Pride does indeed come before a fall. If there is one lesson that we should all learn, and relearn, as often as necessary, it is that no one is invulnerable to persuasion. Not even those of us who make it our life’s work. Indeed, it is confidence in our invulnerability that makes us so vulnerable. Despite decades of immersion in the world of hucksters, I, too, can still be charmed, cajoled, and led like a lamb to the slaughter.
My special area of study has been the destructive cult groups that form around charismatic con artists. Years ago, I finished my interview with a teenager who had been in the leading body of a notorious cult only weeks before. He grinned and said, ‘The great thing is, Jon, that we’ll neverbe conned again.’
I shook my head, ‘No, the great thing is that I realize I’m gullible. And that’s my only defence. Whenever I’m caught up with enthusiasm and about to reach for my wallet, I try to stop myself and analyse the evidence. Sometimes that saves me money and embarrassment.’
A few years ago, when Amazon contacted me to say I’d won a thousand pounds in their Wishlist lottery, I didn’t believe it. And the disbelief did me no harm; it actually made it sweeter when the credit appeared in my account.
The phone huckster – and his colleagues in a boiler room somewhere in Kolkata or Delhi – went through a tried-and-tested script that exploited normal feelings and responses. First, he created fear: your machine will die. Emotional pressure always reduces the capacity to reason. Language can be crafted to direct you away from thinking: psychologists have found that certain words and phrases by-pass our reasoning processes altogether – ‘buy now’, ‘new and improved’, ‘every penny counts’, for instance.
Next, he created a sense of urgency: he wanted me to act immediately, so that I would not have time to think. This is the ‘buy now’ mechanism, which bypasses reasoning. If you are buying anything – from computer software or a second-hand car, to a business training programme, to a new religion – it is important to take your time. This mechanism is recognised legally in some countries, where there is a ‘cooling off’ period in which you can cancel a contract to fit double glazing or anything else you have been pressured into buying. If you must ‘buy now,’ don’t buy at all.
A good scam artist creates rapport. Here the phone scammer failed. He was too urgent, and he was rude. Often as not, when challenged, hucksters will protest too much. How could I doubt his word? This is actually a way of generating rapport in reverse. He was suggesting that we had made a connection and that I had violated it by distrusting him. Whenever I hear the phrase: ‘You can trust me,’ in my mind I whisper: ‘You can trust me; I’m a con artist.’
Rapport is an essential aspect of sales and recruitment. We are far more likely to buy from someone who has become a friend. Instant friendship is all too often a trap. Real friendship takes more than one meeting, just as love at first sight is often simply a matter of psychological projection. We find what we are searching for in the other person, whether it is there or not: expectation conditions experience.
From rapport comes authority. We believe our friends, but we also believe people who agree with us, and share our view of the world. Flattery usually works very well at creating rapport, and when someone has shown us that they have the discernment to appreciate our superior qualities, we are open to their opinions about other matters, too.
Once we have sent the first few dollars to the Nigerian heir, the Dutch lottery official or the gorgeous young Malaysian woman, the next tranche of cash comes more easily. Against the protests of her family, one seventy-year old squandered her every last cent – some $300,000 – on a telephone scammer. She lost her home and ended her days on welfare, after alienating her whole family. The power of persuasion is far greater than we like to admit.1
Once we have committed to a course of action, we tend to continue. It is the inertiaof ‘throwing good money after bad.’ Somehow by continuing to fund the Nigerian’s lifestyle, we believe that everything will work out. History is littered with such scams.