Well, not from readers, but from people who said they reject the subtitle of my ... a more likely victim of romance frau
Rationally Speaking #151: Maria Konnikova on, “Why everyone falls for con artists” Julia:
Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me is today's guest, Maria Konnikova. Maria has a PhD in psychology from Columbia University. She is a columnist for The New Yorker, writing about psychology and culture, and she also writes for numerous other publications. Maria is the author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, which she discussed on an earlier episode of Rationally Speaking, and which is now a New York Times best‐seller. She's returned to the show to talk about her new book, hot off the presses, The Confidence Game. It's about con artists, how they operate, why we fall for it, and what this says about human psychology in general. Maria, welcome back to Rationally Speaking.
Maria:
Thanks so much for having me, Julia.
Julia:
I'm sure you've been asked this question before, but nevertheless I expect many of our listeners are wondering just how personal the origins of this book are. Have you, Maria, been conned?
Maria:
Honestly? I have no idea. The reason I say that is one of the things I learned is a lot of times, in fact I would say the majority of times, people don't realize whether or not they've been conned. Because we really don't like feeling like we're suckers or like we've been duped, a lot of people will rationalize away a con as a simple matter of bad luck, and so they'll never realize that they even fell for a scam. They'll just assume that, "Oh, something happened." I honestly don't know the answer. I'm assuming the answer is yes, at least on a scale. I'm sure that at some point someone I've given money to hasn't actually needed it for a train ticket or a bus ticket or whatever it is I gave them money for, but there's a part of me that would like to think that they were all very honest people who really did just need some extra change so that they could make that bus.
Julia:
So you've never fallen for a big con, because that surely you would know, but you may have given money to something that you didn't realize you were giving money to.
Maria:
Yes. I've never fallen for a Ponzi scheme, for instance. I'm 100% sure of that, because I've actually never invested in the stock market because I don't understand it well enough, and I don't like to do things ...
Julia:
Better safe than sorry.
Maria:
Yes, exactly. I definitely haven't fallen for something like that. I've never played three‐ card Monte, so I know that I haven't fallen for a game of three‐card Monte. Things that are very easy to identify, those I can say with certainty, "Yup, I haven't fallen for that." The smaller things ... There are cons that happen all the time, and some of them aren't
even small. There's so many people who are parts of long cons over many, many years who still at the end of it don't want to believe that they've been duped. Julia:
Yeah. That was something that I noticed when I would interview skeptics who are either currently or formerly magicians. One recurring theme was that they would reveal either the actual trick, or they would just reveal that it was a magic trick, and people would often still insist on believing that there was actual magic happening.
Maria:
Absolutely, yes.
Julia:
Which I think was more likely to happen when the magic trick being performed was, say, mentalism, as opposed to pulling a rabbit out of a hat. This was something that several former mentalists said made them so uncomfortable ethically, that this contributed to them giving up mentalism, because even though they told people, "This is a trick," people would still walk away feeling like they had seen evidence for psychic phenomena. The skeptics were like, "Ah. This is not what I want to be doing."
Maria:
Absolutely. In fact, I actually talked to a few mentalists when I was researching this book and there were a number of them who dropped it. They said that they couldn't ethically do it anymore, because even though they explained that they were magicians, that they weren't out to take advantage of anyone, and that everything that people were about to witness was a trick, and basically they did everything they possibly could to make it clear that this was entertainment, and they meant it, they had people who said, "Yeah, but there really must be something to this, right?" and people who, no matter what they told them, even when they showed them exactly how they knew this information, still refused to disbelieve. They quit the profession because they thought that it was unethical. One of the things that you probably know, but that I learned, was that Harry Houdini had done certain mentalist tricks in the past and then swore them off when he realized that it was really destructive to people's lives.
Julia:
Yeah. One of the things that I particularly enjoyed about your book is how the object level topic of the book is very interesting and important in its own right, but it also serves as a platform for talking about a lot of really fundamental universal features of human psychology. Because the process of performing a successful con and then falling for the successful con involves so many key features of human psychology, of cognitive biases. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about, in this particular context of people denying that they fell for a con, what is going on there?
