The Confidence Game

by Maria Konnikova

  The month after he’d received his new card, Brown took a Christmas holiday to the Lake District. Five-star accommodations and £500 limousines peppered his five-day trip. But the area seemed a bit too provincial for such a discerning young nobleman. And so, as January turned to February, Lord Brown of Ardbreckin began to travel first class across England and Scotland. He had excellent taste, in food, champagne, and cognac alike. His multicourse meals and profligate wine habit—with generous tips often larger than the bills they tipped on—soon became famous. The debts piled up, but still no one questioned—or questioned hard enough—the notion that the young lord was good for them. He was an aristocrat, a member of the most exclusive club there is. And with affiliation comes power. You want the powerful to like you, not to think you petty for deigning to question their integrity, and so you keep any doubts to yourself—much as the Marchioness would later do when it came time to part with her prize pig statue.

  Lord Brown’s exploits continued unabated. He would, on occasion, foray into the capital itself. Claridge’s was his hotel of choice. Propped now by a Barclaycard alongside his AmEx—one seal of seeming approval feeds into the next—he ran up multi-hundred-pound wine and spirits bills at Oddbins and hefty sums at surrounding tanning salons. He couldn’t, of course, be caught on camera with a pallor.

  Meanwhile, the bills kept coming. The payments, not so much. The situation reached a tipping point: aristocracy was no longer enough. This was a business, and any business needs to be paid. Authority only goes so far. Soon, American Express issued a “wanted” poster for the errant cardholder who’d run up charges of some £18,000. On August 15, 2003, as Brown boarded yet another train at Plymouth Station, a look of recognition passed over the ticket officer’s face. By the time the lord disembarked in London, a police escort was waiting.

  Plain old Matthew Brown soon found himself in the halls of Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court. Criminal charges didn’t deter him from his usual flamboyance, though. A pink carnation boutonniere, a neckerchief, a trilby, a cane with a silver tip: he greeted the courtroom in style. In 2004, he pled guilty to 9 charges of deception—with an additional 224 taken into consideration—and was given a three-year rehabilitation order, admitted for treatment for alcohol and cocaine abuse at a £12,000-a-month clinic in Surrey. He’d been in jail, just as he would later admit to Mervyn Barrett. Just not quite for the offense he’d let on.

  That was Brown’s first (that we know of) escapade. And all it took was some credible and choice-sounding affiliations to get off the ground. Position, even if not real, is a powerful thing. Consider how often famous families find their names co-opted for more nefarious uses. Clark Rockefeller successfully convinced dozens of people that he was legitimately part of the Rockefeller clan, until it emerged that he was actually Christian Gerhartsreiter—and a murderer to boot. But for over two decades, he posed not only as Rockefeller (his longest disguise), but variously as a member of British royalty and a Hollywood producer. The guise could change, but the exclusivity remained: he knew well what other people wanted to hear. Who doesn’t want to befriend a Rockefeller?

  Long before the Rockefeller family grew a new member, there was Cassie Chadwick, who for many years passed herself off as the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie. Her plan was deceptively simple. She hired a prominent Cleveland lawyer and had him drive her to the scion’s mansion. There, she pretended to go inside and visit with the man himself; in reality, she only spoke with the housekeeper. On her way back, she accidentally-on-purpose dropped a (forged) promissory note for $2 million, from Carnegie to her. The lawyer was convinced. He spread the word—hush-hush, of course—and soon Cassie was living a life of luxury on the loans that were pouring in: everyone believed that, on Carnegie’s death, the return would be immense. And everyone wanted to be on the good side of the soon-to-be heiress. Chadwick would have gone on indefinitely had she not overreached, drawing the attention of Carnegie himself, who promptly disavowed all knowledge of her identity. In 1904, she was finally arrested.

  Fred Demara, too, chose his affiliations with care. He never stole credentials willy-nilly. They were always stolen with an eye to what they represented—and whether they represented a type of power that his target would respond to. Was a given disguise a good basis for this particular rope, or no? In religious orders, he was unfailingly a former academic superstar. The monks felt honored that someone so learned and decorated wanted to put everything aside and join them. They wanted him to like them and accept them as intellectual equals. When he became warden of a Texas prison, on the other hand, he went for a tougher image: a Southern gentleman with a hard streak, who had a fascination with the law and wanted to enter the penal system. He was someone who was just like the prisoners might one day be—a reformed alcoholic, no less—so that they liked him. But he also had what it takes to be the kind-but-firm enforcer—so that the higher-ups liked him. The rope works best when the persuasive base is tailored to the task.

  Our desire to be accepted as a member of groups that appeal to us is, according to Cialdini, one of the strongest motivators in our being persuaded by something: it is an important reason that the rope often works effectively. We are more likely to go along with something if it has the stamp of approval of a group we trust or promises us entry in a group we’d like to belong to.

