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Alphachatterbox: Maria Konnikova Cardiff Garcia So first of all, Maria, thanks for coming to talk to us. Maria Konnikova Thank you so much for having me. Cardiff Garcia Okay, here's where I want to start. I want to ask you about methodological issues, which is something I like to talk about with a lot of our guests who are either social-science researchers or people who write about social science. You happen to be a bit of both, right? Maria Konnikova Yes. Cardiff Garcia You have a PhD in psychology. I would imagine that this gives you a real edge when you look at psychology papers because you can be a little bit more scrutinising. For psychology, as with economics, you have to know a little bit about statistical techniques. You also have to know about study design. We know that a lot of findings in psychology turn out not to be robust to subsequent evidence. So I guess my first question is, when you look at a piece of psychology research, what are you looking for to see if it's legit and something you can confidently write about, or if it's something you should probably more safely ignore for now? Maria Konnikova Yes, it's a really good question and there are definitely ways that I can weed papers out right away. Now, there are no flags that say, this is definitely going to be good, I have to read it, and sometimes after investing half an hour you realise you also have to throw it out. But some of those red flags at the beginning (and these are, I think, things that people can pick up pretty easily): study size, obviously. So if I see a paper and there are 20 people in it and the thesis is something huge about social psychology, I'm probably not going to read the rest of it because that is such a tiny, tiny sample size and we're not looking at some cancer trial. It's very, very different. You need large numbers in social psych. Is it a randomised trial? What are the control groups? What is the actual study design? Because oftentimes you'll have people making claims and you'll realise that you can't make that claim unless you had very specific controls.

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So for instance, is cognitive behavioural therapy effective? Let's just get a random question, and I haven't written about this, so this is something that I have no skin in the game. You see that they have, you know, 100 people went in for cognitive behavioural therapy and 100 people did nothing. That's not a very effective study design because we know from a lot of previous research that simply doing something and simply talking to someone is incredibly effective, so there's no actual control group for this because doing nothing is not the control group you would want. You would want to test it against different types of therapies. You'd want to test it against just having coffee with someone for half an hour who has no therapeutic background, so you'd need to have the right controls for whatever it is you're trying to prove. And then you do have to look eventually at the statistics, at their methods. And I'm not strong on statistics. I basically got away with, when I was doing my PhD, just learning what I needed to learn to analyse my own data and to figure out how to design those studies. I'm not one of those people who's very data-heavy. So I can look at it and see, what's the effect size basically? Is it tiny? Is it pretty big? what did you control for? There are certain things you can look for. What were the tests that you used? Why did you use them? I think the most important thing is what did you find and how crazy is, it versus not. The crazier the finding, the heavier, I think, the burden of proof. Cardiff Garcia Yes, you write in your articles sometimes about research that might not be able to stand up to that kind of scrutiny. You've written about how a lot of people think that we can glean something about people's relationships based on their social media activity. You were a little bit skeptical in that piece about whether or not that's going to hold up. Maria Konnikova Yes. I think that you have to do that. I try to be very careful never to write about a single study and so this particular piece that you're referring to… There was one big study – Big Data's such a hot term right now, as soon as you hear Big Data people think, oh, this must be right because you're relying on so much data. No, you have to be even more careful in some sense because the more data there is, the more things you might find and the more of it might be spurious and so you really need to be careful. So what I always try to do is put it into context so say theoretically what are the bases for these claims. I always go back in time. So this is a little bit energy-inefficient but I think it's incredibly useful. When you look at all of the references in the paper – and basically what I look at is what are the oldest references – I actually read those papers, see what

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they reference, try to trace the intellectual history and figure out: where are we, what's the context for this and why are we making these claims? That's why sometimes you think, this might not stand up because people have thought this in the past and we've actually had something quite similar. The data were different because we didn't have Twitter but the premise was the same. Cardiff Garcia Yes. The other piece of yours that I really liked that followed a similar logic was about whether or not people were more moral in the morning versus at night. You found that actually it doesn't really matter if it's morning or night. What matters is whether or not the person is himself or herself a morning person or a night person. Maria Konnikova Yes. It's a fit with our chronotype and people forget this all the time. Cardiff Garcia Wait, what's a chronotype? Maria Konnikova That's, are you a night owl or a lark, so basically what does your genetic internal clock say? Every single person is born with a certain genotype which predisposes you to be a morning person or a night person, and there are people who are kind of in-between. But mostly you do have a chronotype that will change as you age but that will govern when you're at your best. We live in a society that's really a lark society. It's built by larks and there's a lot of moralism in that, there's so much judgment. I think in the piece I quote Ben Franklin: early to bed, early to rise... There are so many of those maxims. The early bird catches the worm. And what time do you have to get into the office every day and if you have kids what time do they go to school? So it's really a society that's structured so that the only people who are matching their chronotype to the structure of the day are the larks. So then you see it's very easy to come to a false conclusion and to say that, oh, larks are better and they're more moral because they don't cheat as often, etc, etc. But when you actually look at it you realise that you are missing half the variables. You are missing this fit which is incredibly important. So if you make a lark take a test at night they're going to cheat much more than the owl. It's just that we normally don't take tests at night. I think this is so important when you're doing any sort of data analysis or when you're thinking about anything. We don't look at the missing information. We tend to just look at what's in front of us, but even for journalists, for anyone, you have to try to figure out. What are people not saying? What are they not looking at? What are the potentially missing variables? Because that could be the story, and if you're not even going there you're going to miss the story.

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Cardiff Garcia And precisely because society seems to conform to their preferences, more larks can be unbearably smug about stuff like this. Maria Konnikova Yes. Cardiff Garcia And I say that speaking as very much an owl. Maria Konnikova I'm an owl as well, yes. Cardiff Garcia Although to our listeners, we're taping this at about 11:00 in the morning so I'm past my jerk phase. It's late enough in the morning that everything's fine now. Maria Konnikova Excellent. Cardiff Garcia I guess I ask this because people love to read about quirky findings. And the simpler the better. The more usable the better. And because of that, because there's more demand for it, journalists like to write about it, and this seems to have become increasingly a problem because, with the way media is now, things can proliferate so much faster. And so you see what looks like an incredible finding and there's a rush to write about it and then it gets everywhere before the appropriate amount of scrutiny can be applied. Maria Konnikova Absolutely. Cardiff Garcia Kind of frustrating. Maria Konnikova It's really frustrating, and I think it gives a lot of science a bad name. It gives a lot of journalists a bad name and sometimes the problem isn't with the science because the scientists sometimes don't make these strong claims. If you read the original papers, they caveat it. They say, this is very preliminary, this is all we found. But most people don't take the time to read that. And you have the press releases and the press releases are saying, butter cures cancer – we know, we love butter. And all of a sudden you get headlines that say, butter cures cancer. Sure, it's a little bit lazy journalism too, I'm not letting journalists off the hook because it's our job to disregard press releases. But I think that sometimes, especially if you're younger and you're more inexperienced and you need clips, the pace of media has become much faster. Although sometimes I'll look at some of the original yellow journalism papers from the 1800s and early 1900s and I think, oh, my God. Cardiff Garcia Yes, it's true.

