Don’t Get Fooled: How Con Artists Gain Your Trust | Chris Chabris

24:36We've seen stories of this often with business leaders who they get to a really high position or they acquire a lot of wealth or their company becomes very valuable. They've learned that from that process somehow that their instincts are always good. They will make quick snap decisions, again, without questioning like, what are my assumptions here? What questions should I be asking? Is my attention being misdirected or something like that? And we have some examples in the book of people who some of the cleverest cons and longest cons have worked on because I think these people deceived themselves a little bit into thinking they were smarter than they really were.

25:12I mean, they're not dumb in the conventional sense, but they just didn't understand the situation as well as they think they did. And that's sort of very sophisticated con artist, I think, you know, will actually tailor the con for the specific victim or the specific type of victims. And that could be a small set of people, like really wealthy people can be conned, but in different ways from, you know, from people who aren't so wealthy. And that intelligence can lead to the expectation that you're deserving of this great deal. You're deserving of these outsized results from investing with Madoff, that you're deserving of that next business venture succeeding or the next stock pick being correct.

25:51Sure, yeah. I'm really smart. I know a lot about finance. I found this great opportunity that nobody else misses. And in fact, Madoff, as a great example you bring up, I don't know what was in his mind at all moments of this Ponzi scheme that he ran for about 30 years or so. but certainly he understood that making it seem like an exclusive club was an important part of the deal. Like he never advertised, there were no prospectuses, there was in fact none of the ordinary documentation and information that you would expect from a hedge fund, let alone a mutual fund, which has much more public disclosure and so on.

26:25And yet he managed to make it seem as though everybody who got in was really smart for figuring out how to get in and really smart for being with him and really deserving of that opportunity because it was so scarce. So if you get something that's scarce, you feel that you deserve it in a sense. Yeah. As everyone was moving into technology and moving online, he was still hand-typing statements and sending them only upon request. So you feel like you get this white-glove service. Like, wow, I'm being treated like royalty when every other bank, every other mutual fund in the world was moving online and building a platform for you to access whenever you wanted the information.

27:02Yeah, to look at your balance and to see, you know, your account balance and to see the transactions in real time. It was really kind of remarkable in retrospect that so many people went along with this for so long. You know, and of course, some people did question. Like, we shouldn't pretend that, like, nobody questioned this. There were whistleblowers. There were investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And there were also investors who were pitched by Madoff, especially towards the end. You know, he needed it. It's a Ponzi scheme. So he needed money constantly coming in to pay out the people who requested their money, you know, back.

27:34And as this, you know, financial crisis hit and the, you know, stock market, you know, started to fall, he was getting more people requesting money. And so he was trying to get more money in. But there were people who did ask questions and said it literally they asked questions. They said, can you show me this? Can you show me that? And when he either said no or just didn't answer or was evasive, you know, they they relied on that as a way of making the decision, as opposed to sort of sticking with the lure of this guy's paying out 10 % a year. It's a sure thing, right? So it is possible. That shows that it's possible to sort of overcome these, you know, these cognitive habits and hooks and make better decisions because some people actually, actually did.

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31:15focus. And that just means that we are very good at focusing attention on a subset of all the possible information that we could be using at any one time. And that's built into our visual systems. For example, we're very good at focusing on certain elements of a noisy and complicated visual world in front of us and understanding them very well. That is, for example, how we're able to watch sports, right? You couldn't watch sports with all the players moving around and the ball and the fans cheering and so on. It would make no sense unless you could really track things individually and pay attention to some parts of it and not others.

31:47So it's a critical ability for driving, for, you know, for all kinds of things. But yet the downside of it is we sort of don't realize how much we're not noticing, thinking about paying attention to when we're focusing. So a good con artist, basically just like a magician, you know, will try to control your attention, make sure that you have, you know, the information they want you to have, right? Make sure you're looking where they want you to look while they're doing the trick someplace else. and use that at sort of multiple levels. You can see it in, for example, when psychics do what they call their cold readings, like what they're really doing are cold readings.

32:24It's just a mentalism technique. Plus they're doing some additional cheating usually of looking stuff up about people online in advance and so on. But the way they make people believe in this is they get you to focus on exactly what they're saying and not think about what they're not saying, not think about what they said a few seconds before, which is no longer relevant or downright wrong. And that's one reason why they go so fast often. So controlling focus is one of the key, you know, is one of the key things. One way to try to, you know, overcome that is just, you know, ask yourself what's missing.

32:56You need to sort of step back, slow down and say, what's missing? What am I missing? And as you mentioned in the book, we present this idea called the possibility grid. We call it the possibility grid. It's not really our invention. It's sort of like a common, it's a common thinking tool that emerges from research in cognitive psychology. And the easy way to think about it is to imagine a coincidence. A lot of people are very drawn to coincidences. There are entire books and self-help movements based on coincidences being more meaningful than they are. For example, you know, you applied for a job a couple of days ago and you had an interview the next day.

