The Art Of Plucking Our Mental Strings

What kind of gullible fool would add their own money to a bag of it, just to show good faith? Imagine you are in the mall parking lot, making your way to your car, when you notice an abandoned purse. A young woman happens to see it at the same time, and the two of you chat about what to do about it. It is just a bag of money. The young woman asks what you think you should do next, and after you discuss it, she suggests that she should call the lawyer for whom she works. The lawyer tells her that she should bring the money to him, and he will follow the proper legal procedure to find the bag’s owner. She even offers to go first, producing one thousand dollars in cash and putting it in the bag. After that, you feel more at ease, and drive with the young woman to the bank, take out your money, and put it in the bag, too. Next you drive to the lawyer’s office. In the lobby of the building, she tells you she needs to use the bathroom. She offers to let you hold the bag while she finds the facilities. After twenty minutes, she hasn’t returned, and you start to get worried, but not too worried, since you’re the one with the bag of money. Needless to say, you never see the young woman or your good faith money again.

Life Was Never Intended To Be Simple

This scam is known as a pigeon drop. The pigeon in this scenario is you, the one who gets dropped holding a bag of worthless newspaper, out a thousand dollars. It is a little bit hard to believe that such cons work. But the fact is, pigeon drops and other such confidence games do succeed, which is why they are endlessly recycled and reinvented. I once saw a con in progress. I watched as a woman eagerly accepted, plunked down a hundred bucks, picked what was obviously the wrong card, and then chuckled off her misfortune. And it is just this sort of temptation that cons exploit. It’s easy to focus on the foolhardiness of someone who would voluntarily put their own cash in a bag at the suggestion of a stranger. It’s a daydream we’ve probably all indulged in at one point or another, stumbling upon free money as we go through our daily routine. Skepticism about the young woman and her intentions means skepticism about the unexpected windfall. It is precisely this desire, conscious or unconscious, to have our dreams fulfilled that the con artist exploits. The con artist wants the mark to believe something that the mark wants to believe, too.

You Are Not Alone

Remember, also, that in any circumstance, people operate under a truth bias. This cognitive rule of thumb means that we are predisposed to believe what we hear and see. The pigeon drop is an example of a generic con. It is targeted not at one specific person but, rather, at whichever person stumbles onto it. Other cons are far more individualized and insidious. A con artist will target a specific person, family, or community to dupe and victimize. Even so, the basic psychological tactics the con artist employs are quite similar to those used in a pigeon drop. He or she exploits the mark’s thinking against the mark, identifying and then manipulating the mark’s needs or vulnerabilities. These needs might be financial, but they could also be romantic or emotional. The Psychology of Deceit, explores the relationship between the con and the mark. The confidence game appears to be a dynamic relationship built on the needs of the ‘mark’ as well as those of the exploiter. Rather, the con artist may succeed because of his uncanny ability to identify the psychological pressure points of his victims.

Never Going Back Again

The psychology of the con artist seems to wed the tactics of the impostor to the greed of the fraudster. Yet, con artists are often characterized by a pronounced lack of empathy for their victims, and perhaps for others generally. As we consider this lack of empathy, which can border on the sociopathic, it is useful to return to the broader picture of deception in our society. While lying is common, lies with intent are not. Many of the lies we encounter in our daily lives are actually meant to protect us from hurtful truths, or occur as part of an earnest attempt to strengthen a relationship. Every lie has a price, of course. But not every lie has the intent to harm. Around a billion people tuned in to watch the spectacle, which featured fifteen thousand performers and the budget of a Hollywood movie. Amid a grand spectacle, she seemed to offer a human face people connected with. Yet there was nothing human about her performance. More precisely, her performance was really the electronic amalgamation of two humans. It emerged that quite some time before, had been tapped to appear in the opening ceremonies, but during dress rehearsals, a member of the Chinese Politburo decided she had to go because of imperfect teeth. The revelation of the fakery caused an uproar, in China and in the United States. People on both sides of the Pacific recoiled at the callous handling of the little girls, who, it seemed, had been accorded all the respect of stage props. Now the Chinese people feel they are fooled. The psychological hurt is enormous. In other words, the people of China, and likely people all over the world, felt duped. They’d formed an emotional bond and discovered that it was based on deceit. As people usually do in such a situation, they responded with a combination of anger and embarrassment. Yet if people the world over had been the victims of deceit, it’s worth asking, Who did the deceiving? A television advertisement for the Gillette Fusion razor brought together some of the world’s greatest athletes. Media lies frequently function this way. Why did we trust the media in the first place?