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Maria Konnikova It's not new. Cardiff Garcia People who despair at the state of journalism don't know enough about journalism's origins, I think. Maria Konnikova My God, if you look at the Hearst publications, some of those headlines you just open your eyes and your mouth and your heart drops and you think, that was the front page news! Cardiff Garcia Right. There's another reason I asked about this though. In a post you did at the end of last year on The New Yorker, you listed the six most interesting psychology papers from 2015. One of those was a study by the Reproducibility Project, which was this collaboration of researchers where they essentially tried to replicate the findings of, I forget how many papers, but it might have been in the thousands even, at least in the hundreds. The findings were either fine or terrible depending on your interpretation. I think they managed to replicate somewhere between a third and a half of the papers, which doesn't necessarily mean that the other half of the papers are wrong. But it did lead a lot of people to wonder if psychology has a bit of a problem, specifically – and this is what you say in your post – with emphasising novelty over rigour, I guess. Can you just talk about how important that paper was and whether or not you think it'll bring about any changes? Maria Konnikova I think it's incredibly important to ask those sorts of questions because what ends up happening – psychology is about humans, it's about how we think and so a lot of people read psychology, and by people now I mean the general public – in a different way than they would read an economics paper that they don't think actually applies to their life. So then you have people making lifestyle changes. This is true of nutrition too, so actually what I'm saying about psychology is also true about a lot of medical stuff, so the stuff that you can apply personally. So what ends up happening a lot – and I think that this is happening everywhere in academia, it's just very evident in psychology – that there's tremendous pressure to publish. So if you want a job in academia, if you want tenure, you need tons of publications. And so people try to just churn stuff out as much as they can, and so the rigour gets lost because it's quantity over quality, and basically the incentive structure is all wrong. I think that papers like this, like Nosek's Reproducibility Project, are incredibly important because if people pay attention to that, it might actually push the pendulum a little bit back to the centre – where we're looking more qualitatively and we're saying, okay, you know what, we don't care if you have 20 studies if no-one has cited them. If they haven't been reproduced, what actually matters is: Has this finding been reproduced? Have you reproduced it? What is the evidence behind this?

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It's also a problem with the journals. So journals like Psych Science, like PNAS, which is the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, even Nature sometimes – they love these huge findings. Because they also want the headlines, that's good for them, that's good for their citations. And so there are a lot of bad incentives here, and I think eliminating those incentives… Ultimately if you are a psychologist you should be striving for the truth about how humans work, not about a good finding. You actually want something that will explain human nature. And that's a lofty goal. Cardiff Garcia What's interesting about the findings of that paper too is that psychologists are the ones who have been studying cognitive biases increasingly for the last few decades, and it seems as if they themselves are as vulnerable to cognitive biases as anybody else. Maria Konnikova Oh, absolutely. One of the things that Daniel Kahneman will tell you right away is that he's spent his career looking at biases and heuristics – he won the Nobel Prize for it – he still has every single one of them. That's why they're so powerful. Knowing about them, you can try to correct for them. But ultimately you will still exhibit them and I think if this is your career – and I've written before about how difficult it is to get people to change their minds, especially about things that are central to their self-perception and their self-image – if this is what you've built your career on... Not to pick on anyone, but just because he's one of the people who was in the early replication crisis: John Bargh, who did all of these studies at Yale on whether social priming works – priming is this effect where if I prime you with an idea, then that idea will influence you later on without your knowledge… Cardiff Garcia Subliminally. Maria Konnikova Exactly. For instance this is one of his most famous ones. It's called the Florida Effect. If I give you a crossword puzzle and a lot of those words are things like grey and Florida and old and Alzheimer's, then you'll start walking more slowly as you leave the experiment. This was a really big finding because people start feeling old. This was the tip of the replication crisis iceberg because when people tried to replicate that, they couldn't. They couldn't replicate a lot of the social priming findings. Does that mean social priming is wrong? No. But it does mean that we need to try to figure out what's going on. Why isn't it replicating? Maybe the effect is a little bit different, maybe it's a little bit more fragile.

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It teaches you more about it. But if you're John Bargh you're going to actually just dismiss all of these attempts as just terrible, terrible people being out for blood, because this is who you are. Cardiff Garcia We're going to talk about your book later. There is this scene in the book where the pickpocket artist Apollo Robbins essentially gave you a choice, of choosing between three items and he kept guessing in advance exactly which item you would choose. And it's because he had primed you. It seems to work. Maria Konnikova Yes, it worked perfectly. It was in the way that he asked the questions. But he's brilliant, he is one of the best magicians in the world and I was there and he was helping me with the book. And so I knew that he was doing something and for the life of me I just couldn't do it! Cardiff Garcia Still couldn't resist it, right. That's actually a good segue for my next question, which is partly about economics. This podcast is normally about economics and business. Within economics there's been increasing emphasis on the way people are affected by their circumstances. So the one rock-hard belief in economics is that incentives matter. But increasingly it seems a lot of economists are admitting that circumstances matter as well. A lot of the findings that come out of psychology and behavioural economics are about certain quotidian, mundane things – like if you have a bigger bowl of soup, you're going to end up eating more soup, that kind of thing. But actually it seems to apply to much bigger issues as well. So the book “Scarcity” by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir talks about how not having enough of something affects people's mindset in a way that ends up being really self-defeating. Maria Konnikova Yes, absolutely, yes. Cardiff Garcia It could be a lack of money, a lack of time, whatever it is that you need to essentially accomplish something. If there's a scarcity of it, it messes with you. This has been, I think, a pretty profound shift in economics, understanding the impact of circumstances on people's everyday lives. I guess I'm wondering if you've detected a similar trend in psychology. Or if, because it's psychology, it's just always been there and now it's gaining more prominence. Maria Konnikova I think the answer is actually yes to both. So because it's psychology it has always been there to some extent. But psychologists have actually gone back and forth on how much of a person's decisions, how much of a person's thinking or abilities, is dependent on them versus the situation. In the earlier part of the 20th century there were things like the fundamental attribution error, where people said, okay, we often attribute things to the person that we should actually be attributing to the situation.