Maria:
I think that it's a very strong process of dissonance reduction. We like to think of ourselves as a certain type of person, and that's the type of person who's probably a pretty good judge of character, who's probably pretty smart, probably pretty savvy. We definitely don't want to think of ourselves as someone who is gullible, who can't really tell whether someone else is trustworthy. We wouldn't admit to those sorts of
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characteristics. When we're presented with evidence to the contrary, we do a very classic dissonance reduction, which is we dismiss the evidence and we weave it into a story that makes sense to us and that doesn't clash with our worldview, and that worldview of course is that we are not someone who could be conned and who could be taken for a sucker. You see time and time again people who are presented with the evidence that they've been conned ... For instance, one of the stories that I talk about involved a pair of Evangelist preachers, and they were con artists. It ended up that they had been stealing from their congregation. They weren't doing what they said they were doing. They basically were racketeers who needed to get money from these people. They fueled gambling habits, shopping habits, lots of different things. Fast forward to court, where they are being charged. Their congregants are in the audience, and the judge is actually presenting them with evidence, saying, "Look, they said that they were going to give this money to a mission and here is the gambling debt. They spent that weekend in Las Vegas and they gambled it all away, and here is a $4,000 gambling debt." By the way, we're talking about earlier part of the 20th century, so $4,000 is a lot of money at the time. People would say, "No, I don't believe it." They would say, "No, I don't care. This person is for real. This person is not a con artist. I was not deceived." It's just crazy to me. You also see people who end up paying the defense fees of the con artists who tricked them because they go on believing and they just keep making up excuses. It's a fascinating thing to see, that as a long con progresses the con artist's job gets easier and easier. At some point, the con artist can stop conning and actually ends up letting the victim, the mark, do the conning himself, because we become the best con artists of our own mind, so that we can rationalize away what we've been doing. Julia:
Yeah. I wonder whether part of the reason this cognitive dissonance is so strong in these cases is that people have a folk psychological belief that only morons or extremely gullible people could possibly fall for a con. Clearly they're not morons, therefore they must not have been conned. You present in your book a fair amount of evidence that, no, in fact, that folk psychological belief that only morons fall for cons is wrong. Look at the wide range of people who have been conned in all sorts of different contexts. I just wonder if the lack of understanding of how universal this susceptibility is, is part of the reason people keep denying it and allowing themselves to continue to be conned.
Maria:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that has a lot to do with it. You're incredibly right. People have this set image of what a mark is in their minds and they refuse to budge from it. My book has only been out for a few days. Not very many people have read it, I don't think. I have gotten some really nasty notes from readers ...
Julia:
Really?
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Maria:
Well, not from readers, but from people who said they reject the subtitle of my book because ...
Julia:
Which is, "Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time."
Maria:
"Why 'We' Fall for It." They're like, "'I' would never fall for it. Are you kidding?"
Julia:
Man, you didn't even say, "Why 'You' Fall for It." I would think that would be maybe antagonizing.
Maria:
Right. I say, "Why 'We' Fall for It." They say, "No, this is totally incorrect. Smart people do not fall for cons. You can't fool an honest man." I get all of these cliches thrown at me, and say, "No, please, please read the book ... and you'll probably still disagree." It's just so incredibly strong. It's such a very deep need that people have to say that "I am immune."
Julia:
I'm so torn between sympathy for these people who don't realize how vulnerable they are, and frustration with these people for not realizing how vulnerable they are. Taking as granted that a much broader range of people are susceptible to cons ... well, I guess everyone is to some extent susceptible to cons ... and that people don't fully appreciate that, but still, there must be some individual variation between individuals, in how susceptible they are. Or between different contexts and how susceptible they make people. What have you found in that area?
