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

  While we knowingly volunteer for some risks, we object to those imposed on us by others. Konner notes that we seem to be saying, “If I want to smoke myself to death, it’s my own business, but if some company is trying to put something over on me with asbestos or nerve gas, I’ll be furious.” We will tolerate familiar risks over strange ones. The hijacking of an American jet in Athens looms larger in our concern than the parent who kills a child, even though one happens rarely, and the other happens daily.

  We deny because we’re built to see what we want to see. In his book The Day the Universe Changed, historian James Burke points out that “it is the brain which sees, not the eye. Reality is in the brain before it is experienced, or else the signals we get from the eye would make no sense.” This truth underscores the value of having the pieces of the violence puzzle in our heads before we need them, for only then can we recognize survival signals.

  We certainly care enough about this topic to learn the signals: A Harris poll reveals that an overwhelming majority of Americans perceive the greatest risks in the areas of crime and personal safety. If this is true, then we must ask some new questions about violence and about ourselves. For example, is it reasonable that we know more about why a man buys a particular brand of shaving lotion than about why he buys a gun? And why are we fascinated when a famous person is attacked by a stalker, which happens once every two or three years, yet uninterested when a woman is killed by a stalking husband or boyfriend, which happens once every two hours? Why does America have thousands of suicide prevention centers and not one homicide prevention center?

  And why do we worship hindsight (as in the news media’s constant rehash of the day, the week, the year) and yet distrust foresight, which actually might make a difference in our lives?

  One reason is that we don’t have to develop our own predictive skills in a world where experts will tell us what to do. Katherine, a young women of twenty-seven, asks me (the expert) a question nearly all women in our society must consider: “How can I can tell if a man I date is turning into a problem? Is there a checklist of warning signs about stalkers?”

  Instead of answering her question directly, I ask her to give me an example of what she means.

  “Well,” she says, “I dated this guy named Bryan, who got sort of obsessed with me and wouldn’t let go when I wanted to stop seeing him. We met at a party of a friend of mine, and he must have asked somebody there for my number. Before I even got home, he’d left me three messages. I told him I didn’t want to go out with him, but he was so enthusiastic about it that I really didn’t have any choice. We dated for about a month. In the beginning, he was super attentive, always seemed to know what I wanted. He remembered everything I ever said. It was flattering, but it also made me a little uncomfortable. Like when I mentioned needing more space for my books, he showed up one day with shelves and all the stuff and just put them up. I couldn’t say no. And he read so much into whatever I said. Once he asked if I’d go to a basketball game with him, and I said maybe. He later said, ‘You promised.’ Also, he talked about serious things so early, like living together and marriage and children. He started with jokes about that stuff the first time we went out, and later he wasn’t joking. Or when he suggested that I have a phone in my car. I wasn’t sure I even wanted a carphone, but he borrowed my car one day and just had one installed. It was a gift, so what could I say? And, of course, he called me whenever I was in the car. And he was so adamant that I never speak to my ex-boyfriend on that car phone. Later he got angry if I spoke to my ex at all. There were also a couple of my friends he didn’t like me to see, and he stopped spending time with his own friends. Finally, when I told him I didn’t want to be his girlfriend, he refused to hear it. He basically insisted that I stay in a relationship with him, and when I wouldn’t, he forced me into a relationship of sorts by always calling, showing up, sending gifts, talking to my friends, coming to my work uninvited. We’d only known each other for about a month, but he acted like it was the most important relationship of his life. So what are the warning signs of that kind of guy?”

  Katherine had, of course, answered her own question [more on date-stalking in chapter 11]. My best advice might not have been satisfying to her: “Listen to yourself.” Experts rarely tell us we already know the answers. Just as we want their checklist, they want our check.

  Perhaps the greatest experts at day-to-day high-stakes predictions are police officers. Those with experience on the streets have learned about violence and its warning signs, but unchecked denial can eclipse all that knowledge. Police survival expert Michael Cantrell learned this many times in his career.

  When Cantrell was in his fourth year as a policeman, his partner, whom I’ll call David Patrick, told him about a dream he’d had in which “one of us gets shot.”

  “Well, you should pay close attention to that dream,” Cantrell responded, “because it isn’t going to be me.”

  Patrick brought up the topic again, announcing one day: “I’m sure I will be shot.” Cantrell came to believe him, particularly given Patrick’s lax officer survival strategies. On one of their rides together, they’d pulled over a car with three men inside. Though the driver was cordial, Cantrell intuitively felt danger because the other two men just stared straight ahead. He was dismayed that his partner wasn’t alert to the possible hazards and seemed more interested in getting a pipe lit as he stood at the side of the patrol car. Cantrell asked the driver to get out of the car, and as the man opened the door, Cantrell saw a handgun on the floor and yelled out “Gun!” to his partner, but Patrick still did not respond attentively.