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So if I snap at you and you've never met me before you might say, oh, she is a not very nice person and you'd just say, I don't like her, she's nasty. What if I was stuck in traffic for an hour and I lost my wallet and all this stuff happened before I came, and so I just snapped and it had nothing to do with you but I'm just in a really terrible mental place right now? Fundamental attribution error: you are attributing to me what you should be attributing to my circumstances. And you read it as an aspect of myself. What people have found since then is that actually the fundamental attribution error can go both ways. So in some societies – if you go to Eastern culture where a lot of those societies are much more outwardly focused, there's still the fundamental attribution error. But people are much more likely to over-attribute to circumstances rather than to the person. So you see me and I keep snapping at you over and over and you keep saying, oh, this must have happened, oh, that must have happened... Cardiff Garcia She's having a bad day or whatever. Maria Konnikova Exactly, but the real answer might be I'm just a nasty person! Cardiff Garcia You're just a jerk, right. Maria Konnikova So the thinking has shifted a little bit to realise that both things matter and what you need to figure out – and this goes to economics because you can do a probability weighting – you can see what, given the information I have and given what I know, is likely to be weighed more, and what's likely to matter more. And in my thinking am I over-attributing to something else. Cardiff Garcia Okay, before we get to your new book, The Confidence Game, we are going to do a speed round. Because you're a prolific writer but you also cover quite a wide range of topics. I'm just going to name a topic that you've written about. Tell us the most important thing we should know about it and then we'll keep going. Maria Konnikova Is “I forget” a good answer? Cardiff Garcia I forget is a good answer, after which I'll give you a minute to remember and then we'll go right back into it. Maria Konnikova All right, excellent! Cardiff Garcia Ready? Maria Konnikova Yes. Cardiff Garcia Here we go, this is going to be fun.

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Open-plan offices. Maria Konnikova Bad, bad, bad idea. All of the evidence says it's bad for productivity, it's bad for happiness, you're going to have worse workers. Even people who think that they're better end up performing worse than they do otherwise and – and this is something that employers should think about – originally open-plan offices were used to save money. Nobody likes to admit this. Now it's all sorts of, oh, we want communication It's really a money-saving device because you don't have to build walls or offices. What ends up happening is you lose money because people get sick much more often because germs get spread in an open environment in a way that they don't... and people are also more stressed because of noise. Stress makes you more vulnerable to getting sick. More people miss work and so you end up losing money. So that's an economic incentive argument that should basically make everyone say, no more open offices. Because even the thing that we want to protect, our bottom line, is being hurt by this. Cardiff Garcia Okay, I set you up a little bit on that one. Open-plan offices is one of my favourite topics. I think they're horrible and I've been waging a campaign against them for a little while now. But last year I went down the rabbit-hole on this and I read your piece on it, but something occurred to me more recently. We had Anders Ericsson in here. He's the psychologist who studied deliberate practice. He made the point that the way you go from being mediocre or even above average to being really great at what you do is through deliberate practice, which is usually solitary. It requires deep focus and it requires an awareness of what you're doing right and wrong as you go along. In an open-plan office the environment seems almost perfectly geared towards stopping that altogether. And so when people use this justification that in an open-plan office you have these spontaneous meetings, have these ideas collide, my question now is: Who cares if those ideas are coming from your mediocre staff because they were never able to go from being mediocre to great? Maria Konnikova Yes, no, I think that I such an important point. It's a great insight because one of the things that I've studied is creativity, and where does creativity come from and where does deep thinking... My first book was about mindfulness, long before mindfulness became a buzzword. Now I'm embarrassed to say my first book was about mindfulness! Cardiff Garcia Your timing was terrible! Maria Konnikova I know! It came out right before. In order to actually think, in order to have creative breakthroughs, in order for ideas to come together you need

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quiet time. You need to be able to quiet your mind and you need to work free of distraction because ideas take time to germinate. It's not as if you're walking along and Eureka happens. Eureka can only happen if you first have hours and hours of quiet contemplation. And as soon as your train of thought is broken up you have to start all over. And so I think that it really precludes a lot of deep thinking. But what I will say about that is that is not just a problem with open offices. That's also a problem with our obsession with multi-tasking and Twitter and Facebook and having 20 tabs open at once. You can't have that deep, deliberate practice if you're doing that either. That's like an open office on your computer so you need to make sure to cultivate it internally as well as in your external environment. Cardiff Garcia Your own working environment. How do you like to get everything organised for yourself? Maria Konnikova I work from home as much as I can. I hate going in the office because you get interrupted and lots of things happen. I set aside time for social media because for us it's important to do. It's part of what you are, part of your brand, part of your engagement with readers, part of the way you get ideas because you see what's happening. So I set aside time when I do that, and otherwise my dirty little secret is I pre-schedule tweets and I'm not actually there sending them out. Otherwise I have a program for my computer called Freedom which turns off my internet completely. Cardiff Garcia Okay, so you compartmentalise your internet time versus your writing and your focus time. Maria Konnikova Yes, when I'm writing. Sometimes I can't because I actually need to be doing research and so what I try to do then is to just not have any of those browser windows open so I don't have Twitter open, I don't have my email open. I've learned that nobody has ever died when I haven't responded to an email quickly, so that has yet to happen. I'm waiting for the day that does happen and then I won't be able to say that any more! But so far no lives have been lost. Cardiff Garcia Do you work in the quiet or do you have music on? Maria Konnikova Quiet. Even music can be a distraction so I either work in the quiet or I can also work in cafes. There's actually some really interesting work that tells you why cafes are good, because it's a background buzzing noise and once you filter it out you're actually in the zone. Because you've taken the energy to filter it out.

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The reason this doesn't work, going back to open offices, is they're talking about things that are relevant to you, and there are conversations that are loud and you can't filter that out, especially because sometimes it's directed to you. In a cafe they're talking about things you don't care about so it is actually background noise. Cardiff Garcia I like cafes except that every once in a while the blender starts running. Maria Konnikova Oh, that's terrible. Cardiff Garcia I guess if it's a very loud, acute noise – because I like the general buzz too – but when it's a really loud, acutely-heard noise... Maria Konnikova No, can't do that. Cardiff Garcia Then it's a problem for me. Maria Konnikova It is a problem, yes. Cardiff Garcia Next topic: the importance of sleep. Maria Konnikova Hugely important and undervalued, and I think one of the most important things is that you do not know how much sleep you need. Because after a few days of getting too little sleep, people stop realising that they're functioning at an impaired level. They think that they're at their optimal level still, they no longer see the difference. So when you ask someone, do you get enough sleep, they'll be like, oh, yes, I'm totally fine, I function perfectly on six hours of sleep. Chances are you don't. Because most people do not function perfectly on six hours of sleep. So if I were to put you in a sleep lab you would sleep for 12 hours the first night. Cardiff Garcia To make up for the deficit. Maria Konnikova Yes, exactly, and then you'd probably average out at between eight and nine hours, which is much more than all of us usually get. Cardiff Garcia Then most people aren't getting enough sleep. Maria Konnikova Most people are chronically under-slept and we do a lot of things that impair our sleep. I did a whole series on this. So modern society's not very well-equipped for sleep and I think that's making us much worse off. We should really be valuing it more and if we did we'd have much more productive people – and students. Cardiff Garcia Okay. This was not from the New Yorker, it was from an article on Aeon: pornography and whether it desensitises people to more healthy sexual pleasure.

