The Confidence Game

by Maria Konnikova

  Derren Brown, one of Britain’s most famous magicians, had a field day with the same approach on a 2007 visit to New York. Except in his case it was to make the point that, with the right cognitive load, people won’t notice if you’re paying with paper. Stop one: a fishmonger’s. The goal: three filets of sole. “It’s a fantastic place. Are you a local? How long have you lived in this area?” Brown warbles off as he selects his fish. Twenty years, the shopkeeper responds. “So how much was that—$18.55?” Brown repeats, before launching into a riff on the subways. “I was a bit intimidated by the subway system. I didn’t want to go on it and then someone said, ‘It’s okay—take it, it’s fine.’” Money exchanges hands. “Where’d you live before this? Staten Island? That’s just over the water, isn’t it? Well, thank you.” Out he walks, fish in hand, leaving behind a stack of blank pieces of paper. The same gambit works like a charm in a jewelry store. One platinum ring for $4,500: out the door with blank notes in its wake. The only one who doesn’t fall for Brown’s wiles: a hot dog street cart vendor. He calls him out the moment that blank bill hits his hand. “Asshole,” comes his parting comment as a sheepish Brown walks away.

  Something else happens, too, when our minds feel bombarded from all sides. In situations where we’re overtaxed, psychologist Katherine Milkman has found, we are more likely to make decisions that fit with what we want to do rather than what we should do. The two are often in conflict, and even without outside help, it can be difficult to choose the path of the “should.” “Shoulds” like saving money. Exercising. Always reading the fine print. Controlling our temper. In the moment, the rational “should” recedes and the emotional “want” tends to dominate. “Want” to spend, not save; to eat, not deprive myself; to just get this thing, not worry about how it will turn out; to just let my anger out, not rein it in.

  When psychologist Baba Shiv asked people to keep in mind a seven-digit number—a common way to mimic mental overload—and at the same time choose between eating a chocolate cake and a fruit salad, two thirds chose the cake. Less than half—41 percent—did so when recalling a two-digit number. The difference was especially marked for people who were impulsive to begin with. The con artist knows how to create the equivalent of seven digits from two, in effect making us less likely to choose the “right” thing and more likely to “indulge”—in this case, in the con. The rope is all about the presentation.

  That approach, in fact, is precisely what Anthony Pratkanis, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, found when he looked at actual cons as they unfolded. Beginning in 1998, Pratkanis took charge of a team of researchers and experts devoted to understanding and fighting fraud—the Consumer Fraud Research Group. In 2004, he and his colleagues received some of the first direct evidence of the con process, told not from hearsay or memory but as it was happening: over six hundred tapes that had been collected undercover by twelve law enforcement agencies. They covered seven types of con: investment schemes, like the Ponzi; coin scams, where real money is exchanged for coins that aren’t quite as they seem; recovery room scams, so called because they target existing victims with the promise of “recovering” their lost funds, for a fee, of course; credit card or identity theft; sweepstakes scams, based on false promises of assured winnings; lottery scams; and travel scams, where a great deal on an exotic vacation never materializes. Here was the con artist mid-sell, while his every word was taken down.

  When Pratkanis analyzed the tapes, he found, as expected, that the first part of each con was taken up by the put-up: the first hallmark of the successful scammer, he found, was the extent to which the perpetrator customized his scripts to would-be marks. A con artist would begin a call with a gambit to establish a victim’s psychological profile—the types of needs, wants, and pressure points detailed in the put-up. A lonely widow, say, would receive a very different approach from a devout housewife. Then came the play, perfectly tailored to establish the trust of the intended mark. One con artist professed to spend fifteen minutes of every call with a particularly religious victim in joint prayer. She wanted God’s help in making her decisions. The grifter was only too happy to comply.

