The eureka fallacy
It was a famous scene from a famous movie, but as Gurney scanned the faces in the room, he saw no sign that anyone recognized it. In the scene, an older man is interrogating a younger man.
The young man is eager to work for the Irgun, a radical organization fighting to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the end of World War II. He presents himself boastfully as a demolitions expert, seasoned in combat, who acquired his expertise with dynamite by fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He claims that after killing many Nazis he was captured and imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was assigned to a routine cleaning job.
The older man wants to know more. He asks him several specific questions about his story, the camp, his duties.
The young man’s version of events begins to fall apart when the interrogator reveals that there was no dynamite available in the Warsaw Ghetto. As his heroic narrative crumbles, he’s forced to admit that he learned what he knows about dynamite from his real job in the camp, which was blasting holes in the ground big enough to hold the thousands of bodies of his fellow prisoners, being killed each day in the gas chambers. Beyond that, the older man makes him admit, even more degradingly, that his other job was picking the gold fillings out of the mouths of the corpses. And finally, collapsing in tears of rage and shame, the young man admits that his captors repeatedly raped him.
The raw truth is exposed—along with his desperation to redeem himself. The scene concludes with his induction into the Irgun.
Gurney switched off the tape player.
“So,” he said, turning to the thirty-nine faces, “what was that all about?”
“Every interview should be that simple,” said Falcone dismissively.
“And that fast,” someone chimed in from the back row.
Gurney nodded. “Things in movies always seem simpler and faster than real life. But something happens in that scene that’s very interesting. When you remember it a week or a month from now, what aspect do you think will stick with you?”
“The kid getting raped,” said a broad-shouldered guy next to Falcone.
Murmurs of agreement spread around the room, encouraging other people to speak up.
“His breakdown in the interrogation.”
“Yeah, the whole macho thing evaporating.”
“It’s funny,” said the only black woman. “He starts out by telling lies about himself to get what he wants, but he ends up getting it—getting into the Irgun—by finally telling the truth. By the way, what the hell is the Irgun?”
That got the biggest laugh of the day.
“Okay,” said Gurney. “Let’s stop there and take a closer look. The naïve young guy wants to get into the organization. He tells a lot of lies to make himself look good. The smart old guy sees through it, calls him on his bullshit, drags the truth out of him. And it just so happens that the awfulness of the truth makes the kid an ideal psychological candidate for the fanatical Irgun. So they let him join. Is that a fair summary of what we just saw?”
There were various nods and grunts of agreement, some more cautious than others.
“Anyone think that’s not what we saw?”
Gurney’s Hispanic star looked troubled, which made him grin, which seemed to give her the nudge she needed. “I’m not saying that’s not what I saw. It’s a movie, I know, and in the movie what you said is probably true. But if that was real—you know, a real interview video—it might not be true.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” someone whispered, not quite softly enough.
“I’ll tell you what the fuck it’s supposed to mean,” she said, sparking to the challenge. “It means there’s no proof at all that the old guy actually got to the truth. So the young guy breaks down and cries and says he got fucked in the ass, excuse my language. ‘Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, I’m no big hero after all, just a pathetic little pussycat that gave the Nazis blow jobs.’ So how do we know that story isn’t just more bullshit? Maybe the pussycat is smarter than he looks.”
Christ, thought Gurney, she did it again. He decided to step into the speculative silence that followed her impressive exposition. “Which brings us to the question we started with,” he said. “Why do we believe what we believe? As this perceptive officer here just pointed out, the interrogator in that scene may not have gotten to the truth at all. The question is, what made him think that he did?”
This new twist produced a number of reactions.
“Sometimes your gut tells you what’s what, you know?”
“Maybe the breakdown the kid had looked legit to him. Maybe you had to be there, catch the attitude.”
“Real world, the interrogator would know more stuff than he’s putting on the table. Could be the kid’s confession squares with some of that stuff, confirms it.”
Other officers offered variations on these themes. Others said nothing but listened intently to every word. A few, like Falcone, looked as if the question was making their heads hurt.
When the flow of replies seemed to be stopping, Gurney stepped in with another question. “Do you think a tough-minded interrogator could be misled once in a while by his own wishful thinking?”
A few nods, a few affirmative grunts, a few expressions of pained indecision or maybe plain indigestion.
A guy at the far end of the second row, with a fire-hydrant neck emerging from a black T-shirt, along with densely tattooed Popeye forearms, a shaved head, and tiny eyes—eyes that looked like they were being forced shut by the muscles in his cheeks—raised his hand. The fingers were curled almost into a fist. The voice was slow, deliberate, thoughtful. “You asking, do we sometimes believe what we want to believe?”
“That’s pretty much what I’m asking,” said Gurney. “What do you think?”