33:32And then, you know, you just, when you're thinking about how much you'd really like to have that job, the email arrives with the job offer. Now, some people out there want you to believe that you got the email and the job offer because you thought about getting the email and the job offer, as opposed to worrying about not getting the job offer. They would say, if you worried about not getting the job offer, you would not have gotten the job offer, that your thoughts would actually control the future in that way. Of course, that's not what's going on. What's happening is you're focusing on what we would call the top left box in this two by two grid.

34:04So imagine a two by two grid, you know, four cells, like a tiny little tic-tac-toe thing, but just two by two. And the top left box are, in this case, I was thinking about the thing, you know, and the thing happened. But then what about all the times you think about something and it doesn't happen? You know, you might've thought about the job the day before and you didn't get the job the day before. You might have thought about your friend and they didn't call. There's all kinds of times when you think about something and it doesn't happen. Then there are times when things happen that you weren't thinking about.

34:31Like surprisingly, I got the job offer. I hadn't thought about it at all since the interview, but then they offered me the job still. And then there's the other box in the bottom right, which is you weren't thinking about the thing and it didn't happen, you know, which is most of life, right? Most of life, you're not thinking about something and that thing doesn't happen, right? Once you see like there are all these boxes and the fact that there's one little thing in the top left box, but the other boxes have a lot of other things, many more than what's in the top left, you should pay less attention to the fact that there's something in the top left, because it's sort of inevitable that once in a while, you're going to think about something and it's going to happen.

35:03That's just statistically inevitable. And when those things have a lot of emotional weight, you know, they can really warp our thinking about cause and effect. So all kinds of stories of like, you know, a parent sensed that something was wrong with their child. And sure enough, you know, something had happened at school that day. But, you know, it's almost like they had a Vulcan mind meld or something like that or, you know, whatever. So if you think about those other three possibilities, besides the one that you're really focused on, you will realize that your attention was really being directed, the one that fits with the story that someone's trying to trying to sell you.

35:37You know, this is why companies will talk about, you know, only their success stories or why marketers will talk about, you know, how this marketing campaign, you know, coincided with some big uptick in sales. But they won't tell you about all their marketing campaigns that didn't lead to upticks in sales and all the unexpected sales bumps because of things that had nothing to do with the marketing campaigns and and so on. So, yeah, the possibility grid, I think once you start sort of thinking about it more, you start to see more things that happen in the world that really fit into that framework.

36:05I could talk about some of the other ones too, but maybe that one, I think you rightly said, I think that's one of the best takeaways. If you really can understand that, I think that's one of the best takeaways. It sort of reduces your chance of being victimized by people trying to control your focus on a small set of unrepresentative things. When you start to realize how much the world is focused on just this one box and the positive results and the marketing built around it and the gambling built around it and the stock picking built around it, you start to realize, hey, in these big, important moments, decisions being made, maybe I should take a step back.

36:43Maybe I should look at where's all this information coming from and what are the underlying reasons that that information is being shared with me? And there are just some instances where a successful company will probably be trying 20 or 30 different marketing efforts, 19 of them failing. So doing Google's latest marketing tactic doesn't guarantee success for you. Yeah, no, exactly. And that's a great example, too, because there's this whole genre of business writing about, which basically has the form, Amazon does this in its meetings, dot, dot, dot. And the dot, dot, dot is, therefore, you should do it, too, because Amazon is one of the best companies in the world.

37:21as though the way they run their meetings explains why they're so successful, not first mover advantage, hiring talented people, all the other things that might make Amazon have made Amazon for the last, you know, 28 years or however long they've been in existence different from other companies. So we're only looking at the top left. Yes, Amazon runs its meetings like this, and they're a huge company. But how many other companies run their meetings like that are not as huge? And how many huge companies don't run their meetings like that, etc, etc? You can just start to see it all the time. And one thing we try to do in the book is really, we go through so many different examples of how these things apply.

37:51And the purpose is not for readers to like, remember all these examples and so on, but more to like build up an intuition so that they will start to recognize these patterns. Like when am I in a situation where this might be happening? You know, you might then be able to remind yourself just automatically to sort of think again, right? It's sort of hard to know, like think again is good advice, but when do we think again? Right. So how do we, how do we know when to think again? Well, you've just got to build up, I think your vocabulary for patterns to recognize that you might be getting into, one of those traps.

38:19Unfortunately, a lot of that vocabulary comes with getting scammed a few times and you start to recognize your own flaws or the trappings that you easily fall into. Yeah, I agree that being victimized might be the best teacher of all, but we're hoping that we can help readers avoid having to learn the hard way or at least learn a few things the easy way, and then have fewer things they have to learn the hard way, or at least learn things that might Help them when the stakes are high, right? We're all going to be tricked in all kinds of ways. There's all kinds of deception of all kinds of different levels and importance and so on.

38:54We can't solve it all. We can't avoid ever being deceived. Deceiving people is almost part of human nature. Kids learn how to lie very young, and that's actually an indicator of cognitive growth, right? They've learned to represent new kinds of information, like the fact that dad doesn't know something that I know and I can use that. That's like a huge cognitive leap. Like we want people to be that smart, you know, but we want to reserve our serious like efforts to avoid being deceived for when the stakes are high. And that can be like a big business transaction, of course, something obvious like that or romance scam.

