The Confidence Game

by Maria Konnikova

  The experimental literature could have predicted that outcome. One study of marketers found that the ethical structure of the organization where they worked affected whether or not those high in certain con-like skills (specifically, Machiavellianism) would act on their propensities. Those who worked in more highly ethical organizations, with greater structure and less flexibility for making decisions according to one’s own whims, were significantly less likely to act in con-like ways than those who worked in more loosely structured organizations with less of a clear-cut ethical direction.

  The behavioral norms of a company, culture, or setting—how it is and isn’t acceptable to act—must be communicated clearly and unequivocally. When they aren’t, it becomes too easy for those on the cusp of fraud to take the next step. “It’s a cliché to say this,” says Preet Bharara, a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has gained a reputation for aggressive pursuit of fraud. “But it’s true. The tone at the top really does matter.” While at the extremes, people create the opportunity themselves—they will con their way through life no matter where you place them—for a significant percentage of the conning population, the surroundings matter. The same trader who commits fraud at a fund that looks the other way might be a straight shooter elsewhere.

  We care how we’re perceived, and if we think that most people will frown upon our actions, we become less likely to contravene the norm. It’s not so much “monkey see, monkey do” as “monkey think someone might see, so acts accordingly.”

  The pattern isn’t altogether uncommon. USIS, the contractor that used to supply two thirds of the security clearances for much of the intelligence community, appears to have spiraled from a few faulty checks to thousands. At first, it seemed like one rogue employee had submitted sixteen hundred falsified credit reports; one bad apple does not a rotten tree make. But by January 2014, it had become clear that it wasn’t a bad apple. According to the Department of Justice’s suit, that was but the tip of a much larger scandal: the company had faked well over half a million background checks between 2008 and 2012—or 40 percent of total background checks. (The extent makes the Royal Canadian Navy’s hire of Demara pale in comparison.) It wasn’t one bad apple. It was a tree that allowed such apples to flourish.

  The grifter’s rationale for what he does, in a way, is the culmination of predisposition and opportunity: if you have the predisposing traits, and you sense a good opportunity, you will find a way to rationalize it. About half of those who commit fraud also cite intolerable competitive conditions, be they market or corporate; they want to somehow level the playing field and convince themselves that a bit of deception is one of the only avenues open to them.

  Time and time again, Demara explained away his deceptions as good intentions gone astray. He wasn’t a grifter; he was someone caught up in bad circumstances, but who would always try to make good. He didn’t con hapless members of various religious orders by pretending to be a high-achieving academic in search of life’s meaning; he wanted to spread teachings of the faith. Donning the identity of Ben W. Jones to be a prison warden in Texas? It was because the prisoners needed someone like him. And the stint in the Canadian navy as surgeon? They needed professionals. He was only trying to save some lives. So good was he at rationalizing away his escapades that Crichton ended up depicting him as more victim than perpetrator, someone to whom the grift just happened because of a bad twist of fate.

  It’s not just opportunity that breeds rationalization and actions. Globally, some cultures may also be more accepting of the types of behaviors and rationales that we would consider con-like. In one study, foreign students were more likely to pay a kickback than American ones, no matter the incentives. They had simply grown up in societies with different norms and different resulting standards of behaviors. What to Americans seems ethically dubious may seem to others a fact of how the world works. In Russia, a plagiarist wouldn’t get a second look—and even a data falsifier might get a free pass, as long as the data was falsified in the appropriate direction.

  For some people, the rationalization might seem almost benign. Just over 20 percent of fraudsters say they simply want to hide bad news: their performance isn’t what it ought to be, they feel ashamed, and they truly believe that, with just a little wiggle room, they can get back on their feet and no one ever needs to know. Of course, that doesn’t usually happen.

  At the beginning of his career in private practice, one local lawyer represented the CFO of a small computer start-up. It was the late nineties. The economy was seeing a bit of a downturn. And the CFO decided to “cook the books” one quarter. “He was a very decent guy, a little bit of an ingénue,” he recalls. “He was the guy that went to his kids’ basketball games, and when he started being investigated, he was the guy that would sit in the conference room—I felt bad for him—looking like he was going to cry. He was very upset.” The CFO had reasoned that he’d only cheat that one time. And then the next quarter would be better, and he would go back and fix his misstatement. “And then it didn’t get better. And then the third quarter didn’t get better. And now you’re in, in a major way.” One bad statement led to the next. It wasn’t inevitable. But it happened just as inevitably.

  Is he a con artist? Most people would likely say not. He is just someone who made a bad choice, whose luck ran out, who made an ethical misstep, true, but without some greater malice. Many might, like his lawyer, even sympathize. Bad break. But he’s a fundamentally decent guy. He just wanted to make it work.

