Your Blindspot
How Con Artists Work
"Bernard Madoff, painted portrait _DDC5183" by Abode of Chaos is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Anyone who has ever learnt to drive has struggled with the knowledge that we have a blindspot. When another car is over-taking us, there is a moment when it is hidden from the side mirror and the rear-view mirror, particularly if you drive an older vehicle. The only way to spot the car is to move your head slightly to one side. Having a blindspot is a great metaphor for the limits of our knowledge. Con artists are experts at positioning themselves exactly in our blindspot.
The dictionary defines a con artist as “a person who deceives other people by making them believe something false or making them give money away.” Psychiatrist Anthony Storr has written that people often over-estimate the sanity of con artists. In order to make us believe something false, they often half-believe it themselves. We have already discussed Storr’s observation that gurus who are utterly certain of their views are attractive to us. The same is true of con artists.
So, what is our blindspot? It is our vanity. We all think we are better than others. Con artists are experts at using flattery. The first step of the con involves telling us what we want to believe. “Take this every day and you won’t get cancer.” “Give me a little bit of money and I will make you very rich.” “Vote for me and everything will be well in the world.”
To be successful, con artists have to become experts in hacking our cognitive dissonance. In case you have forgotten, this is the uncomfortable feeling we all get when we feel that our identity is threatened. Our natural instinct is to double down on our identity instead of reconsidering our assumptions. Con artists will try to minimalize our sense of cognitive dissonance by telling victims not to read the press or not to trust their doctor. If you take the advice of a con artist, you will lock yourself into a feedback loop where all the information you are exposed to takes you in a certain direction. The more time you spend in a feedback loop discussing a fringe view, the worse the sense of cognitive dissonance you will experience when you finally meet someone who contradicts the con.
The approach we are trying to develop in Sharpen Your Axe is the opposite of this. Cognitive dissonance is inevitable in the modern world. The best thing we can do is to train ourselves to deal with it in a healthy way. So, if someone tells you something that you want to believe, start off by suspending judgement. It might be true, but it might not be. Check everything!
Get used to reading multiple news sources from across the political spectrum so that you expose yourself to ideas that might make you uncomfortable. Also, try to think like a Bayesian by assigning probabilities to various scenarios. This will allow you to keep various contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without falling in love with any of them. Finally, if you come across someone who you think has fallen victim of a con artist, please be gentle with them. A full-on confrontation will generate cognitive dissonance and they are likely to double down on the con. Why not propose a modest bet instead?
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole.
[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.