39:27We don't talk too much about romance scams, but that's a huge cat in the book. But that's a huge category where a lot of these same habits and hooks get exploited masterfully. But even, you know, even things like fake news and what politicians are saying and so on, those can be high stakes environments. No one person's vote usually determines the results of an outcome, but a lot of people can be sort of collectively misled at the same time, and that can move things. And another big part that stood out for me in the book is just how we're searching for these simple solutions, right? Going back to efficiency, we're looking for these hacks, these big wins, we're swinging for the fences in so many of these situations, and that primes us for this deception.

40:09And you even talk about how scientists, in their pursuit of finding some of these social psychology concepts, these magic words, these nudges to move human behavior in a certain direction, will be primed themselves by looking for this huge impact to be duped by fraudulent data, results that they can't repeat and replicate in other labs. That's right. And sadly, there's both self-deception and deception by others, even in the world of science, among scientists, among professionals. One of the early reviews of our book that came out said something like the psychologists come in for heavy criticism or something.

40:51And what they're referring to is the fact that basically only because we are psychology researchers ourselves, we know our own field better than most others. So we do tend to focus on it a little more. But it's a problem throughout science that scientists are human. I mean, that's not a problem. That's just a fact, you know, but because we are human, scientists are also subject to all of the same cognitive limitations and have the same cognitive habits that can lead them to being deceived within their own realm. And, you know, good deceivers within the realm of science will do things like create data sets and entire papers and articles that don't announce the discovery of some completely new thing that's never been known before and so on, because everyone's going to check that, you know, and find out that, wait a minute, like that doesn't work.

41:38That's in fact how some topics like cold fusion have sort of run aground because the results were so, and by the way, I'm not saying that there was any fraud involved there, but when someone claims a surprising new discovery, a lot of people are going to follow up on it. And if they can't find it too, then interest might quickly die. But if instead the fraudster supplies something that's basically like an incremental advance or an elegant demonstration of something that's already believed or fits in perfectly with the existing theory, and you need to be pretty smart to sort of like get into a field and figure out exactly what to supply people with.

42:09But there are people who do this. If they supply that, it meets expectations. It's sort of what we predicted. That's another habit that we have is we have a habit of predicting what's going to come next. And if we get that, then we're okay with it, right? So that's what scientific fraudsters often do is they supply stuff that looks like exactly what we would expect. And where they sometimes run into trouble is that in creating data and results and graphs and the kind of things that you expect in scientific articles, it's not that easy to create real data. like the world is noisier than we intuitively understand.

42:41There's a lot more randomness. We tend to smooth things out, you know, in our memories, in our minds and the way we present things and make it a little bit too perfect, you know, and that's often where the clever, you know, data detectives, you know, can look and see, well, that, that data actually doesn't make sense when you really look at it carefully. Or when you compare like across a lot of different articles someone publishes, you'll see like, well, the same thing seems to be repeated over and over again, or mysteriously the same number shows up all these times. Is it really, is it really this completely different studies.

43:09And it's not just psychology, but also I would say that psychology has sort of led the way in some ways and sort of trying to figure out why this stuff happens. Because after all, it is a psychological phenomenon. So psychologists figuring out why these mistakes are made and these deceptions happen in psychology is a good place to start. And then hopefully other fields, you know, will learn the same kinds of vigilance that we sort of advise in the, you know, in the book. One of the things that stood out to me in the book around the sciences is there's this need for positive results because positive results leads to funding.

43:41So negative results aren't being published. Negative results aren't going to move your career forward. So there is this incentive to only search and chase positive results no matter how big or small they are. And a lot of them are just phenomenon based on how the experiment was designed and how it was run. And then you have the underlings who are working in the lab and there's pressure on them to provide this data. And then you have a situation where it gets published and all of a sudden science is now built on this. And then even more science goes chasing after this. So this need to replicate these findings, to go back and try to sort through it, I think all of science needs.

44:21It's great to see that social psychology is really diving into this a little bit further to figure out, okay, are these phenomenon that people are basing entire movements on and research on actually real. I can't just agree with any of that. I think it's interesting that, you know, you mentioned like sort of grad students and trainees and people in labs and so on. I mean, one of the interesting ways that some of these large-scale frauds have happened is that someone who's like, say, the head of the lab, like gives the junior people a set of data and says, look, here's the data set. Let's analyze this and write a paper on it.

44:54And what never pops into their head is that their mentor, like in a way, their scientific hero, like the person they wanted to come and work with. Often you like you go to a university to work with a very specific individual to get your degree. Even nowadays, it just doesn't occur to them that that person might've made up the data the weekend before and given it to me to discover, quote unquote, what the results are and so on when they already know. Like that's, that's an example of what we'd call a commitment, right? Like you, you sort of have the assumption that the data came from a legitimate process.