  Only then did the con men begin to persuade, or rope, the mark—and when they did, they for the most part favored the “overwhelm them” strategy, hitting the victim as quickly, with as many approaches, as possible. Every persuasive tactic was there, but not in isolation. It was a kitchen-sink-like approach, and it was remarkably effective. As one con man put it, “My pitch put the victim in a haze of ether . . . I wanted to sell them as soon and as often as I could before the ether wore off.”

  As for the tactics that were used: there were all the expected culprits, neat as you’d like. Scarcity (get it while you can!). Credibility appeals (I’m from a legitimate institution). Phantom fixation (the promise of future wealth—that is, a fixation on a future phantom). And social consensus (everyone else is doing it!). Real scammers, it turns out, operate just as we would theoretically expect them to.

  * * *

  What was Matthew Brown after in his escapades? Despite the fact that Brown had ruined him financially and destroyed his reputation, Mervyn Barrett retains a philosophical view. “He clearly feels inadequate, and you have to question whether his father’s absence from his life and his premature death have something to do with that,” he said. “He simply does not feel able to be himself. He clearly believes that no one will like or love him for himself alone. It’s tragic when you think about it.” A bit later, he added, “I think he wanted to be loved. I thought he was absolutely adorable. He was charming and fun and flirtatious, but it was all an act.” As it always is.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE TALE

  The whole secret to our success is being able to con ourselves into believing that we’re going to change the world—because statistically, we are unlikely to do it.

  —TOM PETERS, BUSINESSMAN

  In late April 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did something almost unprecedented: it fired a tenured professor. He’d wanted to retire. No, the university told him. A peaceful resignation? No. He was, Chancellor Carol Folt reiterated, fired. “You committed misconduct of such a nature as to render you unfit to serve as a member of the faculty of this University,” she wrote in her letter to the professor, informing him of the Faculty Hearing Committee’s decision. The professor in question had held the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy chair at the university. He had published 271 papers and racked up more than 7,000 citations, and had the support of nearly one hundred tenured faculty from across the country behind him. So what had happened to render such an absolute judgment?

  Paul Frampton had first met Denise Milani online, on a popular dating site, Mate1.com. He was sixty-eight, divorced, and lonely, a theoretical particle physicist whose work had devoured much of his personal life. But he wanted more: children. A rewarding home life. Love. And there she was, his perfect mate.

  Denise Milani was gorgeous. A Czech model who, at thirty-two, was forty years his junior, she had been crowned Miss Bikini World several years before. Why would someone like her fall for someone like him? In his mind, it made perfect sense. She liked older men, she told him, and photo shoots had grown draining over time. People always ogling her, seeing her as nothing more than a body; it could all be a bit much. She was ready for a change.

  For eleven weeks, Frampton and Milani corresponded. Their messages, the New York Times reported in a lengthy profile, were frequent, intimate, and passionate. Often, she told him that she loved him. They’d never met, but sometimes love just happens. You have to embrace it when it comes, whatever guise it might take. He asked to speak on the phone. She put him off. Why not just go all the way and meet in person? She was going on a photo shoot to Bolivia, she told him. He could meet her there. At long last, they would be united.

  Frampton was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire. He came from a lower-middle-class family that do
ted on his academic accomplishments, heralding them throughout the neighborhood and encouraging him to do much the same. He graduated with a double first from Oxford’s Brasenose College, received his DPhil in 1968, and from there made his way to Chicago for a postdoc with Yoichiro Nambu, a Japanese physicist who was a leader in his field. In 1985, he became a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, a post he would occupy for close to three decades.

  It wasn’t the first time Frampton had been lured to a foreign country by the prospect of new wedded bliss. After his divorce from his first wife, Anne-Marie, he’d flown to China to meet a twenty-something woman he’d met online. She had said she would marry him. But after their initial meeting, the marriage was called off; she allegedly backed out. It just wasn’t meant to be, Frampton reasoned. Denise, though—now she just might be his soul mate.

