In his book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Jerome Bruner, a central figure in the cognitive revolution in psychology during the second part of the twentieth century, proposes that we can frame experience in two ways: propositional and narrative. Propositional is the part of thought that hinges on logic and formality. Narrative, on the other hand, is more like a story. It’s concrete. It’s imagistic. It’s personally convincing. It’s emotional. And it’s strong.
In fact, Bruner argues, it’s responsible for far more than its logical, systematic counterpart. It’s the basis of myth and history, ritual and social relations. “Popper proposed that falsifiability is the cornerstone of the scientific method,” Bruner told the American Psychological Association at their annual meeting in Toronto in the summer of 1984. “But believability is the hallmark of the well-formed narrative.” Even science constructs narratives all the time. There is no scientific method without the narrative thread that holds the whole enterprise together.
For stories make things more plausible, more convincing, more, well, fundable. A proposal with a compelling narrative arc, rightly or wrongly, stands out from one that takes the essence of the project in numbers. As the economist Robert Heilbroner once confided to Bruner, “When an economic theory fails to work easily, we begin telling stories about the Japanese imports or the slowness of the Zurich ‘snake.’” When a fact is plausible, we still need to test it. When a story is plausible, we often assume it’s true.
Gary Lyon never tired of telling strangers of his daughter’s illness; she had leukemia, and was in the hospital for treatments. Fate really must have had it in for him: he had run out of gas on his way to see her. Could they spare some cash—just ten or twenty pounds—to get him there? He would repay them, of course. And their kindness would be well rewarded. Sometimes, it would be his son in the hospital awaiting surgery when he’d run out of gas. The outlines changed depending on the day, but the story was always a deeply compelling one. Hardly anyone ever questioned him. The detail was too vivid—and you had to be heartless to leave a man desperate to see his hospitalized child stranded without a car. In February 2015, Lyon was convicted of multiple counts of theft and fraud: the money for the gas was being used to finance a fifty-pound-a-day drug habit (crack cocaine). But that wasn’t what most disgusted the judge. Instead, it was that his daughter really had been sick with leukemia in the past. She had since recovered, but Lyon had continued to use her as a prop.
No one questions a cancer victim, just like no one questions an escapee from human trafficking. I could refuse money to a man whose car broke down—I can question that fact, ask to see the stalled vehicle, offer a ride to a gas station—but I can’t refuse to be generous to a man who is trying to make it to a sick child. Facts are up for debate. Stories are far trickier. Emotions on high, empathy engaged, we become primed for the play. The best confidence artist makes us feel not like we’re being taken for a ride but like we are genuinely wonderful human beings.
Sonya Dal Cin is a psychologist at the University of Michigan, where for the last seven years she has been working to determine how stories—the stories we hear, the stories we absorb, the stories we tell ourselves—can affect how we think and how we behave, often without our conscious awareness. What the story says, what it means, how it’s told, and who has told it: all these factors, Dal Cin has found, can conspire to have a meaningful and lasting effect on our own thoughts, actions, and opinions. They can even overcome significant resistance in our beliefs or attitudes: so strong is narrative that it has been shown to be one of the few successful ways of getting someone to change her mind about important issues. In fact, Michael Slater says, gripping narratives may often supersede any logic or more direct tactic: in some cases, it can be the only strategy for getting someone to agree with you or behave in a certain way, where any direct appeals would be met with resistance. The con artist, after all, often gets what he wants without ever having to ask. You yourself kindly offer it up. The more absorbing the story, the stronger the effect. And that’s what the play is all about—finding the best approach to get the strongest effect. As they say, you only have one chance for a first impression.
The Marc Antony gambit, taken from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, is a particular favorite of con men. “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” Marc Antony says in his first speech to the Roman people. His listeners hated Caesar; that note sets them on the same page and ensures their attention—and their loyalty, since they are primed to think they will agree with what follows, given their wholehearted endorsement of the opening line. Of course, Antony then goes on to praise Caesar. And he gets away with it. No one quite realizes what’s going on.
“I’m not trying to sell you anything!” “You can take it or leave it!” “I’m not looking for charity!” So many prefaces to a story can catch you off guard Marc Antony–style. No self-respecting con artist goes straight for the kill. It’s a relationship built on trust, and a story that evolves over time. In June 2014, a persistent journalist, Jen Banbury, published an exposé of a legitimate-seeming businessman who had lured a substantial number of investors from the Amish community into a land scheme in Florida that seemed more suspect by the minute. Tim Moffitt had spent five years building trust within the Lancaster County enclave, operating a produce business, hiring some Amish, getting to know others. Now he wanted to start the next big thing: a wonderful opportunity to get in on an RV park in Bushnell, Florida, that would be sure to yield a 9 percent return on investment. It was the perfect Marc Antony gambit: start by saying you aren’t selling anything at all, building the trust of the audience, and only then change course for the true kill. Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in—and not a one has come back.
In other words, even if you don’t really trust the story of the con artist (or Roman conqueror) in theory, in practice a good story can change your actions. You might be skittish of or on guard against scam artists—especially if you’re a police officer. But how can you turn down a lost child who has clearly gone through major trauma? She isn’t asking for anything, is she? Merely the barest of human kindness.
Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University and director of its Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, looks at the power of the story in our daily interactions, be it with friends, strangers, or even objects (books, television, and the like). What he has found repeatedly is that nothing compels us to receptivity, emotional and behavioral, quite like the neat, relatable narrative flow.
In one study, Zak and his colleagues had people watch a father talk about his child. “Ben’s dying,” the father tells the camera as it pans to a carefree two-year-old boy in the background. He goes on to say that Ben has a brain tumor that, in a matter of months, will end his life. He has resolved, however, to stay strong for the sake of his family, as painful as the coming weeks will be. The camera fades to black.
Watching the film made about half the people donate money to a cancer charity. Why? And what was going on with those who didn’t?
Zak didn’t just ask people to watch “Ben’s Story,” as he calls it. Instead, he had them watch it together—all the while monitoring their neural activity, specifically the levels of certain hormones released from the brain into the blood. For the most part, the people who watched the video released oxytocin, a hormone that has been associated with empathy, bonding, and sensitivity to social cues. Those who released the hormone also reliably donated to charity, even though there was no pressure to do so.
Then Zak switched the story around. Now Ben and his dad were at the zoo. Ben was bald. His dad called him “Miracle Boy.” But there was no real story arc, or immediate mention of cancer, or tension about any life outcomes. The people who watched Ben now drifted away from the story. Their arousal signs fell. They donated little or no money.
Those who’d seen the original story and donated more money were also happier and more empathetic after the fact. In a further study testing the effects of different ads on do
nations, Zak and his colleagues sprayed oxytocin into the nose of some subjects. Their donations increased substantially: they gave to 57 percent more causes, and when they gave, their donations were more than 50 percent greater.
Zak’s work explains how someone like Neil Stokes was able to raise a substantial sum to pay off a heroin debt by pretending instead to be soliciting donations for the family of his nephew, Ashley Talbot. He’d gone door-to-door, recounting the (true) tale of how the teen had been run over by a school minibus, and asking each time for a small amount to either offset funeral costs or help with the family’s Christmas celebration. He would take out his phone and show a picture of the smiling Ashley. People gave willingly—and would have given even more had Stokes’s mother not accidentally reported him to police. She’d heard a man was raising money for the family, and to her it sounded dodgy. Stokes was promptly apprehended.
Keith Quesenberry, a marketing professor at Johns Hopkins University, found much the same thing in his two-year systematic study of the most scientific of topics: Super Bowl ads. He wasn’t coming in cold. For seventeen years, before turning to teaching and research, Quesenberry had worked in the advertising industry as a copywriter and creative director—he’d been the one creating the content from the ground up. Now, however, he took a more systematic approach. He looked at each ad, analyzed the content, and tried to determine what, if anything, predicted how successful it would be. In total, he looked at over one hundred spots.
One thing, he found, was central in a commercial’s success: whether or not it had a dramatic plotline. “People think it’s all about sex or humor or animals,” he told the Johns Hopkins Magazine. “But what we’ve found is that the underbelly of a great commercial is whether it tells a story or not.” The more complete the story, the better. When the interviewer asked him to predict, based on his findings, which ad in the 2013 Super Bowl would take the prize, he offered up the Budweiser spot about the friendship of a puppy with a horse. “Budweiser loves to tell stories,” he said. “Whole movies, really, crunched into thirty seconds. And people love them.” He was right. The ad was the highest scorer on both USA Today’s Ad Meter and Hulu’s Ad Zone.
Think about how similar “Ben’s Story”—and even Budweiser’s winning spot—is to so many successful cons. The grandparent scam: your grandchild has been in a horrible accident and you need to send him money right away. And no, he can’t talk to you. He’s in surgery. The sweetheart scam: the lovebirds of social media who want nothing more than to be with you, but have sudden unforeseeable difficulties and need money, and quickly. Not to mention the impostors who pull at the heartstrings—not just Azzopardi, but Demara playing the “little lost lamb” each time he joined a new monastery, pretending to be a new religious convert who just wanted some solace. That’s one con Demara pulled not once, but over and over again. He would come to a religious order pretending to be a sophisticated secular figure who’d found himself emotionally adrift and was looking for meaning. He’d be taken in. And he would, in turn, do the taking in. Or recall the many Countesses Anastasia who litter history, playing on the global love of and fascination with the young Russian princess whose body was never discovered when the rest of the Romanov family perished. The good story that raises your emotion: it’s what the successful play is all about.
In the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, one episode centers on Charlie’s mom succumbing to cancer. Except she doesn’t really. She just manipulates everyone to think she has. It’s a far more common ploy than we’d like to believe—and one that seems every bit as real as its sincere equivalent. A recent real-life Charlie’s mom was a patient who had been doing her one better: Alan Knight, a forty-seven-year-old in South Wales, faked being a quadriplegic in a coma for almost three years. He not only got benefits for his paralysis but avoided going to court to pay his neighbor back for a £40,000 prior scam.
All of these cons work because they appeal to your emotions by drawing you into a story that can’t help but move you. From that point on, you are governed by something other than reason. Emotion is the key to empathy. Arouse us emotionally and we will identify with you and your plight all the more. Keep us cold, and your goal is far away.
