The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence

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  The stories in this chapter have been about dangers posed by strangers, but what about dangers that might come from those people we choose to bring into our lives as employees, employers, people we date, and people we marry? These relationships do not start with the first meeting—we meet many people we don’t keep in our lives. Our relationships actually start with predictions, predictions that determine—literally—the quality and course of our lives. So it is time to take a look at the quality of those predictions.

  ▪ CHAPTER FIVE ▪

  IMPERFECT STRANGERS

  “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile

  the moment a single man contemplates it,

  bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

  —Antoine De Saint-Exupery

  See if you can imagine this: It is the year 2050, and predictions about people are perfect. They are made with a high-tech chemical test. You can accept a ride from a total stranger, you can ask a homeless person you’ve never seen before to watch your house while you are out of town. You can do this free of fear that they might harm you because predictions of intent and character are totally reliable.

  You are skimming along in your hover-craft one afternoon, taking your six-year-old daughter to the park, when you are paged to come to an urgent business meeting. You go to the park anyway and look around for some stranger with whom you can leave your daughter. There is a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench reading a book, and as you sit down next to her, she smiles. Using a device nearly everyone carries these days, you conduct an instant high-tech test on her, as she does on you, and you both pass with flying colors. Without hesitation, you ask if she’ll watch your daughter for a few hours while you skim over to a meeting. She agrees, you exchange some information about how to reach each other, and off you go without any concern, because you have predicted to your satisfaction that this stranger is emotionally healthy, competent, drug-free and trustworthy.

  The story sounds far-fetched, but in our time we already make every single one of these predictions about baby-sitters. We just don’t do it as quickly or as accurately.

  With present-day technology, how much time would you have to spend with a stranger before she wouldn’t be a stranger anymore? How many of your low-tech tests would a baby-sitter have to pass before you’d trust her? We undertake this common yet very high-stakes prediction by reviewing an application and asking a few questions, but let’s really look at this prediction. For starters, we wouldn’t just interview a woman we met in a park. No, we’d want someone who was recommended by a person we know, because we like to rely on predictions made by others. Our friend Kevin is so bright and honorable, we think, that if he endorses somebody, well, that person must be okay. What often happens, however, is that we attach Kevin’s attributes to the person he recommended, and we don’t listen to our own uncertainty. As we drive away from home, leaving our child behind with someone we met just a half-hour ago, there is that tug that says, “You never really know about people.

  In our interview with the baby-sitter, we watch her attentively for any signs of… of what? Drug use? Well, that can be tested with great reliability; tens of thousands of drug-screen tests are done every week by employers who have less at stake than parents do when hiring a baby-sitter. Though most people believe the drug question is a critical one, have you ever heard of a parent requiring a drug screen of a baby-sitter candidate? Or a Breath-alyzer test to see if she’s been drinking? Most parents don’t even contact all the baby-sitter’s references, so it’s no wonder they drive away feeling, “You never really know about people.”

  I am not, by the way, suggesting drug tests or polygraphs for baby-sitters, but I am pointing out that we rarely bring even a tenth of the available resources to high-stakes predictions. For example, the question people really want answered by a prospective baby-sitter is: Have you ever mistreated a child? But they never ask it! Why not? Because people feel that asking a question so direct is rude, or ridiculous, since it wouldn’t be answered truthfully by someone who had mistreated children. Ask the question anyway, and how it is answered will make you more comfortable or less comfortable with that applicant. Imagine you asked, “Have you ever abused a child?” and the applicant responded with “Define abuse,” or “What have you heard?” It is entirely fair and appropriate to ask someone to whom you’ll entrust your child to discuss the very issues you care about most. Good applicants will certainly understand, and bad applicants may reveal themselves.

  Having not sought any of the information he or she really wants to know, a parent might see the applicant stroke the family cat and think: “She likes animals, that’s a good sign.” (Or worse still: “Tabby likes her, that’s a good sign.”) People want so badly to get someone hired for a job that they spend more time qualifying a candidate than disqualifying a candidate, but this is one process in which it’s better to look for the storm clouds than to look for the silver lining.

  Let’s go back to 2050 for a moment. Not only do you have no hesitation about accepting a ride from a stranger, but there’s a city-run transportation computer to facilitate precisely that. Rather than drive yourself from Los Angeles to San Diego, you enter your destination into the computer along with what time you want to leave, and it identifies several other people who are going from your area to San Diego at the same time. A perfect stranger will stop by your house and pick you up, and you’ll get back from San Diego the same way. That’s what could happen if predictions were perfect. Since they are not, a hundred thousand cars carry the passengers that twenty-five thousand could carry just as well. Fear of each other and lack of confidence in our predictions makes any alternative seem impossible.

