revelation that Philby was guilty.

The face, it would seem, “has a mind of its own”—it reveals our innermost emotions, even when we’re trying to hide them. But this is puzzling—why, if the face is so adept at displaying its owner’s innermost emotions, are humans sometimes bad at picking up on facial cues? And why did none of the plainclothes police officers who shot Diallo notice his fear or distress on the night of his death?

To understand why the police officers shot Diallo, we’ll need to understand how autistic people live. Many autistic adults are capable of living fairly “normal” lives—they have houses, jobs, and families. But autistic people, for the most part, are unable to pick up on basic facial cues. In one psychological experiment, an autistic adult, Peter, was asked to watch the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while machines tracked his eye movements across the movie screen. Peter was able to pick up verbal cues in the film, but not the characters’ expressions and gestures. For example, one character in the movie mentions a painting hanging on the wall. Ordinarily, people would be able to tell which painting the character is referring to because of the position of his body and the direction in which his eyes are pointed. But Peter responded to the word “painting,” not the character’s facial cues; as a result, he looked at a different painting on the wall.

In general, Peter paid more attention to words and physical objects than to people’s faces or gestures. Gladwell speculates that Peter’s condition—the inability to pick up on important facial cues—isn’t as rare as it seems. Perhaps the four police officers who shot Diallo experienced a kind of “temporary autism,” during which they ignored Diallo’s facial expressions.

Another important factor in Diallo’s death was the intense, high-stakes nature of the conflict—most of all, the gunfire. Although movies and TV shows portray gunfire as an everyday occurrence for police officers, more than 90 percent of officers go through their entire careers without firing a gun at another person—thus, the officers who do fire their guns tend to be in particularly intense situations before firing. Many police officers who fire their guns have reported dissociative states in the moments leading up to the gunshot, during which they forget where they are or lose their ability to hear. There is a biological explanation for these bizarre episodes: in high-stakes, life-or-death situations, people’s heart rates may rise to 175 beats per minute or more—in such a situation, people forget how to perform even the simplest tasks.

Gladwell hypothesizes that police officers who shoot innocent people—for example, the officers who shot Diallo—lose their cognitive abilities because they’re in high-stakes situations. The plainclothes police officers felt themselves to be in a high-stakes situation when Diallo ran into his apartment—in the ensuing panic, the officers lost their ability to think clearly, as well as their ability to interpret Diallo’s facial expressions. As a result, they shot Diallo.

For a vivid example of the limits of facial cue-reading, Gladwell considers John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981. Hinckley pushed past other people in the crowd and fired six shots point-blank at Reagan, hitting Reagan in the lung. The mystery of Hinckley’s crime is how he managed to get so close to Reagan, considering that Reagan was surrounded by bodyguards. The answer is that bodyguards have a tough job—they have to scan the crowd to determine which people are dangerous. On the day of the assassination attempt, not even Reagan’s professional bodyguards had enough time to interpret the threatening look on Hinckley’s face. Gladwell posits that human beings become “temporarily autistic in situations where we run out of time.”

In one psychological experiment, subjects were “primed” with a picture of a black face and then asked to identify whether they were looking at a picture of a gun or a wrench. When the subjects were allowed to go through the study at their own pace, they were able to identify the gun slightly more quickly than they identified the wrench, perhaps reflecting racist stereotypes about black people and crime. But when subjects were forced to go through the study very quickly, they began to make notable errors, mistaking the wrench for the gun. The study suggests that when people are forced to make judgments about other people in very little time, they’re more likely to fall back on convenient stereotypes.

Partly in order to avoid prejudicial judgments, many police departments have switched from two-officer patrol cars to single-officer cars: the reason is that when officers work alone, they work more slowly, and therefore are less likely to make prejudicial split-second decisions like the ones that led to Diallo’s death. In general, many police departments have changed their procedures to encourage officers to minimize risks in the moments leading up to their interactions with suspects. For example, police departments have retrained their officers to stand slightly behind drivers who’ve been pulled over for speeding; in this way, the officer makes it more difficult for the driver to shoot them, and it gives them an extra second to decide how to respond when the driver moves their hands suddenly. In short, police departments have tried to cut down on the situations in which a police officer is forced to fall back on instinctive decision-making. In this way, the officer makes fewer instinctive decisions, and therefore, fewer bad, prejudicial mistakes.

Criticisms of police shootings tend to focus on the misdeeds of specific officers—officers are accused of racism and conscious bigotry. But in fact, the police officers who shoot innocent people aren’t necessarily racists at all—perhaps, in the heat of the moment, they lose their ability to think clearly, and fall back on unreliable instincts. Police departments take great efforts to prepare police officers for the dangers of active duty, but they can only do so much. The result is that often, when police officers engage in a seemingly dangerous chase or confrontation, their heart rates are well over 175 beats per minute, and they make tragic mistakes.

Instinct, somewhat counterintuitively, improves with practice. Indeed, Tomkins spent hours every week practicing his ability to interpret people’s facial expressions. Ekman argues that ordinary people can train themselves to pick up on microexpressions in only a few hours. This kind of training could be extremely helpful for police officers. Gladwell recalls an interview with a police officer who arrested a teenaged boy. The boy reached into his pocket instead of putting his hands up—at this time, the officer realized that the boy was grabbing a gun. The officer was tempted to shoot the boy, but because he perceived the fear in the boy’s face, “something told him” to wait a second longer. Sure enough, the boy dropped his gun on the floor—he had been trying to surrender, not shoot the officer. In short, the police officer responded to basic facial cues and made an educated “snap judgment” to give the boy an extra second.

Gladwell now returns to the sad story of Amadou Diallo. On the night of his death, Diallo was standing outside his apartment. The plainclothes police officers saw that Diallo was standing outside, late at night, and guessed that he was a criminal trying to rob an apartment. When they asked to speak to Diallo, Diallo’s face must have expressed fear and confusion—thus, he ran away. The police officers must have been frightened, too—they were in a high-stakes situation that involved chasing a man down a dark hallway; as a result, their heart rates soared. By the time the officers caught up to Diallo, they must have been “temporarily autistic.” Instead of reading Diallo’s face, they must have focused on Diallo’s hands, carrying what they believed to be a gun. We already know the rest of the story: in less than three seconds, the officers made a horrible, high-stress decision: they opened fire on Diallo, and killed him.