The Boston Globe looks into the art of the con and psychology of trust. Researchers have found that our we make judgements upon initial introduction, usually based on how closely appearance and other superficial factors mirror our own.
Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone’s trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we’ve grown close.
Once these impressions are made, it is very hard to override them– “unbelieving the unbelievable.”
…Though we live in an era of worry over faceless Internet predators and Web identity thieves, we can be at our most vulnerable face-to-face.
Alex Pentland’s study of signals, mimicry and his so-called Sociometer are mentioned in the article. His book, Honest Signals is due to be released in October.
An interview with Luc Sante in The Believer:
What’s the appeal to you of property criminals such as hucksters, card cheats, swindlers, bank robbers, and con men?
They tend to use words in interesting ways. Also they work hard at living well without working, which is the unrealized wish of pretty much everybody.
And answering a different question:
The founding myth of this country involves pushing farther and farther out into terra incognita, cutting ties to family and background, maybe adopting a new name and a completely concocted new identity, and somehow making lots of money, the existence of which in sufficient quantity is enough to stifle any questions about its provenance. The land that formerly belonged to the Sioux, the copper that formerly belonged to the Navaho, the skins that formerly belonged to the beavers, the stake that formerly belonged to the miner who caught diphtheria—they’re yours now, pal. Call yourself “Colonel” and declare that your fortune was left to you by Dutch burghers from the seventeenth century. Now you’re a solid citizen, the embodiment of hard work and rugged individualism. You’re no criminal. The criminal is the guy who comes up short, who gets caught, who fails to adopt a respectable cover. But after a while the solid citizen gets to missing those wild years, even as he is ensconced in his forty-room Carrera-marble Beaux-Arts palace on upper Fifth Avenue. He thinks wistfully of how he used to hop freights, sleep in culverts, drink white lightning in hobo jungles, take a sash-weight to his competitors, go through the pockets of the recently dead. He envies those who live that life now denied him forevermore. It seems to him that he’s a prisoner of his own success and that those yeggs out there are truly free.