Maria:
Yeah, absolutely. What I found is that one of the things that really makes people more vulnerable is when they are in an emotionally unstable and emotionally vulnerable place in their lives. It's not a personality characteristic, it's not like they're more trusting, it's that at this particular stage in their life they're going through a life change that has somehow un‐moored them, and that's often a negative change. For instance, you might have had a death in the family, you might have lost your job, something happened that really shook you up a little bit. It could also be positive. It could be something like getting married, which is a really great thing, but it's also a lot of life changes, a lot of upheaval. What you find is that people who are in those moments of transitions are particularly emotionally vulnerable to con artists, because what con artists offer is a sense of certainty, meaning. They know that that's what's lacking, and that's what they end up selling. There's some really interesting work that shows that someone, for instance, who lost a job doesn't just become a more likely victim of financial scams. They also become a more likely victim of romance fraud or any other kind of scam, that it's not domain specific. You start craving that meaning and you start being much more open to different modes of persuasion that you might not have been open to at a different stage in your life. You might take more risks. You're willing to go out on a limb a little bit.
Julia:
Do you know if researchers have done any work on, for example, whether education or IQ or any of these other demographic variables affect susceptibility?
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Maria:
Unfortunately, the answer is no. I mean the answer is yes, they've done work. The answer is no, there's no relationship, because it depends on the type of con. For some frauds, like for instance investment frauds, those victims tend to be not just wealthier but smarter, more financially savvy. It's quite funny that it's not the unsophisticated investor who falls for the really, really big ones, it's the very sophisticated people, which actually kind of makes sense in the context of overconfidence. If you really think you're an expert in this domain then you think that nobody can fool you and so you're probably a little bit less vigilant, which is by the way why con artists sometimes make the best marks. There are some cons that are targeted to con artists ...
Julia:
That's so beautiful.
Maria:
... which I find hilarious. There are other types of cons that less educated people fall for. A lot of mail‐order fraud, sweepstakes, those often tend to happen to people who have lower education.
Julia:
I'm reminded of when I was working as a statistics consultant part‐time when I was in school still. Someone, I forget who it was, drew or showed me a cartoon graph charting experience in statistics or expertise in statistics on the x‐axis, and then, on the y‐axis, ability to screw things up horribly. It starts off not that bad. If you don't have any expertise in statistics, you're not able to screw things up that horribly. Then, as you learn a little bit of statistics, your ability to screw up horribly goes way up, and then it only starts to go down way out on the x‐axis when you're really an expert. But there's that sweet spot, so to speak, where you know just enough to think you know a lot, and then you're able to make horrible mistakes. If you really know nothing, about investing say, I imagine you might be more wary of sinking tons of your money into something that you have no idea whether it would be any good or not.
Maria:
Absolutely, absolutely. I think you've completely identified it. Unfortunately, when it comes to vulnerability to cons, I don't know that there is a sweet spot that makes you invulnerable. It's not like somewhere between con artist and totally just naïve person it's that sweet spot. I think that you become more or less vulnerable to different kinds of cons as you move along the continuum. One of the things that makes us human is what makes us all potential victims. It's really part of our humanity. That's why I think it's so incredibly universal.
Julia:
That thing that's part of our humanity, is it being trusting, or do you mean searching for meaning?
Maria:
I think both, actually. Searching for meaning is something that we do from the youngest of ages. Because if you think about how babies start making sense of the world, they learn laws of cause and effect by observing what happens, and so they start creating rules in their mind. That's how they figure out how the world works. "What's this crazy place into which I've been born?" That's a really hard‐wired instinct, because otherwise, how would we ever learn? That's part of the learning process.
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As we get older, we become prone to what William James called overbelief. We use those same mechanisms, but we apply them to situations that aren't, for instance, a law of physics, where there isn't necessarily a cause and effect, but we still look for and we still want it. We still want to have that meaning. I think that that is a really deeply rooted human need. What we know about human psychology is that people hate uncertainty, they hate ambiguity. They really don't like not knowing. They don't like these gaps in what we can and can't say. They don't like shades of gray. Con artists can really exploit that, because they give you meaning and they give you neat stories and they give you explanations for things that might not have an explanation. Julia:
Like, "What happens after we die?" or like, "What caused this illness?"