  On January 13, 2012, Frampton arrived in Bolivia. He checked into the Eva Palace Hotel and awaited word from his love. Alas, she had been called off to Brussels on another shoot. But in her haste, she’d forgotten a bag—these whirlwind engagements, they really mess with your head; one of the reasons she couldn’t wait to leave it all behind and start a new life in Raleigh. Could he bring the bag with him on his way to see her? Frampton was only too happy to oblige. That evening, in the darkened streets outside the Eva Palace, a man approached him with a nondescript black cloth suitcase. Frampton took it inside, found it empty, promptly stuffed it full of dirty laundry, and went to bed.

  The next day, he flew to Buenos Aires. From there, Denise promised, she’d send a ticket to Brussels. For the next thirty-six hours, Frampton sat in the airport, Ezeiza International, awaiting instructions for the next leg of his trip from his future wife. (He’d calculated the chance of their getting married, and found it to be a near certainty.) The promised airfare never came. Instead, a friend bought him a ticket home. Disappointed but sure that he and Denise would soon reunite in North Carolina, Frampton checked his bags for his new flight and sat down to await boarding. It was now January 23, ten days after he had arrived in Bolivia.

  His name was called over the loudspeaker. He later told the New York Times that he was expecting it to be about an upgrade to first class. Who else, if not him? Distinguished scholars deserve distinguished treatment. Instead, it was a police summons. That nondescript suitcase was descriptive enough. Inside the lining: two kilograms of cocaine. After a brief questioning, Frampton was promptly arrested and taken to prison. How could Denise have betrayed him so? Maybe the man in the street had betrayed her, too, jealously stuffing the drugs inside to keep them from their perfect happiness. At this stage, anything was possible.

  Frampton was placed in the Villa Devoto jail.

  It took some time for the severity of the situation to dawn on him. He and Denise were still practically engaged, as far as he was concerned. “Paul is a charming man, but he has the emotional maturity of a child,” his ex-wife, who had always remained a close friend, remarked. He even laughed as footage of the model appeared on the television, alongside news of his current predicament. “The other prisoners burst into cheers and shouted ‘bravo’ and treated Paul like a hero when they saw her,” Anne-Marie said. He also continued to think of himself as the true standout of the prison’s inmates. Everyone else who was there with him, he said, was guilty. He, however, was the exception. “Some people will say they’re innocent, but when I talk to them further, it becomes clear that they were somehow involved,” he said. “I think people like me are less than one percent.”

  * * *

  At this stage in the confidence game, the mark has been chosen, the play has begun, and the rope has been cast in a very specific way. We’re no longer deciding between abstract, cold courses of action that we don’t much care about. We’re emotionally involved. We’ve already had the case persuasively laid out for us, in a way that makes it seem like a version of what we ourselves would most want, in the way we most want it. And so when the tale is told—that is, we’re told how we, personally, will benefit—it’s no longer really being told to us. We are the ones who are now doing the telling. The good confidence man has been working his way up to this very moment, the moment when “Too good to be true” turns into “Actually, this makes perfect sense”: I am exceptional, and I deserve it. It’s not too good to be true; it is exactly what I had coming to me. The chances may be less than 1 percent, but then again, I’m a less than 1 percent kind of guy.

  One of our fundamental drives is the need for self-affirmation: we need to feel worthy, to feel needed, to feel like we matter. But how do we attain that reality? Throughout the first part of the twentieth century, psychologists saw the self as a realistic entity. They felt that it was somehow crucially important for us to have an accurate representation of our selves and our place in the world. In his seminal 1950 paper “Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health,” Abraham Maslow, a founder of the humanist school of psychology and famous for his eponymous hierarchy of needs, argued that the fully realized, or “self-actualized,” human being must perceive reality “efficiently” and accept herself, with all her quirks and ways, no matter how much that reality might deviate from her ideal vision of herself. Only then will she reach her fullest potential as a person.