  And yet, the exact same case shows the opposite side of the story: that no con is ever as innocent as it might appear. The company had gone over everything in minute detail to try to determine the extent of the CFO’s malfeasance. “It showed that he had used the company credit card for his own personal use to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars starting some point after he first started cooking the books,” the CFO’s lawyer says. “My opinion of him changed a little bit. Here’s a guy that’s trying to do a better job, and doesn’t want to lose his job, and then, well, once he made that first mistake, then it was just easier to make the next mistakes.”

  Thus is a grifter born. There’s no such thing as an innocent cutting of the ethical corner. Once you’ve decided to get on the sled, and have eased yourself over the edge of the hill, it’s too late to break. It starts with a small thing. A credit in a candy store. A fudged line in a financial statement. A rogue quote massaged ever so slightly to make your case more compelling. And lo and behold, nobody notices. And even though you thought it was just the once, because the circumstances were so extreme and you were in such a tight corner, those circumstances somehow never get any better. You’re always pressed for time, for money, for energy, for mental space. Always needing to do just a bit too much with a bit too little. And once you do it once, and successfully at that, the temptation to do it again, do it more, do it differently, grows. Rather than a cut corner, it becomes another tool in your arsenal. It’s like in the Mafia movies: the only one that matters is the first one you kill. After that, piece of cake.

  Who, then, is the con artist? He displays a dark triad–influenced bent, and he acts when the opportunity arises, for unlike other, less sinister-minded counterparts, he can rationalize away just about any behavior as necessary. And yet, despite this seeming underlying commonality, con artists can still surprise us and resist easy classification. Some conform to expectations, others do not, and there may be significant divergence from the profile that emerges from one study to the next. One review of just under six hundred cases of company fraud in seventy-eight countries between 2011 and 2013 managed to capture some of the personality characteristics of the perpetrators—and not all of them, it turns out, fit the dark triad mold. Some did, it’s true—one fifth admitted to having committed fraud, they said, “Just because I can,” a pure dark triad response if ever there were one. Over 40 percent were motivated by greed—but even more, just under half, by a sense of superiority, the hallm
ark of narcissism. They were simply better, they felt, and so they deserved more. Many reported being motivated by a sense of anger, of being underpaid and undervalued. Who are you not to appreciate me? I’ll show you.

  But others seemed both less sinister and less cold-mindedly rational in pursuit of profit. A third were seen as extroverted, and 35 percent as quite friendly. About 40 percent were also highly respected by their colleagues—though only one in five had impressed anyone as a great intellectual or substantive businessman.

  And then there are those who are downright compassionate. In March 2015, Sarah Carr received a phone call from the IRS informing her she was liable for payments on one of her businesses. She broke down crying. She was nine months’ pregnant, she explained, and didn’t know how she could get the money. “Calm down,” the voice said, now seeming agitated himself. It was all a scam, he bluntly explained. In fact, as we know, this is one of the most common scams come springtime: the fake IRS agent. People are scared, they panic, and they hand over the cash. This time, however, the mark’s sob story was enough to make the grifter veer from the script. Since she was pregnant, she was off the hook. She’d chanced upon a con artist with a conscience.

  * * *

  The truth is, the grifter may be more difficult to capture accurately because, to some extent, we all have the capacity for deception: if you’re a sentient being, you’ve almost certainly deceived at some point in your life. From reptiles to humans, the animal kingdom is full of liars. Some snakes can even fake their own death for their own sinister purposes. Or take the cuckoo finch—a venerable brood parasite that tries to pawn off its own eggs on hapless mothers about to do the heavy labor of incubating. One egg would be a simple swindle, someone trying to pull one over on you. But the cuckoo finch is a true con artist, leaving multiple eggs in a nest. That way, the mother can’t tell the parasites from her own.

  In 2009, a group of scientists at the University of Turin, led by Francesca Barbero, found that a certain interloper caterpillar reliably received more food, better care, and more thorough protection than the ants whose home it invaded. The caterpillars simply pretended to be queen ants: they had learned the distinction between worker and queen sounds, and now their pupae and larvae had evolved to make queen-like noises. Even when the ant colonies were low on food, the impostors would receive preferential treatment. After all, they were potential queens. Since then, the researchers have learned that at least twelve other species of butterfly employ the same technique. Mimic a queen, and let yourself be carried into the ants’ nest without raising so much as a foot or a wing in labor.

  Impostors permeate the animal kingdom. The stick insects that look like twigs you wouldn’t think twice about; the leaf insects that take on the contours of a flowering plant: phasmids, or what the Greeks called “apparitions.” Now you see them, now you don’t. Disappearing acts are as old as nature.

  And in the human world, deception is no less common. According to psychologist Robert Feldman, who has spent more than four decades studying the phenomenon, we lie, on average, three times during a routine ten-minute conversation with a stranger or casual acquaintance. Hardly anyone refrains from lying altogether, and some people report lying up to twelve times within that time span. I might open a conversation, for instance, by saying how nice it is to meet someone—when I’m really not at all happy about it. I might go on to say that I grew up in Boston—a lie, technically, since I really grew up in a small town about forty minutes outside the city. I could say that the person’s work sounds fascinating, when it’s no such thing, or compliment him on his (drab) tie or his (awful) shirt. And if the person mentions loving a certain downtown restaurant where I’ve had a terrible experience? I’m likely to just smile and nod and say, Yep, great place. Trust me: we often lie without giving it so much as a second thought. Or in the words of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who studies emotional expression broadly and lying in particular, “Lies are everywhere.”