45:24Like someone ran the experiment somewhere, you know, and there, and now I have the data and you don't, you know, you don't ask enough questions and asking your boss, did you fake this last week? Like not going to go over well. Right. There's, there's always the social and the power and the other dynamics, you know, about asking questions, which is part of why it's hard. Even just the social dynamics of being like the one guy in, you know, the sales meeting who asks hard questions of the sales people, like that can be hard in some, you know, in some cultures, some, some cultures, some organizational cultures, and so on.

45:54Being the jerk is not easy. And that's part of what sort of fuels this. And that's one reason why we say in the book, it's often good to try to get advice from an outsider who doesn't necessarily have the same assumptions in their head, who doesn't have the same history of familiarity and trust with the sources, who hasn't been paying attention to all the things you have, but maybe has been looking at some different things. There are plenty of examples where massive frauds could have been avoided if the person who was defrauded, listen to somebody else who thought it was a fraud before they got started into it.

46:27We have a great example of a con artist who was about to con some, you know, some French businessman out of$3 million or something like that. And the businessman's friend happened to walk in like during the Skype call where this con was happening and said, when the friend went to the bathroom, he said like, I think this is a con, you know, like, and hadn't occurred to the guy yet, you know? And so, so that's why in science we, you know, we do try to have a culture of independent replication, right? Like we make things public, we publish the papers, other scientists should be free to try to replicate the same stuff and they have a different view, right?

46:56Sometimes it's unpleasant when you publish something and then someone else says, I tried it again and I didn't get exactly the same results, but we're engaged in a collective endeavor, not individual glory seeking, you know, process in science. Although, you know, some people are in it partly for that reason or entirely for that reason, but that's not the social, that's not the social purpose of it, which we have to keep in mind. I think that our vanity and wanting to get ahead of everyone else plays into that line as well, where it's like, oh, well, I've got the skinny. I'm moving up. I got this.

47:27I can't share this with anybody. And that's exactly what they want you to think. Because then you start mentioning, and of course, people are going to tell you that doesn't add up and that you're being scammed. And of course, you want to believe that you do, that you are the smart guy who figured out the shortcut, who asked the right questions and got the right line. Some people have the reputation that, and many people had this reputation in the past, their experiments always work. And people started even coming up with sort of explanations for this. Like one prominent psychologist said that you have to have flair, flair, F-L-A-I-R, like some kind of ineffable, you know, ability to make the experiment work that can't sort of be written down.

48:07There's no recipe for it. You know, it can't be, it's, it's, it's, it's almost like, you know, magic or something like that. I don't think he intended it to mean magic, but it's, it's a quality that's so, you know, hard to bottle that you either have it or you don't. And that is not the way science works. Like science doesn't work if, where, if like I assemble the rocket, it makes it to the moon. But if the next guy, you know, with the same training and so on assembles the rocket by the same, you know, instruction manual, it crashes. Like that's not the way it's, that's not the way it's supposed to work.

48:33And yes, I mean, incentives, of course, you know, can cause greater effort and greater work, you know, and greater achievement, but they can also cause greater fraud, right? Because if there are two ways of getting, you know, the award, the legitimate way and the illegitimate way, you're probably going to cause more of each way to happen once you put the award out there. And you might almost argue that the more rewards and honors and so on there are in a field, the more attempts there are going to be to game them in some way. So looking at the four habits, let's shift to the hooks. And I think a lot of us have encountered the hooks in marketing.

49:09One thing that I thought was fascinating about the book is just Deception is on the rise. We think of deception in a criminal way, but we're being deceived by businesses to gain a little bit of profit. We're being deceived by peers just to get slightly ahead. Nothing that would rise to throwing people in jail, but these hooks are definitely being used in ways to reel us in, to get us believing and buying into what people are selling. Yeah, in the second part of the book, we talk about four hooks, which are aspects or features or qualities of what we're shown that we find, especially attractive.

49:43And the first one is consistency. And again, we can go back to the Madoff, you know, the Madoff story for this. So, you know, we were sort of attracted to symmetrical patterns, smooth lines, you know, basically the absence of randomness, noise, you know, anything that it's just part of, it's almost, again, it's almost like, it's like a fundamental property of the visual system, right? Like we recognize objects by using properties like symmetry and smoothness and curves and so on. So it turns out when people show us things that look like that or give us data that sort of conforms to those patterns, we tend to believe them more.

50:14And what Madoff did was, it's often said that Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme, and that's true, but it was really a new form of Ponzi scheme. The original Ponzi scheme promised people 50 % back in six months, 50 % return, like not just 50 % back, 150 % back essentially in six months in the 1920s. By the way, Charles Ponzi was not the original Ponzi schemer. People had tried similar things before, but he was the first one to be so successful that he got the naming rights. And Madoff came along, like he did something a little different. He did not promise anyone anything. He said, you know, here's my track record.