  Even when we’re anonymous and the group not particularly desirable, we’d still like to be included more than not—and it hurts when we are excluded. Kipling Williams, a Purdue University social psychologist whose work centers on ostracism, found that, in a virtual ball toss game, people who were passed over by the other group members felt worse about themselves and had a greater need for belonging—a psychological concept that measures the general extent to which we want to be part of a larger group. In an unrelated task, those same people were much more likely to conform to their peers’ behavior. Now imagine the group had been a well-known one. Imagine you’re trying to get on Madoff’s or Kurniawan’s good side, and he simply won’t see you. The effect can be much more pronounced. You’ll want to belong all the more. And the rope will find its intended mark all the more easily.

  You may be the best roper there is, and have every persuasive strategy playbook down, but the truth is, who you are—or seem to be—will affect how it’s perceived. As will precisely how you present it—and what you do if you encounter resistance. The rope depends on multiple elements: not just the persuasive strategy you use and your identity, but how, exactly, you frame the proposition. Power, in other words, can come from the construction of the argument rather than its substance: power through how you phrase something rather than what you’re actually saying. A good confidence artist uses the structure of his pitch to manipulate the way we perceive or think about something. He may not be powerful as such—perhaps he’s just a nice guy you met in the lobby—but he has power to influence your reality, the way you understand and parse an argument or proposition. If he’s a good roper, you will soon be seeing the world as he sees it, and not as you did moments before falling under his sway.

  Take this example: by the order in which someone presents us with options, she can reliably make those options look better or worse—even if we wouldn’t naturally think so. In 2006, J. Edward Russo, a psychologist specializing in decision making at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, ran a series of experiments to illustrate just how easy it would be to get us to go against our own best interest with just a bit of clever framing. First, he and his colleagues asked a group of students about their restaurant preferences for two pairs of fictional restaurants that were described according to ten different attributes (atmosphere, daily specials, driving distance, speed of service, and the like). Two weeks later, they asked everyone to come in for a follow-up. This time, the list of attributes was modified and ordered in a very specific way. The information was identical, but now the characteristic that most favored the inferior restaurant was placed first—and the less favorable last. Everyone
was next asked to rate the restaurants a second time, and then to say how confident they were of their choices on a scale of zero (uncertain) to one hundred (completely certain), where fifty represents a toss-up.

  This time around, a majority of people—62 percent—favored the previously inferior choice. The fact that the first attribute supported it skewed all subsequent information. In fact, after the first attribute alone, a full 76 percent said the inferior choice was the leader. What’s more, they had no idea they were doing it. People were choosing a restaurant they would not have naturally liked nearly as much as other options, but they remained equally confident in their choice no matter what option they’d picked.

  In the choice of food, effects like these may seem minor. But the order effect—what Russo was demonstrating—is but one of the many elements of decision architecture—how information is presented to us—that can get us to make decisions in a very precise way, and not necessarily in a way that corresponds to our stated preferences.

  There’s the positive side of decision architecture, the nudge, popularized by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book by the same name. The idea behind the nudge, in its positive guise, is a simple one. In many cases, our choices aren’t based on some innate preference. Instead, they are constructed at any given moment by a combination of situational factors. I may not have thought about drinking wine with dinner, for instance, but if the wine list is right in front of me, I may find myself ordering a glass all the same.

  The psychology of why nudges work forms the entire basis of a confidence artist’s soft power. Just as a grifter never coerces in any observable way, a nudge never actually forces one behavior or forbids another—a smoking ban is not a nudge but a policy regulation—but rather changes the nature of the choice itself. That is, you influence a decision by changing how, precisely, that decision is presented. Thaler and Sunstein explain their reasoning in terms of a seeming oxymoron: libertarian paternalism. The environment affects our choices no matter what, the argument goes, so why not make sure it’s doing so for the better? Or, in the case of the con artist, for the worse?

  The order effect is the tip of a very large iceberg that includes things like position effects—where something is located physically. Con artists manipulate this all the time by placing objects or people they want you to gravitate toward in more privileged positions. There are default effects—or what your choice is by default. Cons like the infamous Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes use default effects to get you into more subscriptions you never asked for than you can ever unsubscribe yourself from—a subversive take on the old marketing ploy of automatically receiving e-mails from a retailer you’ve placed an order from, even though you don’t recall ever signing up for a list. There are anchor effects—the initial cues you see that then influence your subsequent decision, like the price that first catches your eye on a menu, that then makes other prices seem more or less fair, or a monthly payment plan that forms a reasonable-seeming anchor for a sum you might otherwise question as too high. And the list goes on. The final message, though, is simple. Precisely how something is presented to you matters a great deal. And you can be certain that the confidence man knows exactly how to engineer any game so that the odds are stacked against you. That is the art of the rope.