Maria:
Absolutely. It can be anything. It can be anything from ... Yes, "What happens after we die?" I do make the connection between organized religion and cons. I think that they exist, and that organized religion will spontaneously arise in any society for the exact same reason that you have cons in any society, because it's that same faith, that same leap of faith. There's a huge amount of overlap between the two. But it need not be necessarily even that spiritual. It can just be your vision of the world, where you weren't fired, there was a reason why you lost this job, and the reason was that it was opening you up for this better opportunity, for instance, or this love interest, because now you're not tethered to your job so now you can move across the country to follow this beautiful man, beautiful woman, whatever it is. You see it as that sort of a meaning. Really it can be quite trivial. It can be quite deep, but it always gives us some sort of a neater narrative rather than saying, "Well, you know, sometimes things just happen, and I can't tell you if this is good or bad. It's kind of gray. I don't have an answer for you." That's a very destabilizing sort of existence.
Julia:
I'm wondering how much we can train ourselves to watch out for the signs of cons and reduce our vulnerability, maybe not to specific phishing e‐mails, but to the general set of ... the con template, something like that? The thing that gives me optimism that we might be able to do this ‐‐ although tell me if this optimism is unwarranted ‐‐ is in reading Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, which I've talked about in other episodes I'm sure, and which you talk about in your book in fact. He's a psychology professor who spent years going undercover at various companies and organizations that are in the business of persuading people to do something, like selling them something, or getting them to sign petitions. He just learned their tricks, all these trade secrets that they would never publish because they help them get an edge in the market, that academics may not have known about. He classified all of these tricks into these five or six, I can't remember, categories of persuasion technique.
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He says that now, having seen how they work, he's just on his guard. And when he notices someone using the foot‐in‐the‐door technique, where they try to get him to do a little thing first so that he'll be more likely to agree to a big thing later, he notices it. And he just feels like, "This is an antagonistic situation now, and I need to let go of my standard social norms of how I'm supposed to react to people, under the standard societal assumption that people are basically good and to be trusted." I do feel like I do that to some extent, in part because I read Cialdini's book and other books like it. I was at the mall actually, recently, and there were these very aggressive salespeople at certain kiosks in the mall. They're selling hair care and skin care products, stuff like that, and they're quite aggressive. I was actually doing an exercise where I was trying to push the boundaries of my comfort zone and do things that I wasn't quite comfortable doing. I'm traditionally quite a sucker for a strong sales pitch, because I don't like conflict and I find it hard to really put my foot down, so I was practicing dealing with these salespeople. One of them used the reciprocity technique on me, to try to sell me a ridiculously overpriced hair straightener. He offered to show me how to curl my hair with the hair straightener. He spent a couple minutes doing my hair for me. I said, "Cool, that looks nice. Thank you." Then I started walking away, and he actually got annoyed. He said, "Hey, you're not going to buy anything? I just straightened your hair for you." In the past, I might have felt, "Oh, God, he gave me this thing and now I'm not reciprocating," which is this natural human instinct, to reciprocate. This time, because I recognized, "Ah, that's a sales trick that I learned about from Cialdini," I just flat out said, "No, I don't owe you anything, and you shouldn't offer free things if you're not willing to just let it be a free sample," and I walked away and I was very proud of myself. Maria:
Good for you.
Julia:
Anyway.
Maria:
I'm so proud of you, Julia.
Julia:
Thank you. I was very proud of myself too. That was a milestone in my life. That was a tangent, but the point was, it does seem to me that there's some ability to, or some opportunity to, learn these tricks and just notice when they happen and get your guard up. Have you found that?
Maria:
Absolutely. There is actually research that shows that knowing some of these persuasion tactics can help you be a little bit more vigilant against them. That said, those persuasive tactics are not the first part of the long con. This might help you avoid short cons like being scammed in the mall, which is actually really great because short cons are also pretty terrible. If you bought one less hair care product that you don't ...
Julia:
They were $300. You can get them at the drug store for literally $20.