50:51You know, people do well. And if you looked at the statements people got, you know, in the mail and so on, every year they gained between eight and 12 % in their accounts. They never even gained less than 7 % probably. There might've been one year when it went down to 7%. And the financial journalist, Diana Enriquez, who wrote the best book about Bernie Madoff, told us that customers were very upset when it went down to 7%. He learned. Bernie, yeah, exactly. So he kept it in the 8 % to 12 % band, which is not unrealistic for the long-run average. If you invest in the stock market for 30 years, you might be up 10 % per year on average by the end.

51:25But there will be some negative 20 % years and some positive 30 % years and some close to 0 % years. So too much consistency, right? And people liked that. I mean, first of all, there were no losses. Second of all, it was just like a smooth upward trend. It's a beautiful look for your bank account. And there was nothing to worry about, right? So consistency is one of the main hooks that people use. Another one, which is, I think, equally valuable is familiarity. So repetition, because of the way memory works, makes us more likely to remember things, but also believe that they're true. This is sometimes called the illusory truth effect, You take a statement which has no truth value at all, but just say it enough times and it starts to sound true.

52:03And I've experienced this myself. I've sometimes felt like there's a piece of political propaganda, which I recognize as propaganda the first time. But like the fifth time I hear it, it sort of seems like it might be true or it's hard to describe the feeling, but it just it feels different from the first time you heard it. Once something's in the environment, once it's common, once it's familiar to us, we become more accepting of it. And there are lots of ways this can work. Familiarity can be based on similarity to things you already know. So, for example, there's this phenomenon called ghost candidates where political parties will run candidates with the same last name as an existing candidate that they want to siphon votes off from.

52:38Because if you voted for Rodriguez last time, maybe you'll vote for Rodriguez again this time and not notice there are two Rodriguez's on the ballot and you voted for the wrong Rodriguez. That's actually happened. Right. And if elections are close, you only need to siphon a small percentage of votes off with a third party candidate to maybe, you know, to maybe tip the balance. That's just a very simple familiarity hack, basically. It wouldn't work if you ran someone with a totally different name from Rodriguez. But if you find someone with that same name, then you might be able to do something with it.

53:05The last two are precision and potency. So precision is just our attraction to precise claims, concrete claims, as opposed to vague approximations. This happens, I wouldn't say everyone uses this, but when someone does tell you that you're going to get some very precise quantity of improvement or something like that, And when you do something, you should worry because almost everything is variable in life. You know, like nobody recovers. It's not the case that everybody recovers from a disease in exactly the same number of days. There's huge variability around there. It's not the case that everybody responds to a medication the same way.

53:39And the more precision people put in their pitches, unless it's some kind of like technical engineering thing, and you're already an expert or something like that, and you understand what those numbers mean, the more you should be, you know, the more you should be on guard. and potency is our desire to see, you know, big effects from small causes. I think I mentioned this earlier. So this is the basis for, you know, ideas like a lot of fraudulent medical, you know, medical scams, like you don't need surgery. You can just have some sort of, you know, simple complimentary medicine procedure will like solve your cancer, right?

54:07You don't need surgery, chemo, radiation, all that complicated, bad stuff. There's something much simpler that can do much more. And in the realm of psychology and social science, there's a vogue lately for the idea that very simple interventions, like having students do a one-hour exercise at the beginning of college, will have a dramatic effect on the grades they get for the next three or four years. Often when you dig into this kind of research, you see that there's like one very small study that found this. And then we get back to the problem we were talking about earlier. Like, has anyone else replicated that?

54:39Does it work at any other colleges? Does it work when any other researchers administer the same thing. So all of these things, consistency, familiarity, precision, and potency, they draw us in and sort of get us on the hook, right? You know, in the first place. And then, you know, once our attention is gotten, we can perhaps be sold. And that's sort of why we have to be wary of those ideas and tend to ask questions like, why does this sound, why does this sound familiar? Like, why have you seen something like this before? And so on. Again, recognizing the patterns of like when these things happen, that's important.

55:07To go along with that, you can see a lot of these hooks in action when it comes to memetics. And memetics is now something that all of us get to participate in due to the internet. Beforehand, it was a song is a memetic. A movie was a memetic. A television show was a memetic. And only certain people had control over those. Where now we're all on Twitter. We're all sharing memes. We're all trying to push consciousness into different areas. and those memes, some are based on truths, some are on the consistency that's going on. There's another rule of two on the nose. So you want something so bad and then you see a meme that is a dead center on target and you're like, I knew it.

55:53And you're sharing it with everybody because you're like, I've been telling everything. It's like, it's right in line only to have that completely fall apart with any research, but it's, it's fun to watch. And it's also fun to see what memetics we get caught up in that serves those holes in our own psychology. I like the phrase you said too on the nose, because like the way I would do the way I would categorize that is it satisfies your expectations so perfectly that you should be worried a little bit, right? Like you're, you know, you are a, in the book, we have an example of a fake news story that was passed around at the beginning of the Trump administration, when Trump nominated his first appointee to the Supreme Court, there was this fake news story about how all the rest of the Supreme Court justices had signed a letter opposing this nomination, which if you know anything about the Supreme Court or American politics and so on, the one thing that justices never talk about is who should be appointed to be a justice.