  One evening over a dinner of pasta, Apollo Robbins, gentleman thief extraordinaire, had me convinced for a good ten minutes that he could read my mind. He’d grabbed three objects from the table, lining them up side by side behind a screen, and asked me to choose the one I wanted. And then, over and over, he would be able to tell me what I had chosen and what hand it was in. I was mystified—until he explained that he was forcing my choice with clever wording. Each time, he would word his instructions slightly differently to make it seem as if he could predict my every move: I had perfect freedom, yet he could tell the future. I can’t give away the trick, alas, but it was all about game engineering: how to frame choices, in what order, and using what precise words to make it seem he was always a step ahead. It’s the rope on a miniature scale—a demonstration of the power of minute presentation in influencing things as weighty as your perception of the future.

  Con artists can even influence choice by limiting it—a take on the default effect. When Ohio State’s Curtis Haugtvedt surveyed the literature on persuasion—specifically how we’re influenced by conversations and interactions, the Internet, radio, television, and books—he found certain characteristics that make a message more likely to hit home. One of them is the element of choice itself. We often like to have our choices constricted. Too much choice, and we just shake our heads and walk away—a phenomenon known as choice fatigue. But if a persuasive statement engenders a strong negative reaction—“There is no choice”—it will draw more attention to itself, and as a result, be more likely to be remembered. If the statement seems persuasive—your granddaughter is in trouble and you have no choice but to send money immediately to help her—we’ll be all the more likely to concede the point rather than stop and think about alternatives. When a con artist appears to make a decision for us, making it seem as if we’ve already decided when we actually haven’t, it can actually work to his advantage. The magazines or products that already arrive at your door. The wallet that has already been found—and the plan to return it that you didn’t even have to think through.

  Another effective tactic, Haugtvedt found, is to prime as much information as possible: order effects where you make sure to seed the first impression ahead of time. That is, throw in just enough early, hard-to-pin-down references that set the mark’s mind thinking in a certain direction. Then, when the grifter makes a suggestion or actually raises the point explicitly, the victim has already been considering it, however subconsciously. It’s almost like a meeting of the minds: you were just thinking that yourself.

  Information priming works so well because it exploits an effect we’ve already seen several times: the ease that comes from familiarity. Mention something in passing, and then when you elaborate on it later—especially if it’s a few days later—it seems that much more convincing. It’s a phenomenon known as the illusion of truth: we are more likely to think something is true if it feels familiar.

  Consider a turn of phrase the con artist often uses: “Picture this,” “Imagine that . . .” Imagine you’ve actually gone to claim the lottery winnings that you already have, if you just make the effort. What will you do with the money? How will you spend it? Where will you go? Suddenly you’re on a warm beach or strolling the streets of Paris. One of Cialdini’s many studies of persuasion had people watch an ad about cable television. Those who were told to “imagine the benefits” were much more likely to actually subscribe to it a month later than those who were simply told about “the benefits of cable TV.” The call to “imagine the benefits” can come even before any concrete proposal. Just a seemingly throwaway remark, a casting of the rope, so to speak, before you even realize that anything is on offer. You’ve planted the suggestion and, when the time for the real proposal comes along, the mark is more likely to see it as coming from her own initiative. (Apart from being a favorite gambit of the con, it’s a famous marital trick.)

  And a final construction that can win an argument: it doesn’t actually matter what you say, in what order, or how. All that matters is that you say a lot, quickly, and that it sounds convoluted and has many moving parts. Simply put, we tend to make worse decisions when we have a lot on our minds—even after that “lot” is removed. Con artists exploit this by making us have to keep track of multiple things at once: multiple acquaintances, multiple moving pieces, multiple histories. At the most basic level, consider sleight-of-hand cons, like three-card monte, where we’re asked to “follow the lady” as she moves from hand to hand. Or the “pig in a poke,” where a wallet we thought full of money ends up being full of paper scraps—a dexterous last-minute switch that succeeds because our minds are busy following the rest of our deceiver
’s story. In all cases, there are too many things for our minds to take in, and so we miss the crucial detail. We’re simply too busy trying to register it all.

  Tyler Alterman, a psychologist turned Bay Area entrepreneur, was eager to be allowed into local Chicago bars when he wasn’t yet of legal drinking age. He didn’t use a fake ID. Instead, his strategy was wholly derived from his psychology training—the so-called pique technique, in reverse. The premise was simple. Bombard the bouncer with so much information that he didn’t actually process the dates on the ID. “How’s it going, man?” he’d open his conversation. Before the bouncer could answer, he would launch into an unrelated demand. “Do you know where I can find a place to get cinnamon pita chips around here?” while handing the bouncer his real, under-twenty-one ID. “My girlfriend loves cinnamon pita chips for whatever reason, and I promised her I’d get some.” The bouncer would hand back the ID. “Is there a store or bodega where I can get some?” Finally the bouncer had an opening. “Cinnamon pita chips? Nah, I can’t help you.” By that point, Tyler was inside: his ploy to increase the bouncer’s cognitive load had succeeded. And it succeeded, in various guises, all the way through his college career. A rope that derives entirely from the argument’s presentation can still be amazingly effective.