The Best Science Books of 2016
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5.
THE CONFIDENCE GAME
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“Try not to get overly attached to a
hypothesis just because it’s yours,” Carl
Sagan urged in his excellent Baloney
Detection Kit— and yet our tendency is to do just that,
becoming increasingly attached to what we’ve come to believe because the belief
has sprung from our own glorious, brilliant, fool-proof minds. How con artists
take advantage of this human hubris is what New Yorker columnist
and psychology writer Maria Konnikova explores in The
Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time — a thrilling psychological detective story
investigating how con artists, the supreme masterminds of malevolent
reality-manipulation, prey on our hopes, our fears, and our propensity for
believing what we wish were true. Through a tapestry of riveting real-life con
artist profiles interwoven with decades of psychology experiments, Konnikova
illuminates the inner workings of trust and deception in our everyday lives.
She writes:
It’s the oldest story ever told. The
story of belief — of the basic, irresistible, universal human need to believe
in something that gives life meaning, something that reaffirms our view of
ourselves, the world, and our place in it… For our minds are built for stories.
We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them.
Stories about our origins. Our purpose. The reasons the world is the way it is.
Human beings don’t like to exist in a state of uncertainty or ambiguity. When
something doesn’t make sense, we want to supply the missing link. When we don’t
understand what or why or how something happened, we want to find the
explanation. A confidence artist is only too happy to comply — and the
well-crafted narrative is his absolute forte.
Konnikova describes the basic elements of the
con and the psychological susceptibility into which each of them plays:
The confidence game starts with basic
human psychology. From the artist’s perspective, it’s a question of identifying
the victim (the put-up): who is he, what does he want, and how can I play on
that desire to achieve what I want? It requires the creation of empathy and rapport
(the play): an emotional foundation must be laid before any scheme is proposed,
any game set in motion. Only then does it move to logic and persuasion (the
rope): the scheme (the tale), the evidence and the way it will work to your
benefit (the convincer), the show of actual profits. And like a fly caught in a
spider’s web, the more we struggle, the less able to extricate ourselves we
become (the breakdown). By the time things begin to look dicey, we tend to be
so invested, emotionally and often physically, that we do most of the
persuasion ourselves. We may even choose to up our involvement ourselves, even
as things turn south (the send), so that by the time we’re completely fleeced
(the touch), we don’t quite know what hit us. The con artist may not even need
to convince us to stay quiet (the blow-off and fix); we are more likely than
not to do so ourselves. We are, after all, the best deceivers of our own minds.
At each step of the game, con artists draw from a seemingly endless toolbox of
ways to manipulate our belief. And as we become more committed, with every step
we give them more psychological material to work with.
Needless to say, the book bears remarkable
relevance to the recent turn of events in American politics and its ripples in
the mass manipulation machine known as the media.
Brain Pickings
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