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Maria:
Exactly, exactly. If it helps you avoid that, that's actually wonderful. What it doesn't protect you against is the long con, because that starts with an emotional, empathetic pitch that has nothing to do with persuasion, nothing to do with any of these logical tactics. What it has to do with is crafting a story that draws you in and where you can't help but be part of the narrative. After that, if you're really part of that story, if you're really feeling empathetic, if you're really drawn in, then you stop thinking rationally. You actually no longer see the persuasive tactics for what they are because you're already involved, so you already start the rationalization process. That's why they often will spend weeks getting to know you, building up trust, crafting this emotional link. Then they can really emotionally involve you in something that will make you susceptible to the eventual con. The thing about this is all the persuasive tactics, they have to do with actually asking you for something, and the entire first part of the con, they haven't asked you for anything at all. It's kind of like giving you a free hair straightening, but it's played over so long and so many times that you don't ...
Julia:
It builds up trust, I imagine, over that long period.
Maria:
Exactly. You can't really identify it for what it is. In those situations, it's really tough. Or, there's another type of situation. One of the people I write about, Samantha Azzopardi, she's a totally crazy story. Probably, actually, "crazy" isn't the best word to use, because she's mentally sane. A lot of people want to dismiss her as crazy, but she has a clean bill of health. She has managed in her short life, she's in her 20s ... and she's currently operational so I'm guessing that we will see much more of her ... to fool the government of three different countries, Australia, Ireland, and Canada, by various forms of playing the victim. In Dublin, for instance, she posed as a victim of sex trafficking, and the government ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, hundreds of police man‐hours trying to figure out who this girl was, trying to figure out how they could possibly help her, and she was just a con artist. She just wanted the attention. She got a kick out of the power that she got over them. It's totally insane, but what are you going to do in a situation like that? She's not using any of those persuasive tactics. She's going for the gut. That's one of those things that's a taboo topic. Nobody lies about sex trafficking. Even if you think they're lying, what are you going to do? Are you going to say, "I don't believe you"? Can you imagine what kind of a reaction that would get?
Julia:
Right, yeah. You have to have a policy decision, not an individual case‐by‐case decision, and the policy decision can't be to never believe or never follow up on accusations of sex trafficking. That would be terrible.
Maria:
Absolutely. That's exactly right. That's an extreme case. That's why I also wanted to make sure to clarify that she has a absolutely clean bill of mental health. Those types of things happen all the time.
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Julia:
We've talked about the psychology of the victims of cons. Let's talk now about the psychology of the con artists themselves. In general, my understanding of people who lie or do ethically dubious things is that they often believe that they're justified in some way. For example, men who will admit in anonymous surveys that they will force a woman to have sex also believe that this is a super common behavior among other men, or that it's significantly more common than it actually is. They basically think, "Well, everyone's doing this," and that makes it feel fine to them. For con artists, especially for the clear‐cut large‐scale examples of con artists, not the pushy salesperson type of con artist, how could they possibly believe that this is something everyone is doing? Clearly, if everyone were doing it, then their marks would not be so trusting. To what extent do you think these people have a rationalization about why they're actually not doing anything wrong, or why they're justified ‐‐ and to what extent do you think they just maybe are sociopaths and don't even see people as people?
Maria:
I think that you raise a really good point. I don't think they justify it by saying, "Everyone else is doing it," but they do justify it. I think that they convince themselves that they are good people who are doing these things because that's the way the world works and that they're doing it for a very good reason. Almost no con artist will tell you, "I'm a con artist." They'll say, "Oh, they deserve it. It sucks to be them, but if they fell for my fake art ... " There was one guy who I spoke with who was an art forger. He says, "You know what? If they bought it and they can't tell the difference, then it's on them, it's not on me."
Julia:
I'm actually slightly sympathetic to that. Not to justify his conning, it's just, from a philosophical perspective, if the value you get from the painting is psychological ... Anyway, I'm not going to go down that road. Go on.