The squinty eyes opened a little. “I think that’s … right. That’s human nature.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll speak for myself. I’ve made mistakes because of that … factor. Not because I so much want to believe good things about people. I’ve been on the job awhile, don’t have a lot of illusions about people’s motives, what they’re willing to do.” He bared his teeth in apparent revulsion at some passing image. “I’ve seen my share of hideous shit. Lot of people in this room have seen the same shit. What I’m saying, though, is that sometimes I get an idea about the way something is, and I may not even know how much I want that idea to be right. Like, I know what went down, or I know exactly how some scumbag thinks. I know why he did what he did. Except sometimes—not often, but definitely sometimes—I don’t know shit, I just think I do. In fact, I’m positive I do. It’s like an occupational hazard.” He fell silent, gave the impression that he was considering the bleak implications of what he’d said.
Once again, for perhaps the thousandth time in his life, Gurney was reminded that his first impressions were not especially reliable.
“Thank you, Detective Beltzer,” he said to the big man, glancing at his ID tag. “That was very good.” He scanned the faces along the rows of tables and saw no signs of disagreement. Even Falcone seemed subdued.
Gurney took a minute to extract a mint from a little tin box and pop it into his mouth. Mostly he was stalling to let Beltzer’s comments resonate before going on.
“In the scene we watched,” said Gurney with new animation, “that interrogator might want to believe in the validity of the young man’s breakdown for a number of reasons. Name one.” He pointed randomly at an officer who hadn’t yet spoken.
The man blinked, looked embarrassed. Gurney waited.
“I guess … I guess he might like the idea that he broke the kid’s story … you know, that he succeeded in the interrogation.”
“Absolutely,” said Gurney. He caught the eye of another previously silent attendee. “Name one more.”
The very Irish face beneath a carroty crew cut grinned. “Thought he’d win a few points, maybe. Must report to somebody. Enjoy walking into the boss’s office. ‘Look at what I did.’ Get some props. Maybe a boost for a promotion.”
“Sure, I can see that,” said Gurney. “Can anyone name another reason he might want to believe the kid’s story?”
“Power,” said the young Hispanic woman disdainfully.
“How so?”
“He’d like the idea that he forced the truth out of the subject, forced him to admit painful things, forced him to give up what he was trying to hide, forced him to expose his shame, made him crawl, even made him cry.” She looked like she was smelling garbage. “He’d get a rush out of it, feel like Superman, the all-powerful genius detective. Like God.”
“Big emotional benefit,” said Gurney. “Could warp a man’s vision.”
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “Big time.”
Gurney saw a hand go up in the back of the room, a brown-faced man with short, wavy hair who hadn’t yet spoken. “Excuse me, sir, I’m confused. There’s an interrogation-techniques seminar here in this building and an undercover seminar. Two separate seminars, right? I signed up for undercover. Am I in the right place? This, what I’m hearing, it’s all about interrogation.”
“You’re in the right place,” said Gurney. “We’re here to talk about undercover, but there’s a link between the two activities. If you understand how an interrogator can fool himself because of what he wants to believe, you can use the same principle to get the target of your undercover operation to believe in you. It’s all about maneuvering the target into ‘discovering’ the facts about you that you want him to believe. It’s about giving him a powerful motive to swallow your bullshit. It’s about making him want to believe you—just like the guy in the movie wants to believe the confession. There’s tremendous believability to facts a person thinks he’s discovered. When your target believes that he knows things about you that you didn’t want him to know, those things will seem doubly true to him. When he thinks he’s penetrated below your surface layer, what he uncovers in that deeper layer he’ll see as the real truth. That’s what I call the eureka fallacy. It’s that peculiar trick of the mind that gives total credibility to what you think you’ve discovered on your own.”
“The what fallacy?” The question came from multiple directions.
“The eureka fallacy. It’s a Greek word roughly translated as ‘I found it’ or, in the context in which I’m using it, ‘I’ve discovered the truth.’ The point is …” Gurney slowed down to emphasize his next statement. “The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth. So what I’m saying is this: Let your target think he’s discovering something about you. Then he’ll feel that he really knows you. That’s the place at which you will have established Trust. You will have established Trust, with a capital T, the trust that makes everything else possible. We’re going to spend the rest of the day showing you how to make that happen—how to make the thing you want your target to believe about you the very thing he thinks he’s discovering on his own. But right now let’s take a break.”
Saying this, Gurney realized that he’d grown up in an era when “a break” automatically meant a cigarette break. Now, for virtually everyone, it meant a cell-phoning or texting break. As if to illustrate the thought, most of the officers getting to their feet and heading for the door were reaching for their BlackBerrys.
Gurney took a deep breath, extended his arms above his head, and stretched his back slowly from side to side. His introductory segment had created more muscle tension than he’d realized.
The female Hispanic officer waited for the tide of cell phoners to pass, then approached Gurney as he was removing the videotape from the machine. Her hair was thick and framed her face in a mass of soft, kinky curls. Her full figure was packed into a pair of tight black jeans and a tight gray sweater with a swooping neckline. Her lips glistened. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said with a serious-student frown. “That was really good.”
“No, I mean you. I mean … what I mean is”—she was incongruously blushing under her serious demeanor—“your whole presentation, your explanation of why people believe things, why they believe some things more strongly, all of that. Like that eureka fallacy thing—that really made me think. The whole presentation was really good.”
“Your own contributions helped make it good.”
She smiled. “I guess we’re just on the same wavelength.”