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Maria Konnikova No, in fact it might sensitise them more. Cardiff Garcia It enhances it. Maria Konnikova It enhances sexual pleasure. And pornography addiction, as far as we know, is not real. Cardiff Garcia There is a reason I like this piece too, and it's not just because it talks about porn. It seems this was a good example of how psychology done the right way can help to dispel received wisdom, wisdom that's passed down through generations, but that turned out to be totally wrong even though it sounds like common sense. Maria Konnikova Absolutely. I got a lot of pretty nasty push-back against this piece because people don't want to believe it's true. It's a very moralistic high ground that this cannot possibly be true because pornography is bad. It comes with a lot of judgment. So when you give people the evidence they say, oh, that can't be right, you're cherry-picking your evidence – when if I had done the exact same piece with the opposite evidence they'd say, yes, I told you so. So you see that sort of confirmation bias. That happens all the time when people believe so strongly in something but it happens much more when it's received wisdom, and when you feel you have the moral high ground. And I really came at this with no preconceived notions. I watched some of my first porn in researching this piece because I needed to know what I was dealing with, so I had no idea and I really looked at all the evidence It's interesting that here you have so much stuff coming together – the sociology, epidemiology, psychology – and they're all pointing to the fact that pornography isn't actually doing anything bad. Cardiff Garcia What was interesting in the piece too is that in the surveys that you cited, most people do think that it desensitises you to sexual pleasure. Maria Konnikova Yes, absolutely. Cardiff Garcia I don't think it stops them from actually watching it. But most people believe that it's problematic, and it's too bad because probably a lot of people might be looking at it and feeling guilty for exactly that reason. Maria Konnikova That's exactly right. Cardiff Garcia And they shouldn't. Maria Konnikova Right, and that's the problem. So the big problem is the guilt, and the fact that social expectations are so against this, that it actually does create psychological problems. Which actually might lead to problems with sexual arousal

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that have nothing to do with the pornography but everything to do with being guilty about experiencing certain feelings. Guilt is a very powerful anti-aphrodisiac. What's the opposite of aphrodisiac? Cardiff Garcia Next up: Donald Trump as con man. Maria Konnikova I have tried to be so careful about this. Given the preponderance of evidence we have, we have a good case for saying that Donald Trump exhibits all of the characteristics that one associates with a con artist. Cardiff Garcia Which isn't a conclusive argument, it's a suggestive one. Maria Konnikova Yes, it's a suggestive argument. Now, if he loses this last lawsuit against Trump University then we'll actually be able to say he's a con artist, because he'll be convicted of fraud. Cardiff Garcia A convicted fraudster; okay. Maria Konnikova Yes, but until then we can say that it certainly appears that he shares every single characteristic that I enumerate in my con artist [book]. Cardiff Garcia Which we will get to soon. We've got two more topics. MOOCs, or massive, open online courses. Maria Konnikova The evidence so far is not very pro-MOOC. It shows that a lot of them need to change for them to actually be a viable alternative to education. There's something very good about having learning that's accessible everywhere. But when you look at the data, it ends up that the people who end up succeeding in MOOCs are the people who already have some educational background, who don't actually really need them, and who succeed in other environments as well. And the people who need them the most, the people who don't have access to other education, unless they're very self-motivated, self-driven and very good at educating themselves – which does happen – will get lost. So far I don't think MOOCs have figured out, how do you actually serve the students who need you the most? Cardiff Garcia I guess I wonder if that's a problem of design - by design I just mean the architecture of how you find a MOOC, and how you get the most usefulness out of it – in addition to being a problem of just resources. You could be the type of person who would gain the most from it. It might mean that you just don't have the money to go to a four-year university or something like that, but that also works against you in terms of finding one of these courses.

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Maria Konnikova Absolutely. I think the truth is that we like to think that everyone has access to all online resources. That's simply not true. There are big parts even of the United States that don't have good internet access and that can't even have these resources. And then, of course, even if you do find them, at least for now it seems that people learn better in person, and people learn better when they have people around them that they can talk about ideas with and they can learn from, and that you have a live professor. So actually there's compelling evidence that MOOCs might never be able to function on their own. Let me give you an example that's external to MOOCs. Electronic textbooks, textbooks on e-readers. There was a big push toward them a decade or so ago and people said, oh, this is the future, everyone's going to want these textbooks. Cardiff Garcia Textbooks are so expensive. Maria Konnikova Right. Didn't work because even children who've grown up with screens prefer physical books because it ends up that you learn much better from a physical book than you do from a screen and even people who've grown up with screens, so textbooks haven't gone anywhere and now the e-textbooks are on the wane. Education is something where we know what works, and some of these new things might work as well, they might work in tandem with some of the traditional stuff. We just need to test it and figure out what the optimal mix is. The truth is we're not there yet and I'm not sure if we'll be there in a few years or in ten years. Cardiff Garcia Right, this is one of things where maybe the optimism about technology got away from us a little bit. Maria Konnikova Exactly. I think people say, of course this is going to work, that's the optimistic... and I don't know that that's necessarily true. I'm optimistic that it will work in some sort of form, but we need to figure out what that form is and whether it will always need to be supplemented by some sort of in-person environment. Cardiff Garcia Which reminds me of another thing, the idea that you learn better from a physical textbook versus an electronic textbook. I think there are also studies, or maybe it's just one study, showing that you remember things better when you write them down by pen rather than typing them out. There's something about the tactile experience that affects you somehow. Maria Konnikova Yes, I've actually written about this as well. Cardiff Garcia I'm not surprised!

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Maria Konnikova I'm really fascinated by this area and yes, it turns out that your memory is much better when you take notes by hand than when you take them on a laptop. And there are two reasons. One is the physical memory and the other is that most people write more slowly than they type and so you actually have to pay attention and process the information. Cardiff Garcia Absorb it better. Maria Konnikova You already have to figure out what's the gist of this, what's the important point. So you've already done that processing, so that you can take the notes. When you type you can be much more mindless about it. You don't actually have to process what the professor or the teacher's saying, you just write it down and so it just goes in one ear and out your fingers, without actually stopping in the middle. Cardiff Garcia That's interesting because when you say physical memory, you mean the actual act of writing in the shape of the letters and the words, and that kind of thing – that that implants itself a little bit better than just typing it up on the screen and maybe subliminally you think, I'll just come back to it, so you forget. Maria Konnikova And you don't because you're not... so you do have that physical memory of writing it out and you also have the thinking, the cognitive processing that has to happen. And it simply doesn't have to happen if you're typing because you don't have to wrestle with the ideas, you don't have to try to understand, this is the important thing. That's not even to mention the fact that if you need to make some sort of visual diagram, you can do that really quickly if you're writing notes. But you can't do that on a computer very quickly. So if you're typing and all of a sudden there's something where you need to draw a picture to understand the information, you can't, whereas if you're writing it takes three seconds. Cardiff Garcia Last topic of the speed round: the marshmallow experiment and self-control. Maria Konnikova This is a loaded question because Walter Michel was my graduate advisor. Cardiff Garcia Okay, that's all right, you've disclosed whatever potential bias you need to disclose. Maria Konnikova Yes, so that's my bias. I did my dissertation, I worked with the marshmallow students. They're now in their 40s. They're no longer children and I will say that it's an incredibly important finding.