56:47Exactly. But it was too on the nose, I think, for certain voters who were anti-Trump, left-wing, maybe didn't like this guy, and so on, and enough for them to sort of lower their guard, you know, truth bias. Of course, truth bias is there too, you know, and so on. And they, you know, pass that around. It does remind me of that famous meme, which has a picture of Thomas Jefferson saying, you know, over 50 % of the quotes you read on the internet turn out to not be from the person they were supposed to be from. And that's exactly right there. You know, why do people attribute things to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and so on?

57:22Well, familiarity is part of that, right? You know, like all of these deceptions, That's a very tiny deception, right? Like saying that Thomas Jefferson said something that he didn't say but could have said, you know. But still, it erodes the fabric of reality a little bit every time people pass this stuff around, right? Well, look how easy it is for us to read a quote from somebody. But in our mind, it's read in their voice as if they are saying it. And it's going to be even easier with AI, like duplicating people's voices so well and so on. Then we'll actually have the quotes in their voice, right?

57:54You know, then it'll be a bigger problem. It raises the bar for how you have to be wary that these things might not be true. We have to try to set aside truth bias a little bit. I can't tell you how many times I've been disappointed to look up a great quote that I come across, and you can't find it anywhere. It's just like you have to say attributed to because someone attributed to that person, but that's the pretty weak sauce when it comes to fact-checking, right? Attributed to. There is another concept that you brought up in the book, concrete words and phrases. and how they trigger emotional responses in us.

58:28And I thought that was fascinating. Do you mind unpacking that for our audience? So we sort of group this under the concept of precision because concreteness and precision are sort of, concrete language is precise language, right? So instead of saying, can't make up like a really good abstract, gobbledygook sentence right now, but imagine when instead of saying that, you say something that refers to concrete concepts like specific people, specific events, colors, and so on. Like the more concrete and physical you can make something, the more likely people are to accept it. There's an example that comes to mind right now is there is a, you know, there's a long history of people liking the idea of personality types, that, you know, our personalities can exist as types.

59:08Like, you know, for example, the Myers Briggs type inventory is the most famous version of this. Like a lot of people, you'll even see an email signature, like I am an INFJ or I am a something or other. And that's meant to be a particular type, which denotes their personality and is thought to be sort of like powerfully explanatory of how they behave, why they behave, what they're going to do next, and so on. Some business gurus even advise giving all your employees the Myers-Briggs and then organizing your company accordingly. Well, an even more popular version of that, which is already kind of concrete to say that there are 16 types and everyone is one of 16 types, that's pretty concrete.

59:43An even more concrete version of that is this color system where there are reds, yellows, blues and greens, I guess. And, you know, there's all these arguments of like reds and yellows, like shouldn't collaborate together, but reds and greens are great together and so on. And I think putting colors on it makes it even more concrete. You know, master politicians are really good at always finding like a concrete human example of what they're talking about, you know? And so Ronald Reagan kind of famously started bringing people into the gallery in the Capitol building when he would give speeches, because then he'd be able to point to them and talk to them and say, there's someone right here who, you know, is suffering from this or benefiting from that or exemplifies the other thing.

1:00:22And that is, again, you know, bringing the concreteness into it. It's, I think it's hard sometimes because for some reason we naturally sort of tend to speak in generalities and abstractions and, you know, but the really good persuaders, I think, use that, you know, to their advantage. And we have to sort of watch out for it. Like, are we being lured in, by that kind of thing? What really backs this? Is that very potent emotional example illustrative of a trend, or is it just one anecdote? Are there really personality types, or do we all vary along a lot of different dimensions? It's really hard to put people in individual boxes like that.

1:01:00I know a popular term online now is gaslighting. It's being talked about, memed about, and everyone feels the effects of it. But it really taps into our memory, and our memories being faulty. So a lot of us feel that there's this concreteness to our memories. Like I remember this specifically, like a snapshot or a video. And of course, the longer the time passes, that memory gets even more faulty. So you see this in witness testimony and then they have video and it's completely different than what that person on the witness stand was explaining. Why is our memory so faulty? But why do we also have this bias to believe that our memory is not faulty?

1:01:39It's so counterintuitive. Excellent questions. And we really sort of talked about, we really talked about memory a little bit more in our first book, which was called The Invisible Gorilla, How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. And we have a whole chapter in there on memory that sort of addresses this topic. Memories change over time because, well, for a number of reasons, but I think the main one that we don't quite realize is that when we retrieve a memory, we kind of rewrite it back into memory based on how we retrieved it. So one metaphor that sometimes uses, it's like you're playing a telephone game with yourself, right?

1:02:08You know, the telephone game where you pass along a story and by the end, it's totally different from the beginning. Well, each time you retrieve a memory, you're sort of passing it back into your own memory. And the next time you retrieve it, it might be slightly different. And you retrieve it enough times, it could have mutated very significantly. And not only that, but when you do retrieve a memory, you don't just sort of take a noisy, extract a noisy version of it. The version you extract might be a little bit different depending on sort of like what your goals and mental state and emotional state are and what you're trying to communicate when you retrieve that memory.