  They survived that hazard, but unable to shake the feeling that his partner’s premonition was an accurate prediction, Cantrell eventually discussed it with his supervisor. The sergeant told him he was over-reacting. Each of the several times Cantrell asked to discuss it, the sergeant chided him, “Look, in all my time with the Department, I’ve never even drawn my gun, and we haven’t had a shooting here for as long as I can remember.”

  On one of Cantrell’s days off, Patrick sat with other officers at the patrol briefing listening to the description of two men who had been involved in several armed robberies. Within a few hours, Patrick (riding alone) observed two men who fit the description discussed in the briefing. One of them stood at a pay phone but didn’t appear to be talking to anyone. The other man repeatedly walked over and looked in the window of a supermarket. Patrick had more than enough reason to call for backup, but may have been concerned that he’d be embarrassed if it turned out these weren’t the wanted criminals. The men saw Patrick and they walked off down the street. He followed alongside in his patrol car. Without calling in any description or request for assistance, he waved the men over. Patrick got out of his car and asked one of them to turn around for a pat-down. Even though Patrick had seen enough to be suspicious, even though he recognized and consciously considered that these might be the two wanted men, he still continued to ignore the survival signals. When he finally registered a signal of great danger from the man next to him, it was much too late to act on. Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick saw the slowly rising handgun that, an instant later, was fired into his face. The man pulled the trigger six times as Patrick fell. The second man produced a gun and shot Patrick once in the back.

  After the two criminals ran off, Patrick was able to get to his radio. When the tape of that radio call was played for Cantrell, he could clearly hear blood gurgling in Patrick’s mouth as he gasped, “I’ve been shot. I’ve been shot.”

  Amazingly, Patrick recovered and went back to police work for a short while. Still reluctant to take responsibility for his safety or his recklessness, he later told Cantrell, “If you’d been with me, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Remember that sergeant who accused Cantrell of overreacting? He had decided there was a low level of risk based on just two factors: that he had never drawn his gun during his career, and that none of the department’s officers had been
shot in recent memory. If this second factor were a valid predictor, then the shooting of Patrick should have changed the sergeant’s evaluation of hazard. Apparently it didn’t, because a few months later, he was himself shot in a convenience store.

  Cantrell has left law enforcement for the corporate world, but every week he volunteers his time to teach the gift of fear to police officers. People now listen to him when he tells them to listen to themselves.

  Aside from outright denial of intuitive signals, there is another way we get into trouble. Our intuition fails when it is loaded with inaccurate information. Since we are the editors of what gets in and what is invested with credibility, it is important to evaluate our sources of information. I explained this during a presentation for hundreds of government threat assessors at the Central Intelligence Agency a few years ago, making my point by drawing on a very rare safety hazard: kangaroo attacks. I told the audience that about twenty people a year are killed by the normally friendly animals, and that kangaroos always display a specific set of indicators before they attack:

  1. They will give what appears to be a wide and genial smile (but they are actually showing their teeth).

  2. They will check their pouches compulsively several times to be sure they have no young with them (they never attack while carrying young).

  3. They will look behind them (since they always retreat immediately after they kill).

  After these three signals, they will lunge, brutally pummel an enemy, and gallop off.

  I asked two audience members to stand up and repeat back the warning signs, and both flawlessly described the smile, the checking of the pouch for young, and the looking back for an escape route. In fact, everyone in that room (and now you) will remember those warning signs for life. If you are ever face to face with a kangaroo, be it tomorrow or decades from now, those three pre-incident indicators will be in your head.

  The problem, I told the audience at the CIA, is that I made up those signals. I did it to demonstrate the risks of inaccurate information. I actually know nothing about kangaroo behavior (so forget the three signals if you can—or stay away from hostile kangaroos).

  In our lives, we are constantly bombarded with kangaroo signals masquerading as knowledge, and our intuition relies on us to decide what we will give credence to. James Burke says, “You are what you know.” He explains that fifteenth-century Europeans knew that everything in the sky rotated around the earth. Then Galileo’s telescope changed that truth.

  Today, Burke notes, we live according to still another truth, and “like the people of the past, we disregard phenomena which do not fit our view because they are ‘wrong’ or outdated. Like our ancestors, we know the real truth.”

  When it comes to safety, there is a lot of “real truth” to go around, and some of it puts people at risk. For example, is it always best for a woman being stalked by an ex-husband to get a restraining order? This certainly is the conventional wisdom, yet women are killed every day by men they have court orders against, the often useless documents found by police in the purse or pocket of the victims. (More on this in chapter 10.)

  Perhaps the greatest false truth is that some people are just not intuitive, as if this key survival element was somehow left out of them.

  Cynthia is a substitute schoolteacher, a funny, beautiful woman totally unlike the dull and much-harassed substitutes most of us recall from our school years. One day while we were having lunch, Cynthia bemoaned to me that she just wasn’t intuitive. “I never see the signs until it’s too late; I don’t have that inner voice some people have.”

