manipulate human emotions in genius (and evil) ways, striking right when we feel lovelorn or otherwise emotionally vulnerable.Khazan wanted to know about
cons, why they happen, and if there’s any way to avoid becoming a fraudster’s next target.
Khazan: Yeah, how can we even be sure what con artists’ life stories are?
Konnikova: The thing is, we actually can’t. I stopped talking to the con artists I was writing about, about halfway through the research process, because I realized that the same thing was happening to me. When I actually spoke with them and met them, I was no longer objective because they’re so good, so charismatic—you really start identifying with them and thinking, “Oh, they’re really not so bad.” You start making all sorts of excuses and it’s really not a good thing, so I stopped talking to them. I realized I needed to talk to the victims.
Khazan: What kinds of things would the con artists say to you?
Konnikova: Well, it’s not just what they say, but how they say it. Some of them were really nasty pieces of work. But, others, they empathize. They ask about you, they know a lot about you. I was surprised at how well they did their homework. I was a journalist interviewing them and they would talk to me about my first book, or about some article that they read. They actually did background research on me. They’d say, “You did such a good job understanding this,” and it’s flattering.
They have excuses for everything they did. They’ll say things like, “Oh, well I wasn't really trying to make her lose all her money. I was actually trying to help her and all these things happened”—and you just get swept up in it. A lot of times, you don’t even realize they’re making excuses until you see yourself writing a paragraph where you are describing them as kind of a ‘jovial man’ and you suddenly see all these positive attributes coming out of your own mouth and you think, oh no, no, no, no, no.
When you’re vulnerable, your world no longer makes sense. Con artists are people who are happy to make sense of it for you.
...Khazan: Explain what the “dark triad” is, and why is it essential to being a successful con artist.
Konnikova: The dark triad is three things, obviously, including psychopathy, the inability to feel emotion in the way that normal people do. It’s kind of a lack of empathy. Your brain is actually different, you process emotional stimuli differently. To you, they don’t mean that much. It’s very difficult for a non-psychopath to understand, but basically everything that would really make you emotionally engaged would leave you cold as a psychopath, so that’s one part of it.
The second part is narcissism, this overblown ego where you not only think you’re just the best thing that’s ever happened to anyone, but you also think you deserve a lot. You deserve basically everyone to bow down to you. And you have it coming to you, all these good things.
...Finally, it's Machiavellianism, or the ability to manipulate people into doing what you want.
Stop right there. Has she not just described Barack Hussein Obama?
...Khazan: One thing I found surprising was that cons are underreported. Why is that?Read more here.
Konnikova: Part of it is that people really value their reputations, so they don’t want others to know that they fell victim. The other thing is that they value their reputation so much is that they don’t want themselves to know. They would much rather believe that they were the victims of bad luck than that they were victims of a con artist. Our self-deception is incredibly powerful, because we have this very strong protective mechanism where we want to think of ourselves in the best possible light. No one wants to think of themselves as a sucker or as someone who falls for some con artist, who to someone else might seem obvious.
You want to think of yourself as someone who’s smart, as someone who’s savvy, as someone who would know better, and so that’s exactly what you do, you say, “Oh, bad luck, luck of the draw, it was just a bad investment decision or this person just wasn’t ready for a serious relationship,” whatever it is. So the funny thing is, most people don’t learn from their mistakes because they don’t acknowledge that they made them. One thing that I learned while I was researching the book, which I had no idea existed, was that there are sucker lists out there that con artists buy and sell of people who’ve already fallen for a scam. Those are the best victims, the ones who have already been victimized once, because they’ve done such a good job rationalizing that they’ll do it again.
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