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It's one of these things where… I'm sure that everyone knows what the marshmallow study is, but for those who don't: Basically if you're three or four years old and you get a marshmallow – or anything, it doesn't have to be a marshmallow – in front of you and someone tells you, if you wait you'll get two, and I'll be out here and I'll be back and if you can't wait then ring this bell and you can eat it right now. Then you see how long these kids can wait and it turns out that the minutes of waiting translate to all sorts of things throughout life. Higher SAT scores, higher educational attainment, better health. You're less likely to use drugs. All sorts of crazy outcomes are tied to your ability to wait at that age. This has been replicated many, many times over and I think that it's so effective because it's a situationally-determined trait. So we're not actually just saying self-control in the abstract. We're saying self-control in a situation where it's incredibly difficult for you to exercise self-control. So you wouldn't give me a marshmallow. I hate marshmallows. You would give me something that I love so you would find for every single person what is the thing that they can't resist, and that's what you put in front of them. When you're three years old it's really hard to wait. Seven minutes for a three-year-old or a four-year-old is an eternity. It's not like an adult waiting for seven minutes. I think the most interesting things from that study are not how long you wait but what is it about those kids that enables them to wait. So you look at their strategies; some sing songs to themselves, they tell stories, they distract themselves, they pretend that the marshmallow isn't really a marshmallow. They do all sorts of crazy things and you can teach people those strategies to help them have better self-control over situations. Cardiff Garcia It's got to be a fun experiment to watch, too. As the kids start dancing around the room or something, trying... Maria Konnikova Oh, it's amazing, I love those videos. There's one, my favourite – and this kid failed the test – this was with Oreo cookies. There was an Oreo cookie in front of him too and he had to wait so that he could have those. He waits for a little bit and then he looks around, makes sure that no-one's there – obviously doesn't realise he's being filmed – opens the cookies and eats out all the cream and then puts them back and sits and looks like this, as if he's never done anything wrong. Cardiff Garcia Very clever. Maria Konnikova So he obviously failed. But that kid's going places. Cardiff Garcia That's great. Maria Konnikova He might become a con artist.

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Cardiff Garcia He might, and that is in fact the perfect place to transition into discussing The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It Every Time. I hope you're not too run-down in discussing this book. It's been all over the place. It looks like it had to be a lot of fun to write. It certainly was a lot of fun to read. You note in the acknowledgements that you were partly inspired to write it because of David Mamot's House of Cards, Great movie. One of my favourites is The Sting, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Maria Konnikova Amazing. Cardiff Garcia There's something beguiling, something seductive about watching someone pull the wool over somebody else's eyes. What do you think it is? Maria Konnikova Oh, absolutely. I think part of the answer stems from what we call them: confidence artists. There's an artistry to this. When you look at a criminal, if someone holds you up of course you're going to give them your wallet. But a con artist talks you into handing them your wallet and saying, please take it, in a metaphorical sense. So they convince you to do things, they make you complicit. That doesn't mean that the victim is to blame. Being complicit in this sense is very different. You're convinced that you're acting out of your own self-interest. So they're craftsmen. And it's really terrifying but it's also beautiful to watch, because you see them convincing people of all sorts of things. They're like magicians. Why do we love to go into a magic show and be fooled? So con artists are doing the same thing, and obviously it's not as innocent as in a magic show. But it's still just as interesting to watch it unfold, especially when you're not the one who's being taken advantage of. Cardiff Garcia Right. I guess it seems as if, in these movies at least, there are these subterranean layers of psychological processes where all these weird things are happening. And partly it's probably interesting because we don't understand exactly how it is that the person got conned. In that sense I read your book as a sympathetic portrait of people who get conned. Maria Konnikova Yes. Cardiff Garcia That would have been a way worse title. But it seems to be one of the themes that holds everything together. And it turns out that the people who get conned are all of us.

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Maria Konnikova Yes, absolutely and I'm so glad you read it that way because that's how I wrote it. Ultimately I wrote it for the victims. I wanted to give people permission to come forward and say, I've been conned, and to realise that it's okay. As much as we glamorise con artists, we do the opposite with victims. We blame them. We say, how could you be so stupid? Cardiff Garcia Yeah, you're a dope. How could you fall for it. Maria Konnikova Exactly. How could anyone fall for that, you can't fool an honest man, are you dishonest, are you greedy? We have all of these victim-blaming tactics because, I think, we want to believe that it could never happen to us. And we want to distance ourselves from those people, and we want to point to a flaw because then we can say, I'm not greedy so I can't be conned; I'm not stupid so I can't be conned. It's a way out for us, when in fact you get really smart people, really honest people - in fact the more honest you are in some ways the easier you are to con - people who don't have a greedy bone in their body and they can be victims because that's not what cons are about. Too many people think this is all about money when it's really not. A lot of con artists make no money whatsoever from their cons and a lot of them would have been much more successful in more legitimate professions So I think for them it's not about the cash, it's about power and it's about that rush of power over other people. Cardiff Garcia A specific kind of power over other people, though. Maria Konnikova Yes. Cardiff Garcia The ability to manipulate emotions. Maria Konnikova Exactly; the ability not just to manipulate emotions but to manipulate their world. You create a world and they inhabit it. They think that it's the true world so you actually get them to believe whatever you want them to believe, and you're kind of playing God, you're creating a little universe. Cardiff Garcia You're a bit of a magician in a way. Maria Konnikova Exactly, you are a magician, you're... Cardiff Garcia You're Prospero. Maria Konnikova You absolutely are. I think the important thing about the greatest magicians is they're not the people who are the best sleight-of-hand artists. They're the people who tell the best stories and manipulate your attention because that's what it's all about.

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It's about making you pay attention to what they want you to pay attention to, so that you ignore the things you're not supposed to be paying attention to. Cardiff Garcia Sure. To get into some more specifics, because I want to stay on the idea of getting conned and the diversity of people who get conned: Although it's true that anybody can be conned, it's also true that certain types of people are more susceptible to certain kinds of cons – let's run through a few examples. So, sad people versus happy people. Maria Konnikova Yes, if you're sad you are much more likely to take some risks when it comes to certain types of decisions. Because chances are if you're sad, something has happened and you want to recalibrate. You want to get out of that position. So you don't like the status quo. You want to change, so you are more likely to do things to change – and so you end up being susceptible often to financial cons and to some financial frauds because you say, oh, I'll gamble, sure, I'll do that. Cardiff Garcia Spontaneous risks. Maria Konnikova Yes, exactly. Cardiff Garcia Impulsive risks. Maria Konnikova Being more of a risk-taker is something that makes you susceptible to cons. But certain emotional states make all of us more willing to take risks. Like being sad. Cardiff Garcia Yes, you give some examples in the book of people who are – to all appearances, to their families, to their co-workers – people who really have it together but it just takes one really bad break (a death in the family, a bad break-up) and all of a sudden they're somebody who ends up walking into a fortune-teller's office, and they get swindled. Maria Konnikova Absolutely. It's one of those things where people think that it doesn't apply to them because, that's not the kind of person I am. But this is what we were talking about earlier in terms of the circumstances versus the person. Circumstances can change, and in the right circumstances anyone can be susceptible because those huge life changes make you very emotionally vulnerable. And con-artists, that's their food, emotional vulnerability. They eat it up and they take advantage of it. So some of the people that I chose specifically for their intelligence who fell for con artists, if you look at them, you have a woman who was working for Goldman Sachs. These are people who are smart people. She makes investment decisions. She is not someone who should be giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to a psychic who's going to reverse a curse on her past life. I say it right now and it just sounds ludicrous.

