The Confidence Game

Why we fall for it…every time

Maria Konnikova

★★★★☆

An interesting read on how con artists operate, and the psychological traits they manipulate in order to trick people into doing what they want. It’s roughly structured around different phases of a con, from picking a target to running off with the ill-gotten goods. The author illustrates it with a number of real cases over the last century or so, some of them recent enough that she interviewed the victims and (alleged) scammers directly.

Some key takeaways:

• Scam victims aren’t stupid. Humans are wired to trust (most of the time), and that’s the only way we get something as complex as modern society. Con artists hijack that trust.
• The “dark triad” personality combo (subclinical psychopathy + narcissism + Machiavellianism) is common among con artists. They’re very skilled at picking up on what will motivate someone to do what they want, and don’t care who gets hurt by it.
• When they’re not cold-calling or spamming, scammers zero in on who’s likely to be vulnerable to a particular ploy right now. Someone who would normally see a particular con from a mile away, but is off-balance today, maybe distraught over recent misfortune, maybe trying to impress someone new, maybe in a rush for one reason or another. Any number of circumstances that this particular con artist has practiced using as a hook.
• Swindlers are also very good at keeping the mark off-balance (like high-pressure sales people, except even less ethical). If they can engage your emotions strongly enough, the logical part of your brain - the part that would spot the red flags - will stay out of the way.
• People in general are very good at retroactively justifying things. Unfortunately that includes things like “I’m too savvy to get scammed. If this was a scam, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with it. Since I did get involved with it, it must be legit, so I can ignore those red flags that are popping up now.” We also like to think we’re the exceptions, as in “I’m sure the leopards won’t eat my face!”

One of these days I should go back and finish reading Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman shows up in several chapters with his research on dual-system thinking and decision-making processes.

I also found myself thinking of Stories are Weapons. There’s an overlap between psy-ops and scams in that they both make use of psychological tricks to get the target to fill in the gaps the way you want them to, think that it’s their own idea, and resist evidence to the contrary.