The Confidence Game Read online

  In June 2013, Tilly’s appeal of his sentence came before the court. He had wanted clemency. It was too much to believe he had had the power over such discerning people. Surely they were to blame. The judge listened closely. And he did award him a new sentence: ten years, instead of the original eight.

  It goes by many names. The Lake Wobegon effect. The better-than-average effect. Illusory superiority. Superiority bias. Whatever you call it, it means the same thing: we believe we are singular, whatever the circumstances. It could be that we’re especially attractive and brilliant, in the case of Frampton, or that our family legacy is unique in history. Regardless of the specifics, we hold an unwavering commitment to the notion that we are special—and not just special, but more special than most anyone else.

  Of one million students who took the SATs in 1976, 70 percent thought they were above average in leadership ability and 60 percent in athletic ability. Eighty-five percent of students put themselves above the average in their ability to get along with others—a full quarter going so far as to place themselves in the top 1 percent. In 1977, a full 95 percent of the faculty of the University of Nebraska thought they were better than average at teaching; over two thirds placed themselves in the top quarter. In a survey that behavioral economist Richard Thaler performed on his own students, he found that less than 5 percent of the class expected to do below average, and over half thought they would be among the top fifth of performers. And, of course, almost all of us are better-than-average drivers, far more skillful and less risky than the next guy. In one study, researchers asked drivers who had been hospitalized after a car accident—which over two thirds of them had caused—to rate their driving skills. They said they were better than average—and the ratings were identical to those of similar drivers who had no accident history.

  Professionally, we are also all better than our colleagues at our jobs, despite any potential protests to the contrary. (We’re not egotistical braggarts like Bill in the next cubicle over.) Would-be managers and actual executives think their future or current firms will overtake competitors quickly. In self-evaluative performance reports, we tend to rate ourselves above average on the skills that matter for our job. And where we are asked to list areas for improvement, we tend to focus on areas that matter only peripherally, if at all, to our main job. (As a writer, I might tell my editor that I need to improve on, say, my public speaking abilities—hence shielding my writing talents from self-critique. That’s a hypothetical example, though. I’m an exceptional public speaker. One of the best, really.)

  Consider it honestly. What do you say when an interviewer asks you to share your greatest weakness? Chances are, you have to think long and hard to prepare the answer in advance. That’s not because you don’t have weaknesses, but rather that you still think you’re better than others, kinks and all. You’re far more likely to say something like the dreaded “I’m a perfectionist”—a strength that cleverly (or so you think) masquerades as a weakness—than to admit an actual professional failing. And when something goes wrong at work? It’s the boss. You’re on a bad team. The markets went haywire. It’s not your fault.

  It’s the exact reason the Gondorf brothers, Fred and Charles, originators of the original wire fraud and big store game, were able to tell the tale to so many victims for so long: each mark wanted to believe himself the lucky beneficiary of an exceptional tip; no one wanted to see himself as a dupe. Over fifteen years, the brothers would bring marks to what looked like a respectable bookmaking parlor, telling them that they had an in at the telegraph: a disgruntled employee who could tap the lines and get the race results seconds before they became public. (No such in actually existed.) So proficient were the Gondorfs at their craft that, for a time, the big store game was known as the “Gondorf game,” with sucker after sucker remaining perfectly convinced that the brothers had given him access to an inner line, and that it was the savvy investment decision to go along—or risk regretting it forever. One victim, William O’Reilly, didn’t even want to believe a police inspector who’d told him he’d been conned: “He had been loath to believe them other than the honest tipsters they seemed,” the New York Times reported on June 5, 1915, when Fred Gondorf was finally apprehended. By that point, the duo had made off with approximately $15 million.

  We are, as well, much better citizens than everyone else. Over the course of twenty studies, Jean-Paul Codol, a social and cognitive psychologist who studied the effects of superiority on behavior, found that people think they behave in ways that are more in line with good social norms than others. We recycle our trash more than the average person. We help others more than our fair share of the time. We turn off unused electrical devices and walk instead of drive more than the average guy. We donate more to charity than usual—sure, I might have given only ten dollars this year, but I bet the average person gave nothing at all.

  Oh, and, frankly, we’re just far better people than most. We’re nicer. We’re more liked. In fact, on almost all desirable categories, we rate ourselves better than the majority of those around us. On almost all undesirable ones, we rate ourselves below average. In six studies, Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and his colleagues demonstrated that people overestimated how they fared on socially desirable characteristics, like accepting social norms, liking knowledge for its own sake, reading widely, being imaginative, and being willing to take a stand on important issues. At the same time, they dismissed any potentially negative tendencies, like aloofness and submissiveness. What’s more, even among positive attributes, they rated traits that they had earlier described themselves as possessing as more desirable than those they hadn’t considered.