1:02:40A great example is in the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton was trying to show that she was the more experienced and steady and solid candidate, especially in foreign policy compared to Barack Obama, who was her opponent at the time. So she started basically retrieving these false memories about literally being shot at in Bosnia when she was first lady. And of course, the problem is that when you're first lady, you've got press traveling with you everywhere and cameras and people pulled back the stories and there were no bullets, like there were no flak jackets. You know, there was, it's true, there was a war going on there and it's true.

1:03:13She did fly in and it's true. She was sort of representing, you know, us foreign policy and so on, but she had embellished it more. Not, I would say because she's an inveterate liar or something like that, but because she recalled a memory that was consistent with how she was thinking of herself at that time. And then when she recalled it, she sort of rewrites it back in there. And then the next time she recalls it, it's like, yeah, when I was shot at and, you know, in, in Bosnia. So that, I think that's how it happens. Why don't we realize this? I think part of the reason for that is that when we do retrieve a memory, often it feels very detailed and it feels like it happens automatically with very little effort.

1:03:47It's not like we're searching a reference library for some book or something like that, right? One of the nice things about human memory is it's instantaneous and it's sort of like content addressable. Like, you know, we think of France, we retrieve our memories of when we were in France. We don't need to like look through all the countries and say, oh, there's France. It happens right away. It's fluent. And there's nothing about the memory you retrieve on the surface that feels wrong. You've got to really sort of think about, wait, does it make sense that I would have been there then? Because wasn't I actually there?

1:04:20You have to sort of triangulate among other things. And that's work, right? Efficiency. Once again, we're back to efficiency, right? We don't sort of tend to do that work. So we can easily think we're right when we're not. A lot of that was also explained in Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And so the faster that we have that cognition, the more true that we think it is. But studies have shown the more wrong those things are. And it's due to efficiency while everything else that is working in order for us to navigate the world around this. I would add an amendment and say it's not that sort of fast thinking is wrong more often, but that we don't really expect it to be wrong.

1:05:01And we don't sort of monitor it very carefully, right, to see whether it's wrong. Like intuition usually is right. You know, we do all kinds of things unconsciously or at least without thinking about them that we get exactly right every day. And we can do relatively complicated behaviors without thinking about them even. The problem is that we don't really monitor it very well to compare it against some other, you know, reality, right? So that's why we're able to make sort of seemingly stupid mistakes, you know, when And they're pointed out to us because we're not really keeping track. And there's a really active area of research trying to figure out exactly what happens when people get these sort of Kahneman style puzzles right versus wrong.

1:05:37Like the stereotype that a lot of people have is that people always get these things wrong. But that's not true. Sometimes they get them right. Why do some people get them right? Why do people get them right in some situations? That's a lot of active, you know, sort of area of research. And reading the book, I just couldn't stop laughing because, of course, every time that I've ever been scammed started sparking memories. And I was like, oh, well, yeah, I knew that. And we tend to look back, you know, I saw all those signs and I still fell for this anyway. And I was before the, we started, I was mentioning that I was, I just returned from Columbia after three months.

1:06:13And luckily for me, I got scammed within my first week. And it showed me just how outside of my normal habits and familiarity that I was, where that if I didn't buckle down, this is going to be the norm for the three. It's going to be a long three months. And that first week I walked to an electronics store that I was told to check out. And when I had gotten there, I noticed that it was three floors, that all three stores had multiple of the same stores in the floors. And I was like, well, that's odd. That's interesting. And I even said to myself, well, this is a, probably a very corrupt store.

1:06:52This stuff's probably stolen, but you know what? I'm here and I need an iPhone charger anyway. So I go into one of the stores that has a funky looking Apple logo. I'm like, well, that's not the Apple logo, but I do need a charger anyway. And I'm here. So I might as well pick it up. I go into the store and a bunch of very cute girls come out to help me. And I'm like, oh wow, this is really nice service. So they're giggling and flirting with me. And I'm like, this is utterly amazing. And I get the charger and I go home. And of course, the charger didn't work. And I was charged$60. And if I had my three months there, I could spend$60 on anything.

1:07:31And I couldn't stop laughing. It was at that point, I was like, you knew you were in a bad place. You knew something was up. You went along with it anyway. And you didn't ask any questions. And if this is going to happen to you in the first week, you need to settle it down and start moving very slow. And it was at that point that every time I went out, I gave myself plenty of time to slow down, to ask questions, to be observant. And there's only so much social awareness that you can have when you don't speak the language as well. And because of that barrier, I made sure at that point that any task that I had to do outside, that I had plenty of time to work through it.