  But what if we had that transportation computer today, and in addition to identifying the people who are making the trip you want to make at the time you want to make it, it also provided some demographic information? You could ride to San Diego in an old van with two unemployed men in their thirties, or you could ride in a late-model station wagon with a housewife and her one-year-old child. You’d likely conclude that the ride with the housewife and her baby would be safer (noisier, perhaps, but safer). What else would you want to know about candidates for ride-alongs? Their criminal histories, driving histories, condition of their vehicle? The point is, if you could learn enough about each candidate, you would actually be comfortable relying upon your prediction because that’s exactly how strangers become people you trust anyway. You learn enough about them. They pass several of your tests and suddenly they aren’t strangers anymore.

  Some animals perceive danger chemically—maybe even part of the way we do it is chemical; I don’t know. But will the day really come when we’ll be able to make predictions about people not by judging their appearance or clothing or smile or assurances, but by applying a chemical test? I believe the answer is yes, though I won’t still be around to say I told you so. In the meantime, since we have to keep doing predictions the old-fashioned way, it’s all the more important that we understand what’s really going on.

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  Psychologist John Monahan is a pioneer in the field of prediction who has influenced my work and life a great deal. In his beautifully written book, Predicting Violent Behavior, he begins by asking the simplest question: In which direction would this book fall if you let it go?

  The reader could technically state only that every other solid object he or she has let go of in the past has (eventually) fallen down rather than risen up or remained suspended. What allows for the prediction that this object, if released in the future, will also fall down is that we possess a theory—gravity—that can plausibly let us generalize from the past class of cases to the current individual case. The catch, of course, is that we understand gravity much better than we understand violence.

  My friend John and I might have a spirited discussion on that, for I know much more about violence than I do about gravity. I believe behavior, like gravity, is bound by some ess
ential rules. Admittedly they may not always apply, but remember, they don’t always apply with gravity either. Where you are (such as in space, or in water) affects how objects will behave. The relationship of objects to each other and to their environment (i.e., magnets, airplanes, etc.) also bears on such predictions. With behavior, as with gravity, context will govern, but there are some broad strokes that can be fairly applied to most of us:

  We seek connection with others;

  We are saddened by loss, and try to avoid it;

  We dislike rejection;

  We like recognition and attention;

  We will do more to avoid pain than we will do to seek pleasure;

  We dislike ridicule and embarrassment;

  We care what others think of us;

  We seek a degree of control over our lives;

  These assumptions are hardly ground-breaking, and though we might expect something more esoteric about people who are violent, these mundane concepts apply to most of them, just as they do to you. You see, this list contains a few of the ingredients in the human recipe, and how much of one ingredient or how little of another will influence the final result. With the man who goes on a shooting spree at work, it is not that he has some mysterious extra component or that he necessarily has something missing. It is usually the balance and interaction of the same ingredients that influence us all. Am I saying the shooting spree at work can be predicted in part by weighing the balance of factors as common as the eight general assumptions listed above? Yes.

  Certainly there are hundreds of other variables that my office considers in predicting violence, and I could present them here with charts and graphs and templates and computer print-outs. I could use psychiatric terms that would require a psychiatrist to interpret, but my purpose here is to simplify, to identify in your experience the factors that matter most.

  As I discussed earlier, no matter how aberrant the person whose behavior you seek to predict, no matter how different from him you may be or want to be, you must find in him a part of yourself, and in yourself a part of him. When you undertake a high-stakes prediction, keep looking until you find some common ground, something you share with the person whose behavior you seek to predict—this will help you see the situation as he perceives it. For example, the anonymous caller may seem to enjoy the fear he is causing in his victim. Getting pleasure from the fear of others is something most of us cannot relate to, until we recall the glee of every teenager who startles a friend or sibling by jumping out of the dark. Anyway, with the frightening caller, fear may not be the issue as much as liking attention, which we can relate to. When the caller causes people to feel fear, they are very attentive. It might not be his favorite way of getting attention if he perceived better options or if he felt he brought other assets to his relationship with his victim, but it has likely worked for him in the past. I don’t mean to imply that the threat caller is so introspective that he consciously considered all this, but neither is our behavior usually the result of conscious decision-making.

