“It’s a startling and disconcerting read that should make you think twice every time a friend of a friend offers you the opportunity of a lifetime.”—Erik Larson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and bestselling author of Devil in the White CityThink you can’t get conned? Think again. The New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes explains … of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes explains how to spot the con before they spot you.
“[An] excellent study of Con Artists, stories & the human need to believe” –Neil Gaiman, via Twitter
A compelling investigation into the minds, motives, and methods of con artists—and the people who fall for their cons over and over again.
While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true conmen—the Bernie Madoffs, the Jim Bakkers, the Lance Armstrongs—are elegant, outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust. How do they do it? Why are they successful? And what keeps us falling for it, over and over again? These are the questions that journalist and psychologist Maria Konnikova tackles in her mesmerizing new book.
From multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes to small-time frauds, Konnikova pulls together a selection of fascinating stories to demonstrate what all cons share in common, drawing on scientific, dramatic, and psychological perspectives. Insightful and gripping, the book brings readers into the world of the con, examining the relationship between artist and victim. The Confidence Game asks not only why we believe con artists, but also examines the very act of believing and how our sense of truth can be manipulated by those around us.
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This is a compelling exploration of the con — its history and most famous perpetrators, as well as the psychology of both the criminal and his mark. There were so many fascinating nuggets here, but I think the most important take away is that no one is immune from being conned.
The contents of this book will tell you why we are all capable of being conned, why religion is so powerful and how politicians make us believe in their answer to the problems of the world. Should be a required read for all teenagers to prepare them for the world of adults.
Whenever we read about some con job that nets a sucker or ten, the first thing across our minds is: how could they possibly have fallen for that? It’s such an obvious scam! What were they thinking?
According to psychologist/author Maria Konnikova, they were thinking the same way we would. In their shoes, we’d have been saps, too.
In the 1950s, linguist David Maurer called confidence men the “aristocrats of crime.” Unlike most other crimes, the con requires us to become willing participants in our own fleecing. Ridiculous? Maybe in the abstract. But as the author points out, time and time again the victims of con games go out of their way to help the grifter take them to the cleaners, then fail to notify the police or even refuse to admit they’ve been taken.
The author divides her narrative into ten chapters, the middle eight of which focus on each step of the long con (the kind that takes days or weeks to unfold, like in The Sting). In each chapter, she pins the text to a particular scam that best illustrates the concepts in that chapter; for instance, in “The Tale” (about the importance of narrative in promoting a con), she follows the story of a college professor duped into smuggling drugs by a woman he thought had fallen for him. She uses academic studies, psychological analysis, the views of lawmen and con men alike, and the examples of other cons to show why a particular trick works.
In short: we as a species became what we are by evolving certain societal traits — trust, empathy, optimism, faith, a need to feel special (ego), a yen for material or spiritual enrichment (greed), an inability to understand statistics (see “optimism”) and a reluctance to believe in the worst-case scenario (see “faith”). Confidence wo/men are both uniquely able to find these traits in other people and powerfully inclined to exploit them without experiencing a lot of angst about it. They prey on belief, on faith, and on greed; that old saw “you can’t cheat an honest man” has more than a little truth to it. However, it can also be said that the entrepreneur is the ideal mark, because s/he is more than most a creature of optimism, ego, faith and greed.
The object of a con is nearly always money or power. Satan was the first grifter, and Eve was the first mark; he told her a story that played on her ego, optimism, greed and faith, she went all-in, and she ended up losing her home. Advertising is a form of con job, with the tools of the ad man being the same as those of the grifter, though the former’s remuneration comes a bit more indirectly. Pyramid schemes are cons, and so were Enron, the mortgage industry in 2007, religious cults, and nationalist politics at just about any time. They all play on belief and all those other traits that make us human and social creatures, then turn it against us.
Despite being an academic, Konnikova writes clearly and engagingly, with a pleasant shortage of fifty-cent words and specialist cant. The case studies she uses are varied enough to not induce deja vu from one chapter to the next. While Charles Ponzi (of the eponymous scheme) and Frank Abagnale (he of Catch Me If You Can) get name-checked, it’s likely you won’t have heard of most of the scams she uses as case studies, which are drawn from over a hundred years of bad behavior. Where’d the fifth star go? The author often doesn’t know when to quit while she’s ahead, so she’s prone to repeating her arguments until you have them embedded in your brain.
The Confidence Game isn’t meant to be a casual read; you need to really want to understand con men and what they do at the office every day. If you do want that, though, it’s an excellent primer on how and why cons work. It’s also a big, fat injection of empathy for the suckers, who at bottom are guilty of little more than being human. Reading this book may not stop you from getting taken, but at least you’ll understand why you let it happen.
This is a fascinating and informative study into the science and psychology of the confidence trick. It explains why people fall for the most outrageous scams.