If you listen to your intuition, you may feel uneasy with this smiling person. You can of course walk away. Yet it’s plausible she is sincere and interested in you. Walking away from everyone who’s interested in you is a poor strategy. So there’s another defense we often use. That is to keep talking, and switch to neutral topics, or back to the other person.
A person who enjoys talking to you will go with the flow, no matter what you talk about. The ability to play with conversation in random directions is a white flag. Mallory will ease the discussion back in line. She will deflect questions about her own background, or she will lie and exaggerate. She may talk about herself and share "intimate" details yet it is always to position you into revealing more. It is near impossible to spot her lying, unless you catch a specific falsehood.
Cold Reading and Shotgunning
During the Interview, Mallory will be cold reading his target. This means guessing significant details about Alice in a short time. It is a basic tool of mentalists, con artists, car salesmen, and assorted mystics. Mallory does it without effort or practice.
Most of us are expert in reading people, though we may not realize it. Yet our brains interpret what we see as emotional signals and empathic reactions. We don’t see stress, we feel stress. Mallory sees what is there, with no emotional lens.
Classic cold reading is a party trick, used by mystics to impress people. "You recently lost your father… he is sending me a message for you." In the field, it is more intrusive.
Most people are readable most of the time. One engages them in conversation, and asks the right questions. One can then make good guesses about:
❂ Where they grew up, from their accent.
❂ Whether they are the first child or not, from the amount of stress they show at disorder. Are they comfortable with delay, and some mess, or not?
❂ Whether they have younger siblings, or come from larger extended families, from the way they treat young children.
❂ Whether their parents argued violently, and divorced or not, from their general confidence.
❂ What field they studied, from the way they talk and act.
❂ How much they earn, from the context, their behavior.
❂ Why they are there and what they expect to happen.
❂ How they feel, about the situation and about you.
❂ What they want most, at that time and place.
And so on. Most people can learn to cold read, to some extent. You must learn to ground your emotions, and then you practice. Much of this is just being open to what people express, in words or in behavior. The unreadable people are those who hide, for one reason or the other.
Mallory cold reads at genius level. He combines perfect reading with shotgunning. He makes rapid, broad guesses at various scenarios. The guesses either fall flat, or trigger a small response. He blasts out five possibilities, sees a response to number four, and knows he’s hit home. The result looks like a shocking ability to read minds.
You can tell when Mallory is shotgunning you. It’s like the Interview except worse. He makes sharp guesses about details he should not know, nor be asking about. He makes these guesses with pure conviction, as if he is stating absolute facts. No questions, he blasts out assertion after assertion, until he scores.
Shotgunning can range from subtle scanning to overt aggression. Mallory may blast allegations aimed to cause the greatest pain. It is a curious form of discussion. It seems to have three goals. First, to hurt and destabilize an opponent or resister. Second, to get reactions and thus to discover vulnerabilities and hidden truths. Third, to convince observers of Mallory’s innocence and virtue.
Internet trolls show many psychopath traits. They show no empathy nor emotion. They tend to be solitary and predatory. They also shotgun their perceived opponents. They are often as violent as one could be over a keyboard[39].
It is remarkable to see Mallory announce outright lies, to discredit others. He may be calm and sad, or burn with righteous indignation. It is theater, aimed at an audience. The best lies are plausible and colorful. They tend to be easy to disprove, yet few people do. Our minds evolved to agree with those in authority. We will accept obvious lies when they come from someone who acts superior to us. It’s called the Asch effect[40].
The Imitation Game
Primates and birds have social instincts for copying the behavior of others. There seem to be three main mechanisms in humans: convergence, mirroring, and mimicking. Each mechanism has its evolutionary reasons. Each is a tool in the hands of a psychopath.
As a social species, our identity lives in the groups we are part of. Our concept of "group" scales from two people to millions. Many of the same mechanisms work at all these levels. Convergence is one of these.
Part of the group identity is a more-or-less consistent culture. Above all, this means appearance, behavior, and language. Groups don’t just aim for consistency, though. They also aim to be unique, and different from other groups, especially close competitors.
There are several reasons why groups strive for consistency and originality. Individuals already in the group have an interest in expanding the group. Size is power. The group culture is its branding. "This is who we are!" is a recruiting statement. And "We’re not like them!" is how groups stop their members defecting to other groups in the same area.
For those who join a group, or are born into it, there is strong advantage in conforming. Being "different" exposes an individual to rejection from others, and to violence from outsiders. When there is conflict between groups, the first targets are the outliers.
The evolutionary benefits of hiding within a group are an old cultural engine. The diversity of human language and behavior is not random chaos. It stems from every group’s need to find its own niche. It expresses in accent, dialect, and memes.
It expresses as food taboos, which are often complex to the point of absurdity. Arbitrary, complex rules are a tool of control, as I’ll explain in The Feeding. Food taboos most likely evolved from our hunting-gathering past. "This is toxic," is easier to explain as "forbidden." We learn disgust once, and it saves our life a hundred times. The same instinct then lets tribes ban foods eaten by neighboring tribes. It stops people slipping away.
Convergence happens by negotiation and imitation. Dominant individuals establish a pattern which the less dominant follow. When people share power, they negotiate a weighted average. Hence the term "slavish conformity." Even a child will try to negotiate with its parents. The result is group consistency in the short term, and evolution over time.
Convergence takes time and effort and is a negotiation between individuals. This means you can tell how close and equal people are by how they appear, act, and talk.
Both men and women converge, in differing ways. Men tend to converge towards group language, behavior, and appearance. Women tend to converge towards other individual women. You rarely see two men dressing alike, unless they are part of a larger group. Yet you will often see two women converge on each other. Observe two women together, and you can often tell how well they know each other. It shows in hair, clothing, shoes, accessories, and body language.
Not everyone converges. There are at least three distinct types of people who appear to act "different." There are those with some degree of autism. There are the natural leaders. And there are the psychopaths. I’ll explain each so that you can tell the difference.