The Story I Invented About a Stranger
In 2009, in a banking hall, the man ahead of me in the queue was filling in a deposit slip. I was not trying to read it. I read it anyway: ten million shillings, in cash. Before the teller called the next customer I had given him three careers, politician, fraudster and gangster, and a fourth occupation, laundering money for people who prefer not to use banks. Then he turned round, caught me looking, smiled, and said, as I remember it: “Instead of fixating on mine, why don’t you focus on yours?”
I would have told you then, as most of us would now, that I judge people on evidence. I had one number. From it I built a man, gave him a history and a motive, and convicted him, all inside the time it takes to fill in a slip. Whether I was right about him I cannot say. The more interesting question is why my mind handed me a finished biography rather than a question mark. An incomplete true story was available: a large sum, origin unknown. My mind preferred a complete false one, and it preferred it instantly.
Psychology has a name for the first half of the trick. In 1977 the Stanford psychologist Lee Ross called it the fundamental attribution error: the habit of explaining other people’s behaviour by their character while explaining our own by our circumstances. When I carry cash, I have reasons. I sold something; the harambee was this week; the client paid in notes. When he carries cash, he has a nature.
The second half is about confidence. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), describes the fast, automatic part of the mind as a machine for coherence. It builds the best story it can from whatever is in front of it and does not stop to ask what is missing. He calls the principle “what you see is all there is”. Its consequence is perverse. In one study he describes, people who heard only one side of a legal dispute were more confident of their verdict than people who heard both. Confidence tracks how neatly the story fits together, not how much evidence went into it. One number on a deposit slip leaves very little to contradict, which is why I was so sure.
There is a serious case for my suspicion, and it should be made before I abandon it. Kenya has given its citizens good reasons to doubt large sums. Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing were not rumours; they were national events, and they taught a generation how public money can leave by the back door with its paperwork in order. Banks are required by law to ask where large cash deposits come from, and nobody calls the asking prejudice. A country that stops noticing unusual money gets robbed. Noticing was not my error.
So there were three different things I could have done in that queue. I could notice: here is a large sum, in a form that is hard to trace. I could inquire, if it were my place, by asking proportionate questions and waiting for the answers. Or I could invent, supplying the evidence myself, in the form of a biography, and reaching a verdict before the man had finished writing his account number. The first was reasonable. The second belonged to the teller. The third is what I did.
Why invent? Partly because crime is a better story than a farmer who has sold land. But partly because of what the verdict did for me. In 1981 the psychologist Thomas Wills described downward comparison: people protect their sense of their own worth by comparing themselves with someone they can regard as worse off, or worse. If the man’s money was dirty, the modest figure on my own slip was no longer a shortfall. It was a credential. The story I invented about him was a flattering story about me, and it cost nothing to believe.
The man in the queue was quoting, whether he knew it or not. “And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye?” (Matthew 7:3; this and the verses below are from the Douay-Rheims). People usually reach for the verse two lines earlier, “Judge not”, to end an argument. But the passage does not end there. “Cast out first the beam in thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (7:5). Jesus does not forbid seeing the mote. He orders the sequence. Elsewhere he is plainer still: “Judge not according to the appearance: but judge just judgment” (John 7:24). The instruction is not to stop judging. It is to stop judging by appearances, and a number on a slip is an appearance. My failure in that queue was not too much judgment. It was too little.
His retort deserves the scrutiny I failed to give his slip. “Focus on yours” is good advice. It is also exactly what a man with something to hide would say, and Kenya has a phrase for the arrangement: kila mtu na hamsini zake, everyone to his own fifty. Minding your own business protects privacy and protects theft with the same efficiency. If the lesson of the queue were simply to look away, it would be the wrong lesson. The discipline the passage asks for is harder: keep looking, and decline to finish the story before the facts do.
What I did privately in a banking hall, the country now does in public, at scale. A photograph, a caption and a WhatsApp group can convict a stranger before lunch. In 2018 a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied rumours on Twitter and found that false stories spread farther and faster than true ones. They are not only more exciting. They are more complete. The truth usually arrives with gaps in it, and the mind, as Kahneman says, does not see the gaps.
Seventeen years on, I still do not know whether I was wrong about him. I know he was right about me. I can tell you his amount to the shilling. I could not tell you mine.