Truth be told.

           The subject of my most recent SleuthSayer post was uncertainty.  I’m certain of that.  In that piece, I asserted that crime fiction was the natural home of ambiguity, an abiding state of nature, and a hallmark of every great mystery.  This may or may not not be precisely true, but on the other hand, likely true enough to be contended here. 

            Another fact of nature that plays an important role in crime fiction is that people often don’t tell the truth.  Almost never.  They lie, hedge, dissemble, prevaricate, and weasel their way through their lives, flooding the environment with oceans of uncertainty. 

            Not everyone lies all the time, but everyone is in the habit of telling only part of the truth.  This is usually meant to maintain civility and pleasant relations, though there’s a lot of daylight between complimenting your mother-in-law’s lousy meatloaf and telling the cops that you were home all night and have no idea how that BMW ended up in your garage.  We do these sorts of things naturally and fluently, having evaded responsibility for cleaning out the cookie jar or socking little brothers as soon as we can form sentences.  It’s innate.

Raymod Chandler described detective fiction as “riding around in cars and interviewing people.”  Maybe he didn’t actually say that, but it fits with his general view of the genre.  And while driving skills are fairly widespread, a good interviewer is an artist. 

There was an awful lot I liked about the advertising business, but aside from creating ads, the thing I liked most was qualitative market research.  That is the academic term for what mostly involves interviewing people, one-on-one, or in groups.  You might believe, like most people, that marketing is a soulless endeavor, but not if you’ve had a bunch of guys in a room talking about their cars.  Or intercepted a pack of teenagers in a mall to learn why they’re buying brand new jeans with the knees ripped out.  Or shadowed kitchen-table insurance agents as they chatted with ordinary people about death, disability and destruction. 

           

            After hundreds of these encounters discussing thousands of individual judgement calls, I’ve learned a few things. 

            Everyone likes to talk about themselves and what they do for a living, or how they spend their free time.  In other words, their lives.  That’s why salesmen, journalists, homicide detectives and hostage negotiators want to get the conversation on a personal level as quickly and smoothly as possible.  You cynics out there claim the interviewer’s true feelings can be faked, but they can’t.  You won’t succeed without some natural empathy and a genuine interest in what people have to say. 

            Although a research interview isn’t a test, everyone thinks there’s a right answer.  There’s an urge to please that’s very powerful, but also a desire to look good in the eyes of the interviewer.  That’s why focus groups (a session where one questioner tries to extract information on a specific subject from five, or eight, or ten people sitting around a conference room) can be a harder nut to crack, since few enjoy standing out from the consensus.  You have to convince each individual that the only right answer is what they actually believe if you want any meaningful outcome. 

            You’ve probably noticed that the accuracy of political polling has been falling dramatically.  One reason is it’s hard to get people on the phone, and even harder to catch them face-to-face.  In my experience, phone interviews themselves are far less effective than in person, for reasons explicated above.  I think written questionnaires are close to worthless, and online surveys worse than that.  Social research is a bit of a science, but it’s mostly an art.  Which is why detectives and savvy researchers always prefer to handle their assignments in the flesh.  You can hide those lying eyes, but it’s harder with the questioner staring you right in the face. 

            Body language is often the most articulate.  This is because gestures and facial expressions are less voluntary.  Things just sort of leak out that you aren’t intending.  Consequently, the first reaction is usually the most reliable, because it springs from an emotional response.  Over the following few seconds, the conscious mind takes the reigns, and people begin to say what they think they ought to say, or what their conditioning says is the proper point of view.

            People often don’t know why they want what they want.  Or why they did what they did.  Humans aren’t robots, but we do tend to delegate a lot of our behavior to unconscious impulses.  But when gently pressed to apply logic and reason to emotional decisions, we’re not that bad at figuring it out.  It may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it’s often good enough for storytellers in any line of business.