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.

I love this somewhat creepy letter to readers from Åsa Larsson, former tax lawyer and author of several chilling thrillers set in rural Sweden, explaining how she came up with the victim for her first book, The Savage Altar, which was published by Penguin in the UK by for the first time.

NEVER trust an author. He or she is perfectly capable of taking everything you say or do and making it into a lovely soup to serve up to his or her readers. Never let an author into your house.

Then I caught sight of some photographs standing on a cupboard there in her kitchen. They were pictures of Lena’s children and her nieces and nephews. And in one of the photographs was her eldest son, Fredrik. It was as if an electric shock ran through me when I looked at the picture of him. He’d grown up so much. When I lived in Kiruna, he was just a little boy. But this picture showed a young man.

He’s so good looking, I thought, experiencing a real jolt at how quickly time passes, and the fact that nothing lasts forever.

He had long, fair hair. And I knew he played the violin.

He looks like a saint, I thought.

Then I thought:

He’d make such a beautiful corpse.

Her friend’s response upon reading the finished manuscript and being asked permission:

“Fine,” she said in her terse Kiruna way when she’d finished reading it. “You can publish it. But you’re not spending any time alone with our children from now on.”

The Savage Altar was published in the United States in 2006 as Sun Storm. Åsa Larsson’s newest book, The Black Path, was published in August.

…some jackass steals two of your hubcaps while you are at band practice.