  Though it is true that people have more in common than in contrast, you will encounter some who have vastly different standards of behavior and vastly different ways of perceiving the same events. For example, some people operate without listening to their consciences; they do not care about the welfare of others, period. In the corporate boardroom we might call this negligence; on the street we call it criminality. The ability to act in spite of conscience or empathy is one characteristic associated with psychopaths. Robert Hare’s insightful book Without Conscience identifies several other features. Such people are:

  Glib and superficial

  Egocentric and grandiose

  Lacking remorse or guilt

  Deceitful and manipulative

  Impulsive

  In need of excitement

  Lacking responsibility

  Emotionally shallow

  Many errors in predicting behavior come from the belief that others will perceive things as we do. The psychopath described above will not. To successfully predict his behavior, you must see a situation your way and his way. It will be easy, of course, to see it your way—that’s automatic. Seeing a situation from another person’s perspective is an acquired skill, but you have already acquired it. Imagine that you are about to fire someone whose behavior, personality, and philosophy of life could not be further from your own. Even with all the differences, you would still know if he’d view the firing as fair, completely unfair, part of a vendetta, or motivated by discrimination or greed, etc. Particularly if you worked closely with this person, you could recite his perception of events much as he would. Though you may not share his view, you can still bring it into focus.

  Predicting human behavior is really about recognizing the play from just a few lines of dialogue. It is about trusting that a character’s behavior will be consistent with his perception of the situation. If the play is true to humanness, each act will follow along as it should, as it does in nature.

  Imagine you are watching a bird as it floats to earth about to land. The sun is casting the bird’s shadow on the ground, and both bird and shadow move toward the landing point. We know that the bird cannot possibly arrive there before its shadow. L ikewise, human action cannot land before impulse, and impulse cannot land before that which triggers it. Each step is preceded by the step before it. You cannot shoot the gun without first touching it, nor take hold of it without first intending to, nor intend to without first having some reason, nor have a reason without first reacting to something, nor react to something without first giving it meaning, and on and on. At many points before aiming a gun and pulling the trigger, particularly if the context is not unique, there are thoughts and emotions which others in similar situations also experienced.

  Think of any situation that many have shared, say, getting to an airport late (but not too late) for a flight. Based on your experience, you can predict some of the thoughts, emotions, and thus behaviors of a harried traveler. Is he likely to stroll? At the ticket counter will he cordially allow others to get in line ahead of him? Will he savor the interesting architecture of the airport?

  Because we are familiar with the airport situation, we find it easy to predict what the traveler will do. It is precisely because some people are not familiar with violent behavior that they feel they cannot predict it, yet they daily predict non-violent behavior and the process is identical. In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman explains that “we recognize all things by the existence of their opposite—day as distinguishable from night, failure from success, peace from war.” We could add “safety from hazard.”

  When a woman is comfortable with a stranger in her home, someone delivering furniture, for example, her comfort communicates that she has already predicted that he is not dangerous to her. Her intuition asked and answered several questions in order to complete that prediction. It evaluated favorable and unfavorable aspects of his behavior. Since we are more familiar with favorable behaviors, if you list them and then simply note their opposites, you will be predicting dangerousness. We call this the “rule of opposites,” and it is a powerful predictive tool.

  FAVORABLE UNFAVORABLE

  Does his job and no more Offers to help on unrelated tasks

  Respectful of privacy Curious, asks many questions

  Stands at an appropriate distance Stands too close

  Waits to be escorted Walks around the house freely

  Keeps his comments to the job at hand Tries to get into discussions on other topics; makes personal comments

  Mindful of the time; works quickly No concern about time; in no hurry to leave

  Doesn’t care if others are home Wants to know if others are home

  Doesn’t care if others are expected Wants to know if others are expected

  Doesn’t pay undue attention to you Stares at you

  All types of behavioral predictions, not just those about danger, can be improved by applying the rule of opposites.

&nb
sp; Just as we can predict behavior once we know the situation or context, we can also recognize the context by the behavior. A man insists on being first in the ticket line at the airport, looks frequently at his watch, appears exasperated by the slowness of the ticket agent. After getting his ticket, he runs awkwardly along, carrying his bags. He appears rushed and stressed. He looks expectantly at each gate he approaches. Is he:

  a) A politician seeking votes who will stop and chat with each passer-by?

  b) A charity volunteer who will solicit donations?

  c) A person late for his flight who will proceed directly to the gate?

  A hostile employee is fired the day he returns from a leave of absence. He refuses to vacate the building. He tells his supervisor, “You haven’t heard the last of me,” and then recites the supervisor’s home address. He says, “I’ll be visiting you with my buddies, Smith and Wesson.” Security guards are called to remove him and the following morning, his supervisor’s car windshield is smashed.

  Is this fired employee likely to:

  a) Send a check for repair of the windshield?

  b) Enroll the next day in medical school?