Maria:
One of the things that I found was that a lot of them have some ... or all, but some is more likely than all ... of the dark triad of traits, and that does include psychopathy, but it also includes narcissism, which is not just an overblown ego, but it comes with this sense of entitlement: "I'm not taking this from you, I deserve it more than you, so I'm just righting a wrong in the world. I deserve this reputation, so I am going to just say that I have a PhD because I'm smarter than people with PhDs, so that's what I'm going to do," and that's what they end up doing. The third part of it is Machiavellianism, which derives obviously from Machiavelli's The Prince. It's all about persuasion, actually, so this goes along with what you were talking about with Cialdini earlier. It's the ability to really manipulate people to do your bidding for your own ends. Of course, the very, very good ones, they won't just use Cialdini's tactics, as we've also discussed. You won't necessarily see how they're achieving their end result, but you'll end up doing what they want you to do.
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In terms of how mentally stable are they, I think the majority of them aren't actually psychopaths. I think some are, but I think Machiavellianism and narcissism actually has more to do with it, and that also comes with a beautiful rationalization ability. Julia:
Right. One of my fears regarding con artists is that they get more sophisticated over time, partly because any individual is going to get better over time as they practice their craft, but also possibly because of a selection process, that the bad con artists get caught and their techniques get exposed and people get warned about them, and the good ones just never get caught. I don't know if we would even be able to detect such a trend, but have you detected it and/or do you suspect it's happening, this increase in sophistication?
Maria:
I think there is an increase in sophistication. As you say, there definitely is a selection mechanism. I think we have such terrible data about con artists we don't actually know how many of them are operational. We don't know how many people get conned. There are no good statistics, because the best ones go undetected. They're so good that they're never reported, they're never caught out. A lot of people don't realize they have been taken. Even if they have, they're too embarrassed, because they feel like a schmuck. These people keep going and their techniques never get exposed because nobody knows that this type of a fraud is operational. The other thing that I think is happening is we're giving them more tools. With every single technological advance, we end up not just widening the scope of operation of a con artist but also giving up more information about ourselves. Social media is just a godsend to con artists, and enables them to be more sophisticated even if they're not necessarily as talented, if that makes sense. Before, it took much more to try to figure out all this personal stuff about people to try to ingratiate yourself, to try to build up trust. These days, you can be a much lower‐ quality craftsman and still achieve those ends, because all you have to do is get them to accept your Facebook friend request or follow them on Instagram or look at their tweets, or, if God forbid you use Foursquare: "Where do they check in? Who do they like? Who are their friends and what kind of food do they like? Oh, they are Red Sox fans. Excellent, I can talk to them about baseball." There's just so much information out there that everyone ups their game. The really sophisticated ones now become even more ridiculously sophisticated, and suddenly there are more sophisticated‐seeming con artists who actually aren't that great but they're able to pull off pretty exceptional frauds because we're giving them our information on a platter.
Julia:
Yeah. That is quite chilling. There's just so much to know about technological vulnerabilities, and that knowledge base keeps changing by the month. I bragged earlier about how I'm on the lookout for cons, and that is true, and I also try to keep abreast of what is it not safe to do online. For example, I have a policy of never
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clicking any links in e‐mails that look at all sketchy. Even if they're from someone if I know, if they look sketchy, maybe they were hacked, et cetera. Maria:
Good policy.
Julia:
That was a body of knowledge I had to develop, and even that is fallible. A few weeks ago I almost ended up clicking on a phishing link because ... This was so sneaky. It looked innocuous. It was from someone I didn't know, but I often get e‐mails from people I don't know. It was Rebecca someone‐or‐other. It looked like she had forwarded a message to me. I couldn't see the whole message. It just said, "Click to view entire message," or, "Click to view rest of message," I don't remember. It was the same phrase that Gmail uses when a message is too long and has been clipped. You click on that thing. It's not a link, it just expands the e‐mail so you can read the rest of it. It didn't even register in my mind as "clicking a link to go to a website," so I just went to click it ‐‐ but I hesitated for a second, and when I hesitated, my cursor over the link showed a URL. It was a Bitly URL, which indicates that someone was trying to hide the content of the actual URL, and I caught myself just in time and I didn't click it.
Maria:
Well done.