1:08:13Yeah, no, I mean, the least they could have done is broken out your receipt into like$5 for a busted charger and$55 entertainment fee or something like that, right? Because it seems like you did get some enjoyment out of the experience in the end. And that's part of what I think some types of cons and frauds do is that you keep the customer, you know, entertained in a way and you deliver other things besides what is the actual promise, you know, of what they're of what they're looking for. And it might explain how they sort of stay in business for longer. Right. Like you didn't maybe have the heart to like, you know, go to, you know, to try to turn them in.

1:08:45And by the way, speaking of the Apple logo and memory, it turns out like our memories for logos are distorted. So I suspect a lot of people might not have even noticed that that was not the real Apple logo if it looks close enough. Like if it's flipped left to right, so the bite is out of the Apple on the other side. There's a study which has like 10, 20 different versions of the Apple logo. And people have trouble figuring out which one is the real one, even though they see it every single day of their life, you know, multiple times, you know, right in their face. Like I can see it right now on my, you know, on my screen.

1:09:12It's right in front of me right now. So Christopher, thank you very much. This has been quite informative and our audience is going to love the book and love this episode. We love asking all of our guests this last question. What do you consider your X factor to be? A trait or a skill that sets you apart from everyone else? I wish I had prepared something for this question, but I think I'm pretty good at adjusting my confidence appropriately to how much I do and don't know about a situation. Overconfidence is necessary, right? We need entrepreneurs who start things against all odds and so on. Underconfidence is probably not that great, although it helps to balance out the overconfidence so we don't just get a super abundance of overconfidence.

1:09:54But for each person, I think knowing what they know, knowing what they don't know, knowing what they're good at, knowing what they're bad at, knowing where they can make a contribution and where they should let others be the experts and not think that they're the experts and so on. I think that's really important for individual level success. Yes, maybe the Elon Musks of the world don't need to worry about that that much, but I think for most of us, it's a good trade. I think that my study of psychology over the years has helped reinforce the importance of that and the distrust of our own internal signals of that and led me to try to understand it more deeply and act accordingly.

1:10:31Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure reading this book, and I'm excited to check out your last book as well. Where can our audience find out more about your research and the book, Nobody's Fool? Well, you can find out about me at my website, shabris.com, C-H-A-B-R-I-S.com. The book is available on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, bookstores, everywhere you want to get it. The book is called Nobody's Fool, Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. And it's important to know that because there are other books called Nobody's Fool, including the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Richard Russo from the 1990s.

1:11:05And you could argue that we were exploiting a little bit of familiarity, you know, familiarity hook by choosing that title. But we thought it really, it really kind of fit. And yeah, you can find that anywhere. And our first book is called The Invisible Gorilla, which I think is a fairly unique title among books. Yeah, definitely. We'll link the right one in the show notes. Great. Thank you, Chris. It was great having you. Thanks. It's been fun.

1:11:38This week's shout out goes to Amir, who wrote us this day after 15 years of marriage, it started to feel a bit stale and felt like they had lost their spark. So he joined us in the X Factor Accelerator, and it was the perfect opportunity to reignite his relationship and bring back that excitement and thrill of the early days. The course provided Amir with incredible insights and techniques on how to communicate with his wife in a new and playful way. Seeing that smile on her face and that twinkle in her eyes, it was like they were back being teenagers again. He writes us to say, Guys, date nights are fun again and the rut has been broken.

1:12:14We've explored new places, tried new activities, and simply enjoyed each other's company like never before. It's like discovering a whole new side to our relationship, and we haven't looked back. I can't thank the Yard of Charm enough for equipping me with the tools and strategies to enhance my marriage. The X-Factor Accelerator truly transformed my perspective on how to keep the flame alive and reignite the passion we thought we had lost. If you're in a similar situation where your marriage could use a breath of fresh air, I highly recommend giving the art of charm the X-Factor Accelerator a shot.

1:12:46Trust me, you won't regret it. Your relationship deserves this chance to thrive and flourish just like mine did. Well, there you have it, folks. And if you've listened this far, my guess that's because you want more out of life, love, and work. And if you're in the military, we'd like to talk to you. We're launching a new program for the military called Elite Human Dynamics. And if you're interested in learning more, please go to theartofcharm.com slash military. And for the rest of you, if you would like to join us in the X Factor, join us, the Art of Charm team, and hundreds of other people like you who are experiencing breakthrough conversations, supercharging your confidence and growing an incredible network inside our x-factor accelerator program the x-factor accelerators where high achieving like-minded people meet strategize to unlock your hidden x-factor to make sure that you get the most out of life's opportunities and unlock those doors keeping you from success we start every month with an intense goal-setting strategy session so that you have a personalized plan of attack as well as weekly implementation sessions with opportunities to practice your conversation skills, rapport building, supercharge your charisma through powerful communication, and unlock the charm to attract the right people into your life.

1:14:03Imagine what you can accomplish with coaching and mentorship with the art of charm. What are you waiting for? Join us today at unlockyourxfactor.com. That's unlockyourxfactor.com. All right. And before we head out, a huge thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery. All right, everybody. Until next week, go out there and crush it.

1:14:45of the tragedy Cause you had your taste of black only yesterday Yeah, but I remember you Oh yeah, I remember you

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