  When we’re asked to select which words better match our personalities and key characteristics out of a list of possible contenders, we overwhelmingly select more positive than negative options. We are better at remembering the good things we’ve done than the bad, and the positive attributes we possess rather than the negative. Our memories for events, too, are skewed: we are worse at recalling the details of failures than successes. That’s why the good con artist is able to plant false memories so easily: it was my idea all along. I was the one who thought to make the investment or place the bet. I was the one who decided to go to South America to meet my future wife. No one forced me to. It was all my idea. Of course it was. The tale almost tells itself: we know we’ll personally profit. We are savvy like that.

  As for when the events are actually happening, we tend to attribute the good aspects to our own prowess and dismiss the bad as environmental consequences—something known as the locus of control, or where we see control residing. In one study, people who worked in pairs were told that they’d collectively done below, at, or better than average. When the score was good, both members of the team individually accepted the credit. If the score was below average, each team member blamed the other. And when the score was average, the above-average performance was, without fail, assigned to oneself. We also tend to dismiss the skills we’re not that good at as not particularly important in the first place—a tendency con artists love, as most people are not particularly skilled at things like financial management, nuanced statistical analysis, or whatever the con of the day happens to be.

  When we compare ourselves to others, we tend to emerge ahead for a simple reason: we focus on our own most positive traits. And, no, we aren’t just all wonderful people. In one experiment, a group of outside observers watched as students took part in a group interaction activity. They then rated each student on a number of dimensions, like warmth, assertiveness, and friendliness. Meanwhile, the students rated themselves on the same scales. Inevitably, the external judgment was significantly more negative than the students’ own.

  Most people are average by definition, although nobody wants to think themselves so. In Lake Wobegon, all the children have above-average IQ and above-average looks. They are all above-average athletes. In artistic pursuits, they excel—not that they’re any slackers on m
athematics. They’re above average there, too. And while they may not be Mozarts—well, a few of them might; I have a sneaking suspicion my child is one of those—they’re certainly still above average in their musicality. And as they grow up and disperse around the world, leaving Lake Wobegon behind, they remain persistently, universally the best.

  The confidence artist will do everything in his power to bring our better-than-averageness front and center. Grifters appeal to our vanity, not about just anything, but about the things that are most central for us—after all, they’ve spent the entire put-up casing our psychology. How intelligent you are, Professor Frampton. Just what I want in a man. So intellectually stellar that my looks are a perfect complement. What a savvy investor you are, Mr. Koufax. What a great judge of character, Mr. Barrett. The tale centers on our singular talents.

  And we believe it. Not because it’s plausible—a supermodel is on a dating site and she targets me?—but because we want it to be. The more exceptional we see ourselves, the easier we may be to con. As one grifter—a player of the short con known as the tat, played with a crooked die that has fives on four sides and sixes on two and is subbed in at the last moment for an identical but fair one—told David Maurer, “A New Yorker is the best sucker that ever was born. He is made to order for anything. You can’t knock him. He loves to be taken because he’s wise.” Because New Yorkers fancy themselves so cosmopolitan and sophisticated, they are the easiest fish to catch.

  The tale tells itself: it’s how so many con artists justify their actions to themselves, getting swept up in their own stories so strongly that they forget, at least for a moment, that they are lying. The belief in exceptionalism, after all, applies just as much to the con artist as to the mark: I am allowed to act like this because I am an exception to society’s rules. In one of his escapades, our old friend Demara took on the role of Ben W. Jones, a proper Southern gentleman who had decided to turn his eye to crime, in the guise of a prison warden in Texas. The Texas penal system has never been known for its leniency, and its potential guards are no exception. Prior to being hired, Demara was asked to provide references from his three last employers, as well as personal references from eight different acquaintances. You’d think that such a burden of proof would scare him off. But no: Demara inhabited his role so completely that he sincerely believed it was rightfully his and everything would work out. And after it did work out (Demara himself helpfully supplied the majority of the references), his belief in his exceptionality—that even here, he would not be caught—is what led to his downfall. So invulnerable did he think himself that he handed one of the inmates the very Time magazine where he’d first been profiled, picture and all. The prisoner promptly reported the rise of the impostor, and B. W. Jones was quietly dismissed.

  The same I’m-the-exception reasoning applies across all types of schemes. It’s true of people from Jonah Lehrer to Lance Armstrong, Michael Shermer points out. “Lehrer’s mea culpa was a bit like Lance’s Oprah moment—not much of a moment at all.” There is no sense of guilt, but rather a sense of entitlement followed by regret at getting caught. “People like Stephen Glass and Jonah Lehrer are just smaller, less harmful versions of Madoff, but still in the same category. Like Lance said—all cyclists dope in that circuit. I got caught, whatever—that’s the only thing he’s sorry about.”

  * * *

  Prison did not agree with Frampton. He had a lung condition that left him coughing amidst the smoke-filled air, and an elevated blood pressure that the stress of cell life did little to alleviate. But, he said, although it was a “very dehumanizing experience to be in prison,” adding that he and his fellow inmates were “treated like cattle,” he was staying creative, using the computer at Villa Devoto to continue with his research and follow field developments, like the Higgs boson discovery.

