This article was first published in the May 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Gary Lyon never tired of sharing his daughter's story: she had leukaemia, but was – at long last – getting excellent treatment in hospital. Fate really must have had it in for him, though: on this particular evening, he had run out of fuel on his way to see her. But he wasn't about to despair. He knew he was surrounded by kind-hearted folk, even if they'd never met before. Could they spare some cash – just £10 or £20 - to get him to the hospital? He would repay them, of course. And their kindness would be well rewarded.
Sometimes, Lyon would be on his way to see his son – likewise in the hospital and likewise awaiting surgery – when he'd run out of fuel. Sometimes, one child or another suffered from a different disease. The specifics of the tale changed from day to day, but the story was always compelling. A sick child, time pressure, a can-you-believe-this emergency. Hardly anyone ever questioned him. The detail was too vivid - and you had to be heartless to leave a man desperate to see his hospitalised child stranded without a car. Strangers willingly opened their wallets.
In February 2015, Lyon, 48, was convicted of multiple counts of theft and fraud at Manchester Crown Court: the money was financing a £50-a-day crack cocaine habit. But that fact, as awful as it was, wasn't what most disgusted the judge. Instead, it was that his daughter really had been sick with leukaemia in the past.
She had since recovered, but Lyon had continued to use her as a prop. No one questions a cancer story – and in that simple fact lies one of the greatest secrets of the ubiquitous success of that oldest of professions, the confidence game. For con artists are consummate storytellers, and stories are more powerful when they come to persuading us and getting us to part with anything, be it trust or validation or cash, than almost anything else. I could refuse to give money to a man whose car broke down – I can question the fact, ask to see the vehicle, offer a ride to a garage – but I can't refuse to be generous to a man who's trying to make it to a sick child. As Henry James put it so well, stories happen to the people who know how to tell them: the ability to weave a compelling narrative is power over people's actions.
In 1997, Princeton University psychologist Deborah Prentice and her colleagues presented an intriguing finding. In his 1988 novel The Lyre of Orpheus, Robertson Davies presents a character, Maria, who speaks about foetal alcohol syndrome. Many of Maria's assertions are patently false: she claims, for instance, that you have "to drink rather a lot to be in danger", whereas, in truth, even certain amounts at critical periods are enough to do sustained damage.
All the same, they found, people reading such incorrect information tended to accept what they read as true – even though they knew, theoretically, that they were reading fiction. In two studies, students expressed belief in false statements that peppered several passages – including such seeming whoppers as the notion that a lot of sunshine can be good for your skin because of its effects on stimulating your immune system. Swept up in the story, they simply assumed the information it told was accurate. Prentice concluded that stories require "a willing construction of disbelief". We are primed to believe them and have to make a concerted, conscious effort to do otherwise.
We will only verify what we hear if we are "motivated and able" to do so. What a well-told story does is circumvent the second stage of what Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says is our default way of interpreting reality: first, we accept everything as true and only then do we reflect, question and, if necessary, correct our initial perception. If we are presented with a logical argument, we go through that precise process. If, however, we are faced with an emotional story, we get stuck at point one. We assume its truth. We are moved by it. We act on it. We don't verify or question it. And in that presumption of faith lies narrative's great strength – and the con artist's great power.
Gary Lyon is no exception. Among grifters, he is the rule, someone so adept at crafting compelling fictions that he renders us unable to say no, unwilling to question. He saps the very motivation and ability we need to verify his claims. And so, rather than raise an eyebrow, we hand over money. It's what all con artists do so well: tell us tales that make us empathise with them, that make us want, in a sense, to fall for the con they are peddling.
And that's the greatest lesson we can learn from the confidence game. Beware of stories. The more emotional, the more they make us empathise, the more we should make certain to verify them. We shouldn't, of course, become inveterate cynics who dismiss everyone's pain. But when a story comes with a punch line – a request, a call to action – we would do best to take a step back and parse what, precisely, we're being told. For stories can manipulate us in ways nothing else quite can. We needn't dismiss our emotion. We may just do well to ensure that, in its wake, we don't leave all logic by the wayside.
Maria Konnikova is a contributing writer forThe New Yorker. Her second book,The Confidence Game(Canongate), is out now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
