The first time I fell victim to a prop bet (not to be confused with the sports bet) was in New Orleans in 2000. I was on spring break with some fellow greenhorns from my Jesuit high school. We were weaving through the French Quarter, loaded on Hand Grenades and freedom, wearing bull’s-eyes on our backs. A black man resplendent in purple and gold, who called himself the Bourbon Street Entertainer—there were presumably dozens of them, like Elmos in Times Square—bet me five dollars that he could tell me where I got my shoes.
“You got ’em,” he said, “right there on your feet in New Orleans.”
The second time I lost this bet was when I tried it on a bum in Pittsburgh who wouldn’t leave my friend and me alone. “I got ’em at Stride Rite,” he growled, and since I didn’t feel it was in my interest to argue, once again the fool and his money were parted.
Later I would see a prop bet laid in Stephen Frears’s 1990 adaptation of The Grifters, the great Jim Thompson novel. Roy Dillon (John Cusack), the short-con operator who is the movie’s down-at-the-heels hero, offers a barfly “a dime for every quarter you can lay on end.” The rube stands ten quarters upright. Roy throws down a dollar and takes the quarters: “That was the deal.” It isn’t a proper grift, let alone a confidence scheme, but it illustrates the grifter’s motivation, to pull a fast one on an overconfident chump.
Maria Konnikova explores this motivation in clinical detail in The Confidence Game. But what really interests her is not the grifter but his mark: “At some point,” she writes, “everyone will be deceived. Everyone will fall victim to a confidence artist of one stripe or another. . . . The real question is why. And can you ever understand your own mind well enough that you learn to extricate yourself before it’s too late?”
If that call to “understand your own mind” wasn’t a sufficient tip-off, be forewarned that The Confidence Game is very much a social science book. It belongs to a genre that is by now familiar to anyone who shops in airport bookstores or listens to TED talks: the attempt to reduce all human behavior to a handful of inescapable cognitive biases. Don’t feel too bad about your missteps, these books seem to say, because you never really were the superior being, armed with reason and free will, that you thought yourself to be. If your brain is more complex than that of, say, one of Pavlov’s dogs, that complexity only serves to expand the range of error of which it’s capable. It is difficult to fathom the barely disguised relish with which the typical social-science journalist advances this bleak contention.
The good news is that it isn’t an especially persuasive contention, and this book does much, in spite of itself, to undermine it. Maria Konnikova does a superb job of outlining the traits a confidence man looks for in his or her mark; but then she goes a step further and implies that maybe all of us, because of our unconscious biases, have these traits. Yet as I ticked off a few of them—optimism, an overly trusting nature, excessive confidence in one’s savviness and decision-making, a longing “for magic” or “an existence that is more extraordinary and somehow more meaningful”—I found myself asking, with apologies to Tonto, “What do you mean we, Ms. Konnikova?”
That many people possess some of these traits, there can be no doubt. But fewer possess all of them, or exhibit them in all circumstances, and some possess none. To take one grating example, Konnikova discusses the Cornell psychologist David Dunning, six of whose studies “demonstrated that people overestimated how they fared on socially desirable characteristics.” But the infamous Dunning-Kruger effect refers to a subtly but significantly different phenomenon: While the incompetent overestimate their abilities, the competent underestimate themselves relative to others. In other words, an idiot might fall for a con because he thinks too highly of his business acumen; a smarter person, if he doesn’t see through the con outright, might be saved by a prudent belief that he isn’t qualified to assess the situation.
It is also the case that one might be optimistic in one context—he might, for instance, overestimate the chances that a relationship will succeed—while being so pessimistic about his financial acumen that he avoids even legitimate business propositions. One might be overly trusting of family members out of a sense of obligation while mistrusting strangers on principle—even if one doesn’t expect to be fleeced by them. I avoid those clipboard-toting charity workers not because I’m hardwired to be mistrustful but because I once read an illuminating article about the borderline-fraudulent way many charities allocate their funds. The notion that individuals are governed by cognitive biases in a categorical or predictable way is revealed by even a passing familiarity with real people to be little more than pop-science superstition.
The con man, Konnikova tells us, relies on our innate craving for a good story and for something to believe in. In the coda, she makes a pat and perfunctory attempt to show how religion taps into the same deeply human needs. But in the case of a con, the story is merely information, the same sort of information one would need to decide whether to participate in a real business venture. Being conned by a plausible story doesn’t make one a rube in thrall to primal cognitive instincts. It makes one a person who has assessed, correctly or not, a proposal, weighed the risks, and acted. Being conned by an implausible story—like the victims, mentioned by Konnikova, who were “sold” the Eiffel Tower—makes one not an ordinary story-loving human but an extraordinary sucker.
This distinction isn’t lost on con artists, either. It is a common practice for con men to peddle not good stories but preposterously bad ones, in order to select for gullibility in their marks. (If you've ever thought to yourself that only someone with the intellect of a cinder block could fall for one of those Nigerian prince email scams, you’re catching on.) Long cons or Ponzi schemes that swindle the relatively savvy or affluent—think Bernie Madoff’s marks—rely on plausibility to a vastly greater degree than the ones that take greedy imbeciles or sex-starved men seeking Internet romance. The con man only needs to exploit a raw desire to believe the unbelievable if he’s trying to hook a dimwitted fish.
Contrary to revealing (as her sub-title puts it) “why we fall for it . . . every time,” Konnikova shows us that different people fall for different things for different reasons. In the realm of social science, that would seem to be an unwelcome and unsexy finding, but in the realm of storytelling, where Konnikova belongs, it is a delightful one. Indeed, Konnikova is at her best when explaining, in great detail and with terrific pacing, some of the wildest and most elaborate cons in history. Her book shows not what we all have in common but rather the infinite and fascinating variety of human personalities, their strengths and weaknesses and hidden desires. If only it were possible today to sell a book of stories—for example, David Maurer’s 1940 classic The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man—and not an airport book full of dubious studies, many of which, incidentally, seem to have tested not man in general but the American undergraduate.
If Maria Konnikova’s aim was to write a book that will sell, she has successfully conned the public, with its inexplicable but enormous appetite for books that reduce us to automata. If her aim was to give a true account of human psychology, in all its startling diversity, she has perhaps only conned herself.