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Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.
And, long before any of these are born, the religious leader who promises hope and salvation when everything seems to have hit a low point, who swears that, somewhere, sometime, the world will be just.
“Gullibility may be deeply engrained in the human behavioral repertoire.” For our minds are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them.
Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change, when new things are happening and old ways of looking at the world no longer suffice.
Transition is the confidence game’s great ally, because transition breeds uncertainty. There’s nothing a con artist likes better than exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change.
Cons go unreported—indeed, undetected—because none of us want to admit that our basic beliefs could be wrong.
And as we become more committed, with every step we give them more psychological material to work with.
These people don’t care; they remain perfectly indifferent to the pain they cause, as long as they end up on top.
Psychopaths, according to Hare, make up an estimated 1 percent of the male population; among women, they are almost nonexistent (though still present).
Psychopathy is part of the so-called dark triad of traits. And as it turns out, the other two, narcissism and Machiavellianism, also seem to describe many of the traits we associate with the grifter.
As the popular saying among scientists goes: genes load the gun; the environment pulls the trigger.
According to psychologist Robert Feldman, who has spent more than four decades studying the phenomenon, we lie, on average, three times during a routine ten-minute conversation with a stranger or casual acquaintance.
Would you be a grifter—even a mild one—if given the chance? Try this short test. Take your index finger, raise it to your forehead, and draw the letter Q. Done? Which way is your Q facing—tail to the right, or tail to the left? The test, described in detail by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist and famed skeptic, is a way to gauge your “self-monitoring” tendency. If you drew the letter with the tail to the left, so that others could read it, you are a high self-monitor. That means you are more concerned with appearance and perception—how others see you. To achieve the desired effect, you are
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Con artists are often the best marks because they think themselves immune. And that false sense of immunity extends to victims more broadly: the better protected you are and the less likely you think you’ll be a victim, the more you’re apt to lose if a con artist can find a way to earn your trust.
“egocentric anchoring”: we are our own point of departure. We assume that others know what we know, believe what we believe, and like what we like.
(The bad grammar and seemingly implausible notes: those aren’t from stupidity. They’re actually well thought out beforehand. Scammers have learned the hard way that notes that sound too legitimate hook too many fish, making the weeding-out process incredibly costly. Now only the true sucker falls for the pitch.)
Pathological liars lie for no reason at all. For them, lying is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or may point to a deeper psychopathy.
“mood as information.” How I happen to be feeling is giving me concrete evidence of how I should act—even if, in fact, my decision is totally distinct. The way I process the information will be colored by my emotion all the same.
persuasion, argues that six principles govern most persuasive relationships: reciprocity (I rub your back, you rub mine), consistency (I believe the same thing today as I did yesterday), social validation (doing this will make me belong), friendship or liking (exactly what it sounds like), scarcity (quick! there isn’t much to go around), and authority (you seem like you know what you’re talking about).
the illusion of truth: we are more likely to think something is true if it feels familiar.
The good confidence man has been working his way up to this very moment, the moment when “Too good to be true” turns into “Actually, this makes perfect sense”: I am exceptional, and I deserve it. It’s not too good to be true; it is exactly what I had coming to me.
It goes by many names. The Lake Wobegon effect. The better-than-average effect. Illusory superiority. Superiority bias. Whatever you call it, it means the same thing: we believe we are singular, whatever the circumstances.
Memory is a tricky thing, and once we’ve been taken once, it becomes all the more likely that we will fall for a con again. There is no better mark, many a con artist will tell you, than one who has already been duped.
In June 2014, a so-called suckers list of people who had fallen for multiple scams surfaced in England, It had been passed on from shady group to shady group, sold to willing bidders, until law enforcement had gotten hold of its contents. It was 160,000 names long.
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire. —RUDYARD KIPLING
any decision of any weight concerning the future is a gamble. It’s inherently risky because the future is inherently uncertain. And so, in the interim—the period after we’ve made our choice but before we know the final outcome—we wait, we look, we evaluate the evidence, we calculate the odds that things will turn out as expected.
But the glow quickly fades, and it’s on to the next paper, the next story, the next book. Unless you can keep producing, you will fade from the public eye and that glorious vision will never come to pass. You not only have to keep producing; you have to do so quickly, before everyone has forgotten about you. And you have to do it at increasingly high levels. Something that was good for your first big break won’t sustain you over the long haul. Then, you were a neophyte. Now you’re more seasoned.
“When people want to believe what they want to believe, they are very hard to dissuade.”
human nature is wired toward creating meaning out of meaninglessness, embracing belief over doubt.
Everyone wants to believe, everyone wants meaning, everyone wants stories that make sense of incoherence. Everyone sees meaning in chaos, crafts narrative out of haphazardly floating geometric patterns. It’s natural, and it’s not only understandable but often laudable. Shouldn’t we want to search for truth and discern the meaning of reality? Spiritual cons exploit us at our most vulnerable. And because the process is so natural and insidious, it is particularly difficult to resist. You become a sucker almost in spite of yourself.
About cults
the key to resisting persuasion and manipulation was to have a strong, unshakeable, even, sense of self. Know who you are no matter what, and hold on to that no matter what.
