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" Ana Montes wasn’t a master spy. She didn’t need to be. In a world where our lie detector is set to the “off” position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all. He did what Truth-Default Theory would predict any of us would do: he operated from the assumption that Ana Montes was telling the truth, and—almost without realizing it—worked to square everything she said with that assumption. We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high. "

Malcolm Gladwell , Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know


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Malcolm Gladwell quote : Ana Montes wasn’t a master spy. She didn’t need to be. In a world where our lie detector is set to the “off” position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all. He did what Truth-Default Theory would predict any of us would do: he operated from the assumption that Ana Montes was telling the truth, and—almost without realizing it—worked to square everything she said with that assumption. We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high.