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Cardiff Garcia Right. Happy people. Maria Konnikova Happy people are also vulnerable to specific types of cons. So if you want someone to win a lottery, happy people are a great target because they are very optimistic. Cardiff Garcia Everything's going great, it'll keep going great. Maria Konnikova So you want to buy into that optimism bias, and happy people are also more vulnerable to basically any sort of approach that tells them how great they are, and how great they will keep doing in the future. So great investment opportunity for you, want some land in Florida, you'll get some great returns on it. Sure, I'm that kind of person, I'm going to do that. So that doesn't seem like a risk. It seems like a safe, sure thing but it might not be something that you would do under other circumstances. So that's one of the things when I say happy, sad, it's not that this is your eternal disposition. Cardiff Garcia Your baseline level of contentment. Maria Konnikova It's just that something... Cardiff Garcia Something has made you really happy; something's made you really sad. Maria Konnikova Exactly, that there's been a life change so this is kind of a bump and you're not at your baseline. Cardiff Garcia You write in the book the story of a friend of yours who I think in the 1980s was in college and went to visit Manhattan for the first time with a friend. She only had $40 – back then $40 was a little more than $40 now but still not a ton of money – $40 to make it through a weekend or something, and she saw one of those guys doing, I have three cards, pick which card I'm holding or whatever. He let her win the first time and that's when he got her. Maria Konnikova Yes, absolutely, three-card monty gets you every time. By the way, this woman went on to get a PhD in sociology. Once again not a stupid person. Cardiff Garcia Smart woman, yes. Maria Konnikova She just… You get caught up in that euphoria and everyone is cheering you on, there's this whole environment and you don't realise that everyone's out to get you. Three-card monty again is a group of people. You have shills who are winning. They have people who are telling you how to beat it.

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She didn't know what three-card monty was but the one thing that gets me is that people who do know exactly what it is still play because they think they know it and they can beat the con-artist. Elementary mistake. Never think that you can out-con a con-artist. You cannot do it! But they think that they'll be able to figure out where the trick is. What they don't realise is that then there's another trick. You will never figure it out, you will never win. But that enticement of, maybe I will win and I'll put one over on them, is so strong that people who should really know better still play. To this day you have three-card monty. Even though I'm far from the first person to write about this, this is one of the most widely-known cons in the US. Cardiff Garcia About a third of the way into the book you introduce the topic of storytelling and its importance to the con. We tend to process the world more through stories than through, I guess, cold logic. We impose stories where there aren't any. How important is that to the process of conning someone and getting conned? Maria Konnikova Crucial. Con artists, at the end of the day, are storytellers. That is what they do, and the ability to craft a good narrative is essential to the ability to con someone into going along with you. Because what ends up happening is that stories make you emotional. So this is your ability to manipulate emotion. As soon as you are immersed in a story your critical thinking cap is off a little bit because you're just following along. And so it's not as if you're trying to pick apart the argument. In fact there are some studies that I read about where people didn't see red flags when they were reading an emotionally compelling story that they saw when those same stories were presented in a newspaper-y kind of account. Cardiff Garcia So they're unknowingly filtering out items that would screw with the story itself. Maria Konnikova Exactly, and con-artists know this and so they give you just enough detail, but not too much detail because your mind fills in all of the blanks and you create the story with them. So they feed you a little. They see how you're reacting and then they figure out where that story's going to go next. So they craft the narrative just for you and then you become part of it. And then you're already invested in it and so not only did you filter out stuff before the fact, you're going to now rationalise away things after the fact. So you'll say, oh, that's not a red flag, no, no, no – this just means he's more honest because I wouldn't have lost any money. He would have made sure that I kept winning if you were a true con artist, see, he's on my side.

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Cardiff Garcia Yes, and it's amazing too because even after the con is revealed people persist in believing it. They really have trouble letting go, after they've lost all their money. Maria Konnikova It's crazy some of the stories that I write about, some of the cons that I write about. You have people on trial, con-artists on trial and their legal expenses are paid for by their victims, because to the end the victims think that this is a farce. It's a conspiracy and that this person is really innocent. This is not just a one-time thing, this happens over and over because once you believe it's really difficult to admit that you were wrong, that you were taken in. Cardiff Garcia Yes, you were wrong all along. Maria Konnikova It's much easier to say, no, no, no, I wasn't wrong, this person isn't a con-artist. There were people with Bernie Madoff... Cardiff Garcia Especially when the story itself was so compelling. Maria Konnikova Yes, absolutely. What I'm about to say is Bernie Madoff's victims – there were red flags and people called him out along the way but nobody believed them. It's not because they were being greedy, it's because they had already invested so much that they really believed in him. And they would point at evidence – and this was brilliant of him – look, he doesn't take money from everyone, this person can't get in with him. If he were just a Ponzi schemer he would take money from everyone, he'd do this, he'd do that. Cardiff Garcia The illusion of exclusivity. It's interesting that that works for almost anything. Maria Konnikova Absolutely. Cardiff Garcia People want to go to a club where there're people out the door. I don't – but in general they do this stuff on purpose where it looks as if only a select few people can get into something. Maria Konnikova It makes you want it. Cardiff Garcia It makes it seem legitimate too. Maria Konnikova It does make it seem legitimate, and people want to associate with those types of people. Think about, throughout history, how many imposters there were that weren't just any imposter but imposters to aristocracy. I read about the daughter of Andrew Carnegie, or we have the Rockefeller people who you want to associate with. You want to be

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their friend, you want to believe them. I want Andrew Carnegie's daughter as my best friend, sure, why not, of course I'll lend her money. Cardiff Garcia Right. Let's talk a little bit about the con-artists themselves. You write about the dark triad of traits. One is nonchalance. I hadn't heard it referred to this way before actually. The more conventional term, I guess, is psychopathy - I don't actually know how to pronounce it. Maria Konnikova Psychopathy. Cardiff Garcia Psychopathy, that's one. Another is narcissism, and then a third is Machiavellianism. But you write also that although those traits might be more prevalent in con artists than in people in other professions, normal professions, legitimate professions, not all con artists necessarily have all there. Maria Konnikova Yes, I think especially psychopathy is more rare than one would think, simply because it's pretty rare in the population. And I think all con artists need to have Machiavellianism because Machiavellianism is the ability to manipulate people without their realising that they're being manipulated. So you get them to do what's in your best interest. All the while they think it's their own idea and that they're doing what's in their best interests, and that's the essence of how a con-artist operates. So I think we can safely say that they're all Machiavellian, and many of them are narcissistic because it's an incredibly narcissistic thing to... Cardiff Garcia It requires a lot of moxy to pull these off sometimes. Maria Konnikova Yes. Psychopathy – not all of them are just evil people who have no empathy. That's not true. Some of them are for sure, but that is more of a toss-up. And you have plenty of female con-artists and you have hardly any female psychopaths. So that's one point where you can see that that really diverges. The other thing that I will say is that you can be a Machiavellian, you can be a narcissist, you can even be a psychopath and not become a con artist. So it really is predisposition plus opportunity. So you have to be in the right circumstances for that to come out. I don't think anyone is fated to become a con artist. Cardiff Garcia Sure. In terms of cognitive biases that make people, probably all people susceptible to cons, one is optimism bias.