  And yet, I reminded her, several times a week she enters a room full of six and seven year-old children she’s never met before and quickly makes automatic, unconscious assessments of their future behavior. With amazing accuracy, she predicts who among thirty will seek to test her the most, who will encourage the other children to behave or misbehave, whom the other children will follow, what discipline strategies will work best, and on and on.

  “That’s true,” she says. “Every day I have to predict what the kids will do, and I succeed for reasons I can’t explain.” After a thoughtful pause she adds: “But I can’t predict the behavior of adults.”

  This is interesting, because the range of behavior children might engage in is far, far greater than it is for adults. Few adults will suddenly throw something across the room and then break into uncontrolled laughter. Few women will, without apparent reason, lift their skirts above their heads or reach over to the next desk at work and grab the eyeglasses right off someone’s face. Few adults will pour paint on the floor and then smear it around with their feet. Yet each of these behaviors is familiar to substitute teachers.

  Predicting the routine behavior of adults in the same culture is so simple, in fact, that we rarely even bother to do it consciously. We react only to the unusual, which is a signal that there might be something worth predicting. The man next to us on the plane for five hours garners little of our attention until, out of the corner of one eye, we see that he is reading the magazine in our hand. The point is that we intuitively evaluate people all the time, quite attentively, but they only get our conscious attention when there is a reason. We see it all, but we edit out most of it. Thus, when something does call out to us, we ought to pay attention. For many people, that is a muscle they don’t exercise.

  At lunch, I told Cynthia I’d show her an example of listening to intuition. We were at a restaurant neither of us had been to before. The waiter was a slightly too subservient man whom I took to be of Middle-Eastern descent.

  I said, “Take our waiter, for example. I’ve never met him and don’t know a thing about him, but I can tell you he’s not just the waiter—he’s actually the owner of this restaurant. He is from Iran, where his family had several successful restaurants before they moved to America.”

  Because there was no expectation that I’d be right on any of this, I had simply said what came into my head. I thought I was making it up, creating it. More likely, I was calling it up, discovering it.

  Cynthia and I went on talking, but in my head I was tearing apart the theories I had just expressed with such certainty. Across the room I saw a print of an elephant on the wall and thought, “Oh, he’s from India, not Iran; that makes sense, because an Iranian would be more assertive than this guy. And he’s definitely not the owner.”

  By the time he next visited our table, I’d concluded that all my predictions were wrong. I reluctantly asked him who owned the restaurant.

  “I do.”

  “Is it your first place?”

  “Yes, but my family owned several successful restaurants in Iran. We sold them to come to America.” Turning to Cynthia he said, “and you are from Texas.” Cynthia, who has no Texas accent whatever, asked how he knew.

  “You have Texas eyes.”

  No matter how I so accurately guessed his status at the restaurant, his country of origin, and his family history, and no matter how he knew Cynthia was from Texas, we did know. But is that methodology something I’d bet my life on? I do it every day, and so do you, and I’d have done no better with conscious logic.

  Cynthia also talked about what she called “car body language,” her ability to predict the likely movements of cars. “I know when a car is about to edge over into my lane without signaling. I know when a car will or won’t turn left in front of me.” Most people gladly accept this ability and travel every day with absolute confidence in their car-reading skill. Clearly they are actually expert at reading people, but because we can’t see the whole person, we read his intent, level of attentiveness, competence, sobriety, caution, all through the medium of the tiny movements of those big metal objects around them.

  So, we think: We can predict what kangaroos and children and cars might do, but we cannot predict human behavior to save our lives.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  China Leonard’s story is not about violence. It is, however, about life and death, and about the denial of i
ntuition. She and her young son, Richard, had just settled into the pre-op room at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Richard was soon to have minor ear surgery. He usually had a barrage of questions for doctors, but when the anesthesiologist, Dr. Joseph Verbrugge Jr., came into the room, the boy fell silent. He didn’t even answer when Dr. Verbrugge asked if he was nervous. “Look at me!” the doctor demanded, but Richard didn’t respond.

  The boy obviously disliked the abrupt and unpleasant doctor, and China felt the same way, but she also felt something more than that. A strong intuitive impulse crossed her mind: “Cancel the operation,” it boldly said, “Cancel the operation.” She quickly suppressed that impulse and began a mental search for why it was unsound. Setting aside her intuition about Dr. Verbrugge in favor of logic and reason, she assured herself that you can’t judge someone by his personality. But again, that impulse: “Cancel the operation.” Since China Leonard was not a worrier, it took some effort to silence her inner voice. Don’t be silly, she thought, St. Joseph’s is one of the best hospitals in the state, it’s a teaching hospital; it’s owned by the Sisters of Charity, for Christ’s sake. You just have to assume this doctor is good.