You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.
<aside> 💡 When you don't have enough doubt, you will find all kinds of excuses to explain away for the person you trust.
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The right question is: Were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.
<aside> 💡 When people start to realize that someone is lying to them and start to accumulate the evidence to the point where they finally become aware that this person is lying to them. This is called by Malcolm Gladwell "push you over the threshold of belief". That's when you realize that the person you have trusted all the time is not the person you know any more. But do we really know the person since the beginning anyway?
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You ask your husband if he is having an affair, and he says no, and you believe him. Your default is that he is telling the truth. And whatever little inconsistencies you spot in his story, you explain away. But three months later you happen to notice an unusual hotel charge on his credit-card bill, and the combination of that and the weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious phone calls pushes you over the top. That’s how lies are detected.
<aside> 💡 This is a perfect example to explain why some of the wives do not believe when their husbands cheat on them, even thought there is plenty of evidence threw right in their face.
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Defaulting to truth makes logical sense. If the person behind the counter at the coffee shop says your total with tax is $6.74, you can do the math yourself to double-check their calculations, holding up the line and wasting thirty seconds of your time. Or you can simply assume the salesperson is telling you the truth, because on balance most people do tell the truth.
<aside> 💡 People naturally believe that there's no way someone would lie to them. This is my understanding of defaulting to truth, and this quote is a perfect example of it. How many of us would check receipts carefully and calculate right on the site. By doing it, we are holding up the line and wearing out other people's patience. Within the short time of debating whether we're going to do it or not, we decide to trust the cashier. This is defaulting to truth.
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We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.
<aside> 💡 When we default to truth, we trust the person who's with us and open ourselves to them. This increases the chance of getting hurt by the person. That's why, in our social life, we get betrayed by our lovers, friends, even our parents. We trust them, but sometimes, trust just ends in betrayal. We feel bad for ourselves and people like us, but we don't stop trusting people. If you do, we would really end up having no friends at all. We may get hurt, but it's not common. As Malcolm says here, it's a rare instance. We talk about rare instances because these kind of things are talkable. If things like this are common, then no one would want to talk about it whatsoever.
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Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside —provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.
<aside> 💡 We always assume the person in front of us shows everything to us. What we see from the person is transparent. In this chapter, Malcolm uses an example from Friends to indicate that real life is not that simple. In our real life, it's hard to tell if the person is good or not, happy or not, honest or not. There is no transparancy between me and the person who interacts with me. Anyone can pretend to be the one they want to be or the one they want you to know. How can we tell? We tend to expect what is going on the outside to be in line with what is happening inside, in terms of friendship and relationship. But this is difficult. What we have picked up from watching too much dramas and read too many novels where everything is just so obvious is not helping us with our social life in reality.
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Knox had just been freed after spending four years in an Italian prison for the crime of not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered.
But with strangers, we’re intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.
<aside> 💡 Some people don't act like what other people expect. When their emotional reponses don't fall in our expectations, we think they don't have emotions for certain situations. Some people don't feel sad when bad things happen. People think they're cold hearted. Some people don't show their anger when they are supposed to. Then people think that they're not furious about the situation. This can perfectly explain that some people are not considered as patriots because they don't verbally or explicitly supported some of the activities. But how do we know they are not? Different people have different reactions to the same situation. However, nowadays, such different behavours and responses are not tolerated. Malcolm says similar things later in this chapter:
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