Prepare to dive into the world of human deception, where our deepest psychological vulnerabilities become a playground for the most cunning manipulators. At the heart of every con lies a profound truth: we don't just want to be fooled—we desperately need to believe!!Take Ferdinand Waldo Demara, aka the Great Impostor. This extraordinary con artist didn't just trick people; he became them. A prison warden, a monk, a professor, a Navy surgeon without medical training who performed life-saving surgeries? Yes to...
How Con Artists Read You Like A Book
A dance instructor walks into a psychic's parlor. It sounds like the start of a funny story, but for Debra Saalfield, it was the beginning of a $27,000 nightmare. Fresh from a breakup and job loss, she found herself drawn to the storefront of Zena the Clairvoyant. Inside waited Sylvia Mitchell, a self-proclaimed mystic who would prove to be more perceptive than any genuine fortune teller.Mitchell didn't need supernatural powers to read Saalfield. She simply excelled at what we all...
Emotions Make Us Trust Others & Fall for Their Lies
Picture Joan, successful and savvy, falling head over heels for Greg - a man who seemed to have stepped out of a romance novel. He was brilliant, funny, supportive through her grandmother's illness, and amazingly skilled at everything. Too perfect? Joan was too smitten to notice. All the warning signs were there. No mail ever arrived for Greg. His student ID looked suspicious. He had no old friends, no past to verify. But Joan was in love, and as psychologist...
The Trick of Persuasion
Persuasion isn't just an art - it's a science with clear patterns and principles. As social psychologists Eric Knowles and Jay Linn discovered in 2003, all persuasive strategies fall into two categories: 'alpha' tactics that boost appeal, and 'omega' tactics that reduce resistance. Robert Cialdini, a leading authority on influence, expanded this understanding and identified six core principles that make people say "yes": reciprocity, consistency, social validation, friendship, scarcity, and authority. But perhaps the most fascinating insights came from Stanford...
The Art of the Small Ask
You'd think con artists would go straight for your wallet. But the truly clever ones? They start by asking for pocket change. In 1984, psychologist Joel Brockner discovered why this works so brilliantly - people trust someone who seems modest in their requests. After all, what kind of swindler would be satisfied with just a penny?Take Glafira Rosales, who pulled off one of the twentieth century's biggest art frauds. Her secret weapon wasn't masterful forgeries - it was appearing completely...
Your Superior Self-Image Enables Deception
Tenured professors don't often get fired. Yet in April 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made exactly that decision regarding Paul Frampton, the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy. With 271 published papers and over 7,000 citations to his name, Frampton's academic credentials were impeccable. But credentials couldn't save him from what psychologists recognize as one of humanity's most fundamental vulnerabilities: our unwavering belief in our own exceptionalism.The story that led to Frampton's...
How Con Artists Use Psychology to Keep Us Hooked
Ever wonder why victims don't walk away when a con starts going south? The story of James Franklin "Frank" Norfleet, a sharp-shooting Texas rancher, shows us exactly how con artists turn losses into bigger wins. In 1919, Norfleet met J.B. Stetson, a supposed stock market wizard who had "lost" - a wallet Norfleet later happened to find - noticing the huge wealth in it and Masonic membership card. This built respect and trust toward Stetson. The con artists orchestrated a...
The Art of Getting Away With It
Con artists don't just rely on their ability to deceive - they count on their victims' unwillingness to admit they've been fooled. Take Oscar Hartzell's brilliant twist on the Drake inheritance scam in 1915. After being conned out of his family's savings by two swindlers promising returns from Sir Francis Drake's nonexistent fortune, Hartzell didn't get mad - he got creative. He realized the scam's true genius lay not in the fake inheritance story, but in how it trapped victims...
Summary
The paradox of The Confidence Game lies in this bitter truth: the very qualities that make us most human - our capacity for trust, our yearning for transformation, our willingness to believe in something larger than ourselves - are what render us most vulnerable. We’ve learnt how con artist’s exploit these - hope you’ll now have techniques and mental presence to avoid them! But remember these same qualities are also what make life worth living. Perhaps then, the con artist's...
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About the Author
Maria Konnikova is a New York Times best-selling author, journalist, and professional poker player.
Maria Konnikova is the author, most recently, of The Biggest Bluff, a New York Times bestseller, one of the Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2020, and a finalist for the Telegraph Best Sports Writing Awards for 2021. She is the co-host, along with Nate Silver, of Risky Business, a weekly podcast from Pushkin and iHeartRadio, and the author of The Leap, a new weekly Substack. Her previous books are the bestsellers The Confidence Game, winner of the 2016 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, an Anthony and Agatha Award finalist. Maria is a regularly contributing writer for The New Yorker whose writing has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. While researching The Biggest Bluff, Maria became an international poker champion and the winner of over $500,000 in tournament earnings—and inadvertently turned into a professional poker player.
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