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Another is a kind of belief that we're more awesome than we really are and therefore could never fall for one of these things. Could you just take us through what some of these inherent traits that we all have are that make us more vulnerable? Maria Konnikova Yes. This thing that you're talking about has many names; exceptionalism bias, superiority bias, the Lake Woebegone effect, for the mythical town of Lake Woebegone where everyone is above average. Cardiff Garcia I'd have gone with awesomeness self-belief but nobody puts me in charge of naming anything. Maria Konnikova All right, so awesomeness self-belief. Basically we think that on anything good we're above average or well above average, and on anything bad we're either below average or well below average. And it's really difficult to convince us otherwise. One example was of a study that was done in a hospital after people got into car accidents and two-thirds of the people had caused the accident and were in a hospital. So clearly serious accidents. The researchers asked them a very simple question: What kind of a driver are you, below average, average, above average? They all said they were above average, even though they had just been in an accident that they caused, because... Cardiff Garcia Nobody wanted to self-assess again. Maria Konnikova Exactly. It happens on everything. So if you have someone from the outside evaluate you and rank you on all sorts of qualities your self-rankings are going to be much higher and then – this is one of my favourite findings – there’s this guy at Stanford who does all of these studies and he loves to work with his own students, who always think that they're going to be in the top quarter of his class. By the way with, I think, over half of them thinking that they're going to be in the top 10% of grades. So he teaches them about this bias. He has them do a self-assessment, then they have a lesson on this exceptionalism bias. Then he says, do you want to redo your assessment? He has them do them a second time and they change their answers even more in the direction that they had them because they think, okay, I understand this, other people have it but I've already accounted for it, I don't have it! So even in terms of this exceptionalism bias they think that they're below average in their susceptibility, which is kind of brilliant, right? Cardiff Garcia Great, yes, wow.

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Let's talk about a couple of specific con-artists. The one I think you referred to most often in the book is Fred Demara. This was incredible, and maybe his best con was the long-term con on his own biographer. How did that work? Maria Konnikova Yes, that is quite the story. So Bob Crichton wrote this book, The Great Impostor, which became a movie starring Tony Curtis. Demara is one of the greatest impostors, I think, of the 20th century, operated over decades, was very well-known, was on the cover of Time magazine, appeared on Groucho Marx's show. This still did not stop him from being able to... Cardiff Garcia Perpetrate any more cons. Maria Konnikova Yes, exactly, so through the 80s – this guy died in the 80s – he was still an impostor to the end. Cardiff Garcia He was a doctor, he was a lawyer, what was he? Maria Konnikova A surgeon; he founded a religious college in Maine; he was a professor; he almost got a contract to build a bridge in Mexico so he was a civil engineer; prison warden in Texas. This guy was pretty brilliant and so Crichton spends so much time with him, ends up believing that this guy's a really good guy who's just got bad breaks, writes this pretty amazing book about him. And I'm not just saying amazing in terms of the writing, and it is a great book, but also makes Demara into kind of a hero. It says that he... Cardiff Garcia It's a flattering portrait of him. Maria Konnikova It's a very flattering portrait, and he has all of this evidence to the contrary and he chooses just to ignore it. So what ends up happening is what comes out. Demara steals Crichton's identity, becomes Crichton for a while. Crichton forgives him. Demara sues him, two lawsuits, that he didn't get enough money, even though he's already got more than enough. Crichton forgives him. Demara keeps asking him for money. Crichton gives him loan after loan after loan. He buys him a car; he pays for a religious education so that he could really be a monk – he loves to be a monk, that's one of his favourite disguises – so that he can really be a religious leader. So he keeps doing all of this stuff. Demara keeps not just not living up to expectations but just ruining it all and doing terrible things. And Crichton keeps writing him glowing letters of recommendation and really believing in him. He almost had him deliver his wife's kid because Demara convinced him that he was going to be a much better doctor than his wife's OBGYN. Luckily that didn't work but this guy just gets under your skin.

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I saw that too when I was doing research. When you meet con-artists a lot of them are so charismatic that you want to stop any association with them because they get to you and you start being on their side. So basically for his whole life Demara had this very prominent writer in his corner defending him against all wrongdoing. Cardiff Garcia Yes, I try to imagine myself as a journalist, if I've dedicated myself to a certain topic… Imagine coming to the end of your career or even being at the midway point of your career and having to admit that everything that's come before was dead wrong. How hard would it be to convince myself that I'd been wrong the whole time? I would have such a stake in defending myself. Maria Konnikova Of course, and I think the more that Crichton invested in Demara the more the stake grew and the more difficult it was to admit that he was wrong. And I can't blame him at all. I don't think it makes him a bad journalist. I think it's a very natural tendency to defend that. Cardiff Garcia In the book there's also the very sad story of Paul Frampton, a 68-year-old academic, or 68 years old at the time of the con, I believe, who thought that he was having email romance with a 32-year-old Czech supermodel, which sounds ridiculous but he was completely into it, partly because, I think, the awesomeness self-belief bias kicked in. Maria Konnikova Absolutely. Cardiff Garcia He thought that of course a 32-year-old Czech model would want to date him. Maria Konnikova Of course. Miss Bikini World, former Miss Bikini World. Cardiff Garcia Oh, was she Miss Bikini World? Okay. But he ended up running drugs for her through Argentina where he got busted, and even then he thought that she had been set up too. Maria Konnikova Yes, he thought that they were both set up, that she was the love of his life, his future wife and that some evil boyfriend must have been jealous of their romance and so planted drugs on him so that they would be broken up forever. This is what he's saying in prison after it's clear that Denise Milani doesn't exist – she does exist, she just was not the person he was having a relationship with. Talk about not stupid. This guy is a physicist, tenured professor, brilliant guy in one respect, and yet someone who just cannot admit that his could possibly be a ruse and he was so taken in by her that he's positive that he is running an errand for his future wife.

