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By Root 556 0

are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling. When someone says, “I love you,” we look into that person’s eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that afterward, even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, we may say, “I don’t think he liked me,” or “I don’t think she’s very happy.” We easily parse complex distinctions in facial expression. If you were to see me grinning, for example, with my eyes twinkling, you’d say I was amused. But if you were to see me nod and smile exaggeratedly, with the corners of my lips tightened, you would take it that I had been teased and was responding sarcastically. If I were to make eye contact with someone, give a small smile, and then look down and avert my gaze, you would think I was flirting. If I were to follow a remark with a quick smile and then nod or tilt my head sideways, you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh and wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn’t need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach these conclusions. They would just come to you, blink. If you were to approach a one-year-old child who sits playing on the floor and do something a little bit puzzling, such as cupping your hands over hers, the child would immediately look up into your eyes. Why? Because what you have done requires explanation, and the child knows that she can find an answer on your face. This practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin-slicing. It is picking up on subtle, fleeting cues in order to read someone’s mind — and there is almost no other impulse so basic and so automatic and at which, most of the time, we so effortlessly excel. In the early hours of February 4, 1999, however, the four officers cruising down Wheeler Avenue failed at this most fundamental task. They did not read Diallo’s mind.

First, Sean Carroll saw Diallo and said to the others in the car, “What’s that guy doing there?” The answer was that Diallo was getting some air. But Carroll sized him up and in that instant decided he looked suspicious. That was mistake number one. Then they backed the car up, and Diallo didn’t move. Carroll later said that “amazed” him: How brazen was this man, who didn’t run at the sight ofthe police? Diallo wasn’t brazen. He was curious. That was mistake number two. Then Carroll and Murphy stepped toward Diallo on the stoop and watched him turn slightly to the side, and make a movement for his pocket. In that split second, they decided he was dangerous. But he was not. He was terrified. That was mistake number three. Ordinarily, we have no difficulty at all distinguishing, in a blink, between someone who is suspicious and someone who is not, between someone brazen and someone curious, and, most easily of all, between someone terrified and someone dangerous; anyone who walks down a city street late at night makes those kinds of instantaneous calculations constantly. Yet, for some reason, that most basic human ability deserted those officers that night. Why?

These kinds of mistakes were not anomalous events. Mind-reading failures happen to all of us. They lie at the root of countless arguments, disagreements, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings. And yet, because these failures are so instantaneous and so mysterious, we don’t really know how to understand them. In the weeks and months that followed the Diallo shooting, for example, as the case made headlines around the world, the argument over what happened that night veered back and forth between two extremes. There were those who said that it was just a horrible accident, an inevitable by-product of the fact that police officers sometimes have to make life-or-death decisions in conditions of uncertainty. That’s what the jury in the Diallo trial concluded, and Boss, Carroll, McMellon, and Murphy