Julia:
Thank you. I realize this is not a long con like the kind you were focusing on earlier, but it really did drive home how I'm more educated about how to be safe online than probably the average American, I'm younger and just have grown up with technology and more educated than the average American, and still there's just so many little details that, if you're missing that little piece of knowledge, you're vulnerable. You have to keep learning and keep updating your knowledge. It just made me feel so pessimistic about the ability to guard against these things.
Maria:
Absolutely. It's one of these things where people think that technology protects us, but they're always one step ahead too. The second that we have a technology and that we know how to protect ourselves, then they figure out how to take advantage of the new protections. Yeah, I think we just need to realize that you should definitely have some best practices. One of the things I often do is if someone sends me an attachment that I'm not expecting or if someone sends me a link that I'm not expecting, I'll e‐mail them back and say, "Hey, did you mean to send this to me? Is this legit?" That I think goes along with those best practices. Other things, like never accept a Facebook friend request from someone you don't actually know or know exactly who they are. Even if you have 50 friends in common, that doesn't matter, because it always starts with one friend, and then someone sees, "Oh, we have a friend in common, great," and then all of a sudden you're up to 50 friends and it seems like a trusted person, but no one actually knows this person.
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There are things like that. On the other hand, you say you've become discouraged, and frankly so do I, but I think that we need to, and this is a difficult thing for me to say, but I think we need to give ourselves permission to be victims as well. I think we need to be a little easier on ourselves and realize that, you know what? I'm going to do my best. I'm really going to try to protect myself. I'll follow best practices. I'll learn about this stuff. I'll read about persuasion tactics. I'll not click on attachments. I'll really follow best practices as best as I can. If that doesn't protect me, if I end up falling for some stupid scam, that's okay. Julia:
Yeah. This also reminds me of this theme that I kept seeing run through your book, of the difficulties of this trade‐off between protecting yourself from being duped or conned versus being trusting and allowing yourself to believe things that might be helpful to you psychologically, which is, again, as you say, a very natural, instinctive, human urge or tendency. You give examples of self‐deception obviously making people vulnerable to cons. You also give examples of studies showing that self‐deception can be beneficial in various contexts. I was wondering, do you have any overall perspective on the net value of self‐deception?
Maria:
Good.
Julia:
Good? That's the net value?
Maria:
Self‐deception: good. Done. It is something that we do need to think about. I think that what the data show is that actually it's good not to see the world quite as it is, be it in terms of self‐deception where you see yourself in a slightly rosier light. That's actually really healthy. It's psychologically healthy. We don't want to know what we really are like. Those people have a name, they're called the clinically depressed. That's the only subset of the population as far as we know that lacks an optimism bias completely and that just is able to see themselves and accurately answer questions about themselves. Obviously, they suffer from clinical depression, so you can see by its absence just what a psychological benefit that self‐deception ends up having. We see so many studies where people perform better, they push themselves harder, they end up actually becoming better because they believe themselves to be better. I hate those kinds of "fake it till you make it" types of things, and you never quite make it because once you make it you think yourself even better, so you're always a step ahead of where you are in reality, but it does have, I think, a great benefit. We also know that being trusting comes with a lot of benefits, not just psychological. We know that on a social level societies with higher levels of generalized trust end up doing better economically. They have better social institutions. It makes so much sense, because we have to trust one another to be able to develop as a society. If everyone second‐guessed every single person's motive, we would not live in a very pleasant world.
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Julia:
Even with the "don't accept Facebook friend requests from people you don't know" advice that you gave, which is good advice, but still, it called to mind this instance where a close relative of mine accepted a Facebook friend request from this random woman from, I think it was Nigeria, who he didn't know. They had one mutual friend in common, but that's also very common. And he just said, "Hi, it's nice to meet you. What's the weather in your country like now?" They started talking, and they've just been having nice conversations for the last few weeks about their various countries.
Maria:
Well, let's see if those nice conversations continue or if suddenly she needs something.
Julia:
Right. It's not a clear success case yet. But that vision of what this kind of open, trusting attitude can or could deliver is definitely appealing, and it does seem like a clear loss to get rid of that or to substantially decrease that in order to increase your protection from cons.
Maria:
Absolutely.