  We lie in most any context—Feldman’s work has turned up frequent lies in relationships ranging from the most intimate (marriage) to the completely casual. Some lies are small (“You look like you’ve lost a bit of weight”) and some bigger (“I did not have sex with that woman”). Sometimes they are harmless, and sometimes they are not.

  And we lie from a very young age. In a series of studies with three-year-olds, developmental psychologists asked each child to stay in a room with a new toy, by herself, without turning around to peek at what that toy might be. Hardly any child could resist the temptation to look (four out of thirty-three, to be precise), and over half proceeded to lie about having done so. In a follow-up with slightly older children, the five-year-olds fared even worse: all of them looked, and all of them lied.

  As we reach adulthood, many of the same habits remain, and at times they take on a more pernicious guise than “You look great in that dress!” According to the Insurance Research Council, a quarter of adults feel that it’s fine to increase an insurance claim when they felt they were making up for the deductible. It may seem fine, but it’s actually fraud—soft fraud. And what about a slight fudge here or there on a tax return? You might say you’re sticking it to the man, and you’re certain others do far worse—just look at those corporate tax loopholes!—but each time you knowingly misreport so much as a dollar, you’ve committed fraud.

  Even some legitimate professions find it difficult to escape the image of playing a bit loose with the truth. Each November, Santon Bridge, a small rural town in Cumbria, England, holds a contest: the world’s biggest liar. From all over the UK and beyond, people gather in a tavern in the center of town to try their hand at the tallest, yet still somehow believable, tall tale they can muster within a five-minute time span. The most convincing of the lot gets the crown for the year. But there’s an exception to the generally democratic enterprise: lawyers, politicians, salespeople, real estate agents, and journalists are not allowed to participate. Presumably, they would be at an unfair advantage. They are simply too well versed in the art of stretching the truth to offer a level playing field to the laypeople.

  Would you be a grifter—even a mild one—if given the chance? Try this short test. Take your index finger, raise it to your forehead, and draw the letter Q.

  Done? Which way is your Q facing—tail to the right, or tail to the left? The test, described in detail by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist and famed skeptic, is a way to gauge your “self-monitoring” tendency. If you drew the letter with the tail to the left, so that others could read it, you are a high self-monitor. That means you are more concerned with appearance and perception—how others see you. To achieve the desired effect, you are likely more willing to manipulate reality—even just a bit—to make a better impression. Con artists, in some sense, merely take our regular white lies to the next level. Plagiarists. Fabulists. Confabulists. Impostors. They take that desire to shine, to be the best version of something, and they fly with it.

  * * *

  So could you spot the grifter in a sea of faces, pick him up out of your daily interactions? Are there signs that will give the confidence artist away by virtue of who he is and what he’s up to—namely, taking advantage of you? Given that we all have the capacity to deceive, and have all done so at some point in our lives, you’d think we’d be experts in spotting lies in others, at picking the grifter out from the crowd. Just as when we’re little we’re certain our mothers know whenever we’re stretching the truth—I was sure mine could read my mind and so tried to hide behind pieces of furniture or books, so that her mentalist rays couldn’t penetrate inside—so, too, do we grow up believing that we’re fairly decent when it comes to spotting someone else’s deceptions.

  Over the years, a folklore has developed around the facial and physical cues that can give someone away—a folklore that has, in recent years, been put to the empirical test. In 2006, Charles Bond, a psychologist at Texas Christian University who has studied lying since the 1980s, assembled a team of researchers spann
ing seventy-five countries and forty-three languages. His goal: to determine whether there are any universal theories of lying—signs that, to most people, signal deception no matter the culture. In one study, conducted in fifty-eight countries, over twenty-three hundred people were asked to respond to a single question: “How can you tell when people are lying?” One sign stood out: in two thirds of responses, people listed gaze aversion. A liar doesn’t look you in the eye. Twenty-eight percent reported that liars seemed nervous, a quarter reported incoherency, and another quarter that liars exhibited certain telltale motions. Just over a fifth thought facial expressions and narrative inconsistencies betrayed lying. And just under a fifth thought that liars used filler words like “uh” and made frequent pauses, and that their skin would flush to signal their betrayal.

  A second study flipped the process around. This time, people saw a list of possible behaviors. Which of these, they were asked, did they associate with lying? Now nearly three quarters of the responses signaled gaze aversion, two thirds noted a shift in posture, another two thirds that liars scratch and touch themselves more, and 62 percent said that they tell longer stories. The answers spanned sixty-three countries.