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So even when you have something that's not just a red flag, it's like a scarlet wall – you're given a suitcase to carry – how many times do you hear, has any of your luggage been out of your sight, has anyone else given you something? He should know better and yet he doesn't, he just puts his dirty laundry in it and continues on. Cardiff Garcia There was something almost unbearably sad about that story, which is that this guy got to the point where he was so myopic about, again, the story that he was telling himself, that he'd finally met the love of his life, everything was going to be great, that even after being on trial in Argentina he still couldn't quite bring himself to admit what had happened. Maria Konnikova Yes, and can you imagine being almost 70 years old and being in prison in Argentina? That's not a happy place to be and he was still... It's very funny because he could see it very clearly about other prisoners, he said things like, oh, they all think they're innocent but they're not innocent, I'm the only innocent one here. So he can see that they're all... Cardiff Garcia Even though he had a suitcase full of cocaine. Maria Konnikova Right, exactly. Cardiff Garcia I want to close by talking about three central tensions in the book that you didn't come back to explicitly all the time but they seemed to be undercurrents in the book. The first is the idea that to live a good life, a pleasant life, you have to have a certain amount of trust in people, you should be optimistic about some things, and yet those are also the very things that make you susceptible or convenient for a con artist to prey on. Maria Konnikova Absolutely. When I finished writing this book I wanted to just lock myself in a room. People suck, I'm not going to do anything. Then you realise that if you have that attitude, that's a very impoverished life. It's like Scrooge. You have no true friendships, you can't form any new relationships or new connections, you're not emotionally open to any new experiences because you just think that everything is bad. That hopefulness and that trust is what enables you to forge the bonds that are going to be the most important parts of your life in many respects. And honestly, the trade-off is worth it. If it means that one of those will end up screwing me over, so be it, at least it makes my life much richer and worth living. I don't want to live a long life of not getting fooled if I'm living it completely isolated. Cardiff Garcia Right, completely cynically. The second and kind of related question is about the tactics that con-artists employ. A lot of them are tactics that in a more benign setting we all use in our relationships,

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tactics of persuasion. I guess here's what's hard about it, at least for me, in terms of how to think about it. There's a certain amount of persuasion happening all the time -- the word manipulation has connotations that are very powerful so I don't want to label it that… But in your personal life with your friends, you want them to like you. Sometimes you're going to lie, to say something nice because you don't want to hurt their feelings. If it's a romantic partner or somebody that you want to be a romantic partner, you're going to put your best foot forward, you're going to bury some of the uglier things, even though those are things that eventually he or she will be exposed to anyway, right. And that's okay, that's just a normal thing. So when we talk about con-artists we're talking about them exploiting our cognitive biases in order to get what they want. But at work or in our personal lives aren't we also constantly exploiting other people's cognitive biases by being charismatic or persuasive or telling clear and simple stories when nuance is called for? We're all doing it. Maria Konnikova Yes, absolutely. The exact same tactics can be used for good or for evil basically and yes, we are all minor con-artists in our lives. And I think we have to, it's what makes society work well, makes life much more pleasant, to be perfectly honest. To me the dividing line is, is your intention malicious or not? If it's not, if you're actually just doing this for pretty benign ends, for reasons that aren't to take advantage of other people then you're not a con artist. And yes, sure, you're using some con-like tactics but that doesn't make you a con-artist. It's only when that malicious, I'm going to take... Cardiff Garcia It's intentionality. Maria Konnikova Yes, it's intentionality. To take advantage of other people for your own ends, then it becomes a con. You have con-artists in all legitimate professions too. It's not as if here's a profession, con-artist. There are con-artists who are also lawyers, con-artists who are also businessmen. Cardiff Garcia There is also sometimes a very fine line between a con and a more legitimate attempt to capitalise on people's propensity for optimism in order to introduce something new. Maria Konnikova Yes. Cardiff Garcia In the book you bring up the example of John Law, who essentially came up with the idea of fiat money in the 1700s. Maybe a more recent example, a more contemporary example, would be in Silicon Valley, where people are expected to, quote, fake it 'til you make it. And sometimes they make it! Maria Konnikova Yes, no, I think that's a really important point and we don't know often, was it overoptimism, have you been swept up in this Silicon Valley

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mentality? Let's use a very modern example; Theranos. We still don't know if it's a con. The evidence doesn't look good but maybe in six months they'll release data that show that this actually works. What we do know is they certainly got ahead of themselves. They just had to invalidate results from two years of testing; that's terrible. Cardiff Garcia I'd be surprised if in six months we had hard evidence but I know what you mean. Maria Konnikova I know, I'm just... We don't know for sure so we don't know, was Holmes deliberately trying to con or did she just get over-optimistic? Cardiff Garcia Maybe she legitimately... Maria Konnikova And was she conned herself? Cardiff Garcia Sincerely got wrapped up in it; sure. Maria Konnikova Exactly, we don't know so it really is a thin line and until we get into her head – and right now, I'm sure that no matter what her original intention was she's retrenched and she's going to support her position until the end. Cardiff Garcia Sure. Let's set aside Theranos for a second. There are companies there that do this for a reason, and there's actually a legitimate reason for doing it, which is the more people you get to buy into your idea, even if you aren't quite as hopeful as you're portraying yourself to be, it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right? Maria Konnikova Yes, absolutely. Cardiff Garcia The final chapter in your book is really quite lovely. Maria Konnikova Thank you. Cardiff Garcia It's about religious cons essentially, cults, and there is something both tragic and also beautiful about these kinds of cons. How do I explain this? The idea that you can impose meaning in the world is fascinating, and it's tragic in the sense that if we actually were to look at the world in a very cold, honest way we might see the meaninglessness everywhere, and that would suck. And it's beautiful in the sense that we have this weird, inherent capacity to see things as better than they are and maybe we shouldn't just abandon that. Do you find in your own life, now that you've written this book, that you try to selectively apply when you have this kind of storytelling narrative versus when you try to assess something really honestly?

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Maria Konnikova I try. It's hard. It's easy to think that I will take control of this but the storytelling narrative is so powerful that sometimes you fall for it without quite realising. But I definitely try, especially in very important decisions, in things that matter. You have to try and ask the hard questions, especially when you really want to believe in something. The more you want to believe, the more you have to push back. And not ad infinitum, it's not something where you just keep pushing back forever. At some point you say, okay, I'll go along with this. But I do try to strike a balance and I do think that there is beauty in it. And there's room for it. We all need beliefs. It's a really stark existence and not a very fulfilling one without them. I'm not saying we all need to be religious. I'm not religious. But I think it's good to have the capacity to believe in something because it also gives you the capacity for curiosity, for awe, for wonder, for all sorts of beautiful feelings from which great ideas can originate. Cardiff Garcia So in that sense, then, aren't con-artists doing us a favour as well, if they're exposing us to the idea that we have this propensity, this ability to impose meaning where it might not necessarily exist? Maria Konnikova I don't think that they're doing us a favour. But I think that their existence shows something great about humanity. Cardiff Garcia That's exactly what I meant. Maria Konnikova has been our guest. The book is The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It Every Time. People can find your work at The New Yorker and a few other places too, at least in the archives. Thanks so much for coming in, this was great. Maria Konnikova Thank you so much for having me, I had a really good time.