Julia:
Regarding the self‐deception part, though, I think my perspective is a little different than yours on this, although I do agree there are certain contexts in which self‐deception seems to be valuable. I probably would have a longer answer than "good" to the question that I asked you about the net value, although I realize you were being pithy. My hunch, and I'd be interested to hear your take on this, is that self‐deception is especially valuable in short‐term contexts like the ones that psychology studies tend to look at. For example, if you're going to go out and try to chat up women at a bar or if you're going to compete in a swim meet, which is one of the studies you cite in the book, it's really not helpful to be second‐guessing yourself right then. That's the time to psych yourself up and just focus on the positives and not think about the negatives or downplay them. I think that if you never second‐guess yourself ...
Maria:
Oh, absolutely, yes.
Julia:
... and never ask, like, "Do I need help learning how to present myself"? or, "Do I need to practice more? Am I not practicing enough my swimming skill?" et cetera, then maybe you'll still be happy because you believe you're great, but you're not going to actually be achieving the larger goals that would make you happier, like meeting a girlfriend or achieving success in your swimming career, that kind of thing.
Maria:
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Julia:
It seems to me there's this tricky two‐step that you have to perform, on some level unconsciously, where you psych yourself up in some contexts and then allow yourself to let the doubt in in the longer‐term.
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Maria:
Oh, absolutely. I agree with that 100%. I'm not saying that we always need to think positive. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying actually it's good to have a certain optimistic bias about yourself. That doesn't mean that you don't question. That doesn't mean that you don't try to improve. That doesn't mean that you say, "Oh, I'm perfect." That's not what I mean at all. All I mean is that it's healthy for all of us to see ourselves in a slightly better light than the light in which others see us. It's not a question of not second‐guessing yourself. I think doubt is very, very healthy. I think we should second‐guess ourselves. I think those best athletes, they're not just good at self‐deception. They've also probably worked their asses off and have learned from mistakes and realized that they aren't always perfect. I think, yes, we need to make sure that it comes through loud and clear that I'm not advocating just a rosy glow. All I mean is that there is a psychological advantage. It's protective to not always see yourself as you really are.
Julia:
Yeah. Makes sense. We are just over time, so I'll take this as an opportunity to wrap up the discussion and we'll move onto the Rationally Speaking Pick. [musical interlude] Welcome back. Every episode we invite our guest to introduce the Rationally Speaking Pick of the episode, which is a book or website or something else that influenced their thinking in an interesting way. Maria, what's your pick for today's episode?
Maria:
Well, since we've been talking about con artists, I'd like to pick David Maurer's The Big Con, from 1940, which really just absolutely changed the way that I saw the world of the con. It made me realize just how rich and intriguing it could be. Maurer was a linguist, he wasn't a psychologist, but he spent years on the streets with con artists, studying their language and just studying how they behave and how they act, and this book was the result of that. I think it's to date the best thing that's ever been written about con artists. I think one of the things that really drew me to it is that my original background in psychology was in psycholinguistics. I worked with Steven Pinker as an undergrad. The way that language affects how people think is such a fascinating question to me. Pinker's books were quite influential when I was younger and one of the reasons that I studied psychology. This, you start seeing how, when you call the person that you're dealing with a "mark," that changes how you see them and that changes the way that you see the world, and how all of these different language choices, they really helped create that subculture. I would recommend The Big Con to anyone who's interested not just in con artists but in the ability of language to shape perception.
Julia:
Yeah. We actually talked a little bit about that two or three episodes ago with Susan Gelman, who studies essentialism and the essentialist bias in psychology, and how word choice and describing someone as "an autistic" instead of "a person with autism" can
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affect your attitude towards them and your predictions about what they'll do. It's fascinating. Maria:
Absolutely.
Julia:
Great. Well, Maria, thank you so much for returning to the show. It's been a pleasure having you back on, and I encourage everyone to check out The Confidence Game. We'll link to it on our website. Thanks very much.
Maria:
Thank you so much, Julia. It's been a pleasure.
Julia:
This concludes another episode or Rationally Speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
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