Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Maria Konnikova for The New York Times. One of her key points is that many people have “a deep need to believe in a version of the world where everything really is for the best — at least when it comes to them.” To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Alexis Beauclair
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There’s an adage you hear most any time you mention con artists: You can’t cheat an honest man. It’s a comforting defense against vulnerability, but is it actually true?
No, as it turns out; honesty has precious little to do with it. Equally blameless is greed, at least in the traditional sense. What matters instead is greed of a different sort: a deep need to believe in a version of the world where everything really is for the best — at least when it comes to us.
Robin Lloyd wasn’t looking to get rich. She was just a poor college student who thought she’d finally caught a break. It was 1982, and Ms. Lloyd was making her first trip to New York City. On Day 1 she fell for what, to a hardened New Yorker, would seem impossible: a game of three-card monte. On a Broadway sidewalk, a loud man behind a cardboard box was doing something at lightning speed with three playing cards, telling the crowd to “follow the lady.” Guess where she went correctly, and you could easily double your cash.
“I remember being like a kid at the circus, so fascinated by him showing us how easy it was to win,” Ms. Lloyd told me. She didn’t take the decision to play lightly. She had only two $20 bills in her pocket, and she remembered, “At this time in my life, I had no winter coat.”
But something about this man’s patter seemed genuine; it was almost as if he saw her woes and wanted to help. And she’d just seen a lucky winner who’d doubled his money and walked away elated. “It was so exciting, the energy there. And you want to win and want to believe so much.” The moment the cash left her hand, she regretted it, and rightly so. In a flash, she lost everything.
Three-card monte is one of the most persistent and effective cons in history. The games still pop up along city streets. But we tend to dismiss the victims as rubes. Even Ms. Lloyd felt that way, calling herself a fool. “I probably deserved it,” she says. But that’s in retrospect. In the moment, it wasn’t so simple. She was frugal and intelligent (a student in sociology, who would soon go on to get her Ph.D., she was, until recently, the news editor at Scientific American).
But Ms. Lloyd was up against forces far greater than she realized. Monte operators, like all good con men, are exceptional judges of character, but even more important they are exceptional creators of drama, of the sort of narrative sweep that makes everything seem legitimate, even inevitable. When I mentioned to Ms. Lloyd that the winner she’d seen was planted there to lure people in, she expressed surprise. She hadn’t realized that that was how the game worked. “The rational part of me knows I was conned. But there’s still a part of me that feels like I was unlucky.”
That’s the power of the good con artist: the ability to identify your deepest need and exploit it. It’s not about honesty or greed; we are all suckers for belief. In Ms. Lloyd’s case, money was indeed a factor. But it need not be.
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Here’ a direct link to the complete article.
Maria Konnikova is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It … Every Time, published by Viking (January 2016), from which this essay is adapted. Her previous book, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, was also published by Viking (2013).