“Our results,” Zak told psychologist Jeremy Dean, “show why puppies and babies are in toilet paper commercials. This research suggests that advertisers use images that cause our brains to release oxytocin to build trust in a product or brand, and hence increase sales.” Increased oxytocin makes us more generous—with our money, our time, our trust, ourselves. The better the story, the more successful the play, and the more we give. And the better the con man, the better the story.
A successful story does two things well. It relies on the narrative itself rather than any overt arguments or logical appeals to make the case on its own, and it makes us identify with its characters. We’re not expecting to be persuaded or asked to do something. We’re expecting to experience something inherently pleasant, that is, an interesting tale. And even if we’re not relating to the story as such, the mere process of absorbing it can create a bond between us and the teller—a bond the teller can then exploit.
It’s always harder to argue with a story, be it sad or joyful. I can dismiss your hard logic, but not how you feel. Give me a list of reasons, and I can argue with it. Give me a good story, and I can no longer quite put my finger on what, if anything, should raise my alarm bells. After all, nothing alarming is ever said explicitly, only implied.
When psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock decided to test the persuasive power of narrative, they found that the more a story transported us into its world, the more we were likely to believe it. All of it—even if some details didn’t quite mesh. The personal narrative yardstick is much more permissive than any other form of appeal. And if it’s especially emotionally jarring—How amazing/awful! I can’t believe that happened to her!—that somehow seems to ratchet the perceived truthfulness up a notch. The more extreme the play, in other words, the more successful it could ultimately be.
Mamoru Samuragochi was a musical phenomenon. Not only was he one of Japan’s most prolific and popular composers—his music graced concert halls and video game scores alike, and his composition “Hiroshima,” inspired by his parents’ survival of the bombing, had sold an astounding 180,000 copies—but he had a remarkable, and remarkably emotional, story that made his accomplishments all the more impressive. He was deaf. When he turned thirty-five, a degenerative disease caused the loss of his hearing—and despite it all, he’d gone on to compose beautiful pieces of art. The “modern Beethoven,” the media dubbed him in the 1990s, when he first emerged as a composer to be reckoned with. The resemblance was more than passing. He, too, had long, flowing hair and a penchant for stylish suits. A pair of sunglasses was never far from his face. In 2001, Samuragochi told Time that his deafness was “a gift from God.”
He remembered well the moment he’d lost his hearing: he had had a dream, he wrote in his autobiography, Symphony No. 1, in which he was pulled slowly underwater, losing the ability to hear as the water hit his ears. When he woke up, he went immediately to the keyboard. He couldn’t hear a thing. He was distraught. Composing was his life. It was then that he decided to try a small experiment: could he hear Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata—the symbolism wasn’t lost on him—in his head and re-create the notes from memory? He could. His resulting score perfectly matched the original.
It was only after he’d lost his hearing that Samuragochi’s career took off in earnest. In 2001, the year of his deafness, he wrote his first symphony. Hiroshima, his birthplace, chose his composition to commemorate the bombing in a ceremony in 2008. In 2011, he became the only living composer to be included in a list of favorite classical CDs in Recording Arts magazine.
On February 5, 2014, Samuragochi made a stunning confession. Since 1996, he had employed a ghostwriter. Takashi Niigaki was a forty-three-year-old lecturer at a Tokyo music college, and for almost twenty years, he had w
ritten over twenty songs on Samuragochi’s behalf. He’d been paid approximately $70,000 for his efforts. He’d wanted to stop, he told the press, but Samuragochi wouldn’t have it: he threatened to commit suicide if the deception were to come to light. For Niigaki, the breaking point was an unprecedented piece of publicity: one of his ghostwritten compositions would be used in the Olympics by a Japanese skater. “I could not bear the thought of skater Takahashi being seen by the world as coconspirator in our crime.”
But there was more, Niigaki said. The songs weren’t simply ghostwritten. Samuragochi wasn’t even deaf. The illness had been largely faked for the benefit of the story. Alone, the music might have been good, but not remarkable. Together, the story became irresistibly incredible—so much so that a number of red flags in the lead-up to the February confession were ignored. In one interview, a reporter noticed that Samuragochi was responding to some questions before the sign interpreter was done making his interpretations; another time, he’d reacted to a doorbell ringing. Samuragochi was a con artist of the highest caliber, the media concurred. But part of the blame, wrote Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s most widely read newspapers, was with the press. “The media must also consider our own tendency to fall for tearjerking stories.” The story had made the composer.
Samuragochi’s tale seems crazy. But when we become swept up in powerful narrative, our reason often falls by the wayside. That’s the whole point of the play: get us off balance by hitting us hard with a rousing yarn. In one study, readers were given a short story to read, to see how engrossed they would become in different types of narratives. One of the stories, “Murder at the Mall,” based on a true account of a Connecticut murder from Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, followed a little girl, Katie, as she was brutally murdered in the middle of a mall under the shocked gaze of her family and shoppers. Her assailant, as it later turned out, was a psychiatric patient who had been let out on a day pass.
The Confidence Game Page 12