  Eight years later, Marie Jahoda, one of the earliest pioneers of positive psychology and empirical research into the foundations of mental health—she was a founding director of NYU’s Research Center for Human Relations—defined the healthy psyche as one that could perceive the self as it is in reality, without skewing it to fit a particular image or desire. Accurate perception of reality was one of the six criteria she put forward for full mental health. And in 1967, Harold Kelley, a psychologist who was one of the originators of attribution theory, or the theory of how we ascribe causes to different events, agued that humans were like naïve scientists, striving for truth through unbiased, systematic research. Accurate perceptions, he wrote, made us function at our most effective.

  Starting in the 1970s, though, that emphasis on accuracy started to shift. As it turns out, not only are we not particularly accurate at how we see ourselves, but that accuracy would be self-defeating: brutal honesty likely wouldn’t allow us to reach our goals. The self we most want to affirm isn’t the self a stranger would describe if he were to simply observe us for an hour, or even a minute. Instead, we want to affirm our best, most deserving self: the skewed ideal, not the unvarnished original. And so we systematically represent ourselves and our reality in a way that favors our preferred version. In the things that truly matter to us, the core characteristics that we view as central to our identity, we exhibit the greatest bias of all. We all become, in a sense, Frampton’s “less than one percent.” Each one of us is exceptional in our own minds. And exceptional individuals are not chumps. Exceptional individuals are in charge. They don’t get conned. Which is precisely why the tale works as well as it does. We are ready—eager, even—to believe we will personally benefit, no matter what. Exceptional people, after all, have good things coming to them.

  When Ghislaine de Védrines, a member of the old French aristocracy and the director of a successful Paris school, first met Thierry Tilly, a man who had almost, but not quite, completed a law degree and had few professional qualifications, she could hardly have known that within a few years he would come to dominate not only her life but that of her entire family, in an intricate plot that would rival any of Dan Brown’s fictional creations. By the time Tilly and an accomplice were sentenced to prison for “despoiling” the de Védrines family and “depriving them of ten years of their lives,” in November 2012, eleven family members, spanning three generations, had handed over $6 million in assets, the three-hundred-year-old family estate, and countless personal items to the conning duo. Tilly had managed to convince them all that they were protectors of an ancient secret—and that they were being hunted by Freemasons, Jews, and multiple other “sinister” forces. And so, little by little, they entrusted their entire lives to his keeping. At th
e end of it all, they would be living in England, working at menial jobs and subsisting on little more than biscuits and water, their wealth, education, and aristocratic pedigree a thing of the distant past.

  When the story came to light, the public was shocked. How could an intelligent, educated, successful family fall, one after the other, for a story that more resembled fiction than fact? How could they, day by day and year by year, impoverish themselves for a vision with no proof, a fantastical creation that looked like it wouldn’t pass muster in even the most accommodating of circumstances? Therein lies the power of the tale: it is a story of your exceptionalism.

  Tilly was savvy. He didn’t just create a fantastical story. He created a fantastical story in which the aristocratic family became guardians of a precious part of history. He knew they were proud of their heritage—the family’s friends often said as much—and so used that heritage as an entry point into their trust. He, too, was noble, he told them, a descendant of the Habsburg line. And as such, he was privy to some inner workings of the nobility that might have passed them by. Their family name was the key to an ancient treasure—and the target of an elaborate Masonic plot. They weren’t simply an aristocratic family. They were an exceptional aristocratic family with a legacy no one else could ever dream of, and that legacy was under threat of extinction. It was their duty—no, their calling—to protect it. To prove themselves exceptional and worthy of the trust history had placed in them.

  It seems impossible to believe, but Tilly was persuasive to no end. A master brainwasher, a master manipulator with a master intuition of the way to weave the most convincing tale. “I heard someone on the radio talking about us and saying we were cultured, educated, intelligent and this should have armed us against Tilly,” Christine de Védrines told the Observer in one of her first interviews after Tilly’s sentence. “But it didn’t. We were simply not armed to deal with someone who lied on such an extraordinary scale.”