THE CONFIDENCE GAME
Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time
Maria Konnikova
Viking
340 pages; $28
Have you ever been the victim of a con? I have.
It happened when I was in college, travelling around Turkey with a friend. We were approached one night in Istanbul by a chatty young man who spoke good English. He was headed to a nightclub to meet some people. Would we like to join him? When we arrived at the place a few minutes later, it was empty. A couple of half-dressed women soon appeared at our table, as did a bottle of champagne that we hadn't ordered. (Come to think of it, we were never even given a menu.) Another few minutes passed, and the check came: Between the cover charge and the champagne, we had evidently run up a bill of more than $500. We walked out of the nightclub not only broke but embarrassed by our own stupidity.
How could we have been such suckers? As I learned from Maria Konnikova's The Confidence Game, people are instinctively trusting: Why not assume that this stranger we met on the street was perfectly well intentioned? What's more, con artists are experts at reading their victims. "Size someone up well, and you can sell them anything," Ms Konnikova writes. It's as true of the psychic who takes advantage of the brokenhearted or the cult leader who preys on lost souls as it is of that Turkish swindler who knew that nothing would sound more enticing to a couple of American college kids than the prospect of a night on the town with a local.
The Confidence Game belongs to the genre popularised by Malcolm Gladwell: Social psychology designed for mass consumption. Typically, books of this sort are intended to be both useful and entertaining; their appeal is at least partly bound up in their potential to change your life, whether that means becoming more productive at work or turning your eight-year-old child into a Carnegie Hall-worthy violinist. Unless you're an aspiring hustler or serial mark, The Confidence Game doesn't have much to offer by way of practical advice. (In contrast to Ms Konnikova's first book, Mastermind, which was tantalisingly subtitled: "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.") But it turns out there's a lot to be learned about human nature from the con's enduring success. And Ms Konnikova, a psychologist and a contributor to NewYorker.com, is an insightful analyst of the dark art of the scam.
What makes a convincing con? It helps to have a vulnerable mark, someone in the throes of some sort of life turmoil. But other emotional states, like happiness or fear, can also lower our defenses and make us more open to persuasion. Clark Stanley, the 19th-century salesman who peddled actual snake oil - or what he claimed was snake oil, anyway - is part of a long tradition of scam artists who exploit our anxieties about our health and well-being.
Con artists thrive in times of social and political upheaval, when instability and uncertainty reign, making it easier for emotion to overwhelm reason. The technological revolution, which has upended so many aspects of everyday human behaviour, has been especially good for business. Not only has the Internet given scammers easy access to countless marks who might be sympathetic to the plight of a grammatically challenged Nigerian prince, but it has also made it easy for them to establish convincing false identities. With a big assist from a memorable 2013 profile in The Times Magazine, Ms Konnikova recounts the story of a lonely 68-year-old physics professor at the University of North Carolina whose trip to Bolivia and Argentina to meet a Czech model with whom he'd been corresponding via an online dating service lands him in jail after unwittingly serving as a cocaine mule.
Con artists aren't just master manipulators; they are expert storytellers. Much as we are intrinsically inclined to trust, we are naturally drawn to a compelling story. Just ask any advertising executive or political operative. "When a fact is plausible, we still need to test it," Ms Konnikova writes with characteristic concision. "When a story is plausible, we often assume it's true." And once we've accepted a story as true, we're not likely to question it; on the contrary, we will probably unconsciously bend any contradictory information to conform to the conclusion we've already drawn. There's a name for this phenomenon - confirmation bias. It provides the key psychological scaffolding for the long con, during the course of which the mark finds a way to rationalise any number of warning signs. (Like the fact that we were the only patrons in that empty bar in Istanbul.)
Ms Konnikova sticks to her genre's familiar formula, juxtaposing academic research with brief narratives of a wide range of cons, from the two-bit three-card monte games that were once ubiquitous on New York City street corners to more outlandish scams, like the 19th-century Scot Gregor MacGregor who made a fortune persuading the public to invest in the bonds of a fictional government. And MacGregor wasn't done yet. He then convinced seven ships' worth of settlers to emigrate to this imaginary nation.
The stories in The Confidence Game can feel a bit clipped and superficial. Ms Konnikova dispenses with MacGregor's crazy tale in just a few pages; I would have happily read a few hundred more. And then another couple of hundred on Thierry Tilly, a law-school dropout who took millions off a family of French aristocrats by convincing them that he could protect their fortune from "sinister" forces (Jews, Freemasons, etc.). I could go on. But this may be more of a statement about the endlessly juicy possibilities of the subject matter rather than a criticism of the shortcomings of the book.
Ms Konnikova has learned at least one thing from the con artists she studied: Always leave your marks wanting more.
Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time
Maria Konnikova
Viking
340 pages; $28
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It happened when I was in college, travelling around Turkey with a friend. We were approached one night in Istanbul by a chatty young man who spoke good English. He was headed to a nightclub to meet some people. Would we like to join him? When we arrived at the place a few minutes later, it was empty. A couple of half-dressed women soon appeared at our table, as did a bottle of champagne that we hadn't ordered. (Come to think of it, we were never even given a menu.) Another few minutes passed, and the check came: Between the cover charge and the champagne, we had evidently run up a bill of more than $500. We walked out of the nightclub not only broke but embarrassed by our own stupidity.
How could we have been such suckers? As I learned from Maria Konnikova's The Confidence Game, people are instinctively trusting: Why not assume that this stranger we met on the street was perfectly well intentioned? What's more, con artists are experts at reading their victims. "Size someone up well, and you can sell them anything," Ms Konnikova writes. It's as true of the psychic who takes advantage of the brokenhearted or the cult leader who preys on lost souls as it is of that Turkish swindler who knew that nothing would sound more enticing to a couple of American college kids than the prospect of a night on the town with a local.
The Confidence Game belongs to the genre popularised by Malcolm Gladwell: Social psychology designed for mass consumption. Typically, books of this sort are intended to be both useful and entertaining; their appeal is at least partly bound up in their potential to change your life, whether that means becoming more productive at work or turning your eight-year-old child into a Carnegie Hall-worthy violinist. Unless you're an aspiring hustler or serial mark, The Confidence Game doesn't have much to offer by way of practical advice. (In contrast to Ms Konnikova's first book, Mastermind, which was tantalisingly subtitled: "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.") But it turns out there's a lot to be learned about human nature from the con's enduring success. And Ms Konnikova, a psychologist and a contributor to NewYorker.com, is an insightful analyst of the dark art of the scam.
What makes a convincing con? It helps to have a vulnerable mark, someone in the throes of some sort of life turmoil. But other emotional states, like happiness or fear, can also lower our defenses and make us more open to persuasion. Clark Stanley, the 19th-century salesman who peddled actual snake oil - or what he claimed was snake oil, anyway - is part of a long tradition of scam artists who exploit our anxieties about our health and well-being.
Con artists thrive in times of social and political upheaval, when instability and uncertainty reign, making it easier for emotion to overwhelm reason. The technological revolution, which has upended so many aspects of everyday human behaviour, has been especially good for business. Not only has the Internet given scammers easy access to countless marks who might be sympathetic to the plight of a grammatically challenged Nigerian prince, but it has also made it easy for them to establish convincing false identities. With a big assist from a memorable 2013 profile in The Times Magazine, Ms Konnikova recounts the story of a lonely 68-year-old physics professor at the University of North Carolina whose trip to Bolivia and Argentina to meet a Czech model with whom he'd been corresponding via an online dating service lands him in jail after unwittingly serving as a cocaine mule.
Con artists aren't just master manipulators; they are expert storytellers. Much as we are intrinsically inclined to trust, we are naturally drawn to a compelling story. Just ask any advertising executive or political operative. "When a fact is plausible, we still need to test it," Ms Konnikova writes with characteristic concision. "When a story is plausible, we often assume it's true." And once we've accepted a story as true, we're not likely to question it; on the contrary, we will probably unconsciously bend any contradictory information to conform to the conclusion we've already drawn. There's a name for this phenomenon - confirmation bias. It provides the key psychological scaffolding for the long con, during the course of which the mark finds a way to rationalise any number of warning signs. (Like the fact that we were the only patrons in that empty bar in Istanbul.)
Ms Konnikova sticks to her genre's familiar formula, juxtaposing academic research with brief narratives of a wide range of cons, from the two-bit three-card monte games that were once ubiquitous on New York City street corners to more outlandish scams, like the 19th-century Scot Gregor MacGregor who made a fortune persuading the public to invest in the bonds of a fictional government. And MacGregor wasn't done yet. He then convinced seven ships' worth of settlers to emigrate to this imaginary nation.
The stories in The Confidence Game can feel a bit clipped and superficial. Ms Konnikova dispenses with MacGregor's crazy tale in just a few pages; I would have happily read a few hundred more. And then another couple of hundred on Thierry Tilly, a law-school dropout who took millions off a family of French aristocrats by convincing them that he could protect their fortune from "sinister" forces (Jews, Freemasons, etc.). I could go on. But this may be more of a statement about the endlessly juicy possibilities of the subject matter rather than a criticism of the shortcomings of the book.
Ms Konnikova has learned at least one thing from the con artists she studied: Always leave your marks wanting more.