  He continued to post works in progress on ArXiv, an Internet repository of preprints in mathematical and scientific fields. Over the phone, he persisted in supervising two graduate students. He even found time to referee some journal articles.

  In October 2012, Frampton was allowed to leave the prison and instead spend his days under house arrest at an old friend’s home. His lawyers had convinced the judge that his lung condition was too dire, and ever-worsening, in the Villa Devoto cells.

  UNC, meanwhile, suspended his $106,835 annual salary. Frampton appealed. Over eighty professors signed a letter in support of his case, calling it a threat to the tenure system everywhere. The suspension remained in place.

  The trial lasted for three days. Piece by piece, the prosecution laid out the evidence against Frampton. And his situation began to seem ever more dire. There were the texts with “Denise.” He worried about “sniffer dogs.” He was taking care of the “special little suitcase.” “In Bolivia this is worth nothing, in Europe it’s worth millions,” one text to his beloved read. Another: “Monday arrival changed. You must not tell the coca-goons.” Another: “Need to know if your loyalty is with the bad guy-agent & bolivian friends—or good guy, your husband?” Frampton explained them away as jokes—in retrospect, jokes in poor taste, but in the moment, fairly hilarious, he said. Besides, he had been severely sleep deprived. Then there was the back-of-the-napkin calculation about the drugs’ street value. But he’d only written it out after he’d been detained, he argued. He was prone to calculating everything in his line of sight.

  On November 21, 2012, nearly a year after he was first arrested, Frampton was found guilty of drug smuggling and sentenced to fifty-six months in prison. “I am in a state of shock and disbelief,” he told the Raleigh News and Observer a day after the sentence. “This is a gross miscarriage of justice. If this had happened in the U.S., a jury would have obviously acquitted me.”

  Soon after the sentence, he received further bad news: the provost of UNC at the time, Bruce Carney, told him that he was going to be fired. Frampton requested a hearing from the Faculty Hearing Committee.

  * * *

  Why did Frampton persist in believing that he deserved an exception? Why did he appear to be so seemingly oblivious to things that, to an outside observer, seem nothing short of overtly incriminating? Could he truly believe his actions would be taken for a practical joke—and then expect the university to bend its rules and let him keep his position? What seems like sheer stupidity at best, and more likely willful ignorance, is actually quite understandable in the moment. The power of the tale isn’t the strength of its logic; it’s that at the point it’s told, we’re past being reasonable. The superiority bias doesn’t just make us more vulnerable to tales that seem rather tall to an objective eye. It colors how we then evaluate evidence and make decisions.

  In one early study, Ziva Kunda, a psychologist who devoted her career to motivated cognition—the process by which our views of the world are motivated by our own self-serving, better-than-average biases in perception—found that, when personal outcomes were at stake, people’s ability to reason logically went out the window. When she had students read descriptions of individuals who were either like them or not, their predictions of their likelihood of personal and professional success vacillated strongly. The more similar the person, the less objectively the students weighed the evidence, skewing in favor of a positive outcome—a successful marriage, a stellar academic career—even when it didn’t seem warranted. The students, concluded Kunda, were interpreting the world with what she termed the self-serving bias.

  That bias, moreover, didn’t just manifest itself in hypothetical predictions. In another study, Kunda gave students an article about the risks caffeine consumption posed for the development of fibrocystic disease in women. (She told them it was from the New York Times Science section but had really taken it from a medical journal, where its findings had later been disputed by other researchers.) She then asked them to rate their own risk for developing the disease within fifteen years and to evaluate how convincing they found the article itself. A curious pattern soon emerged. Women who were heavy or moderate c
affeine drinkers themselves acknowledged that they might be at higher risk, but were also far more skeptical of the article. They wanted, they said, to see some additional evidence; to them, the study seemed shaky at best. Everyone else, however—men and women who drank little or no caffeine—found the work convincing.

  So what does this suggest? Simply put, when it comes to ourselves—our traits, our lives, our decisions—our personal attachment overshadows our objective knowledge. We systematically misevaluate evidence based on our own characteristics, and if we’re given evidence that something about us poses a threat, instead of thinking about how to change our own behavior, we call the evidence itself into question. To put this in conning terms, if I paint a picture of a perfect mark for you, and you recognize yourself in it, you are more likely to think I’m a poor researcher than yourself a good target. Nah, you’ll say. Those aren’t actually the things that get someone conned. I bet this girl didn’t do any research and is just constructing this out of thin air.

  Frampton’s texts look beyond incriminating in retrospect. But at the time? “I am not generally the suspicious type,” he told the Telegraph. “So although it seems very odd in retrospect, even to me, it all seemed perfectly plausible to me at the time. I really did not suspect anything was wrong until I was arrested.” This is less far-fetched than it may at first appear. We don’t see objectively. We see the version that best suits our own desires. And because the tale is all about telling us how we’ll personally benefit, it is in many ways the easiest part of the confidence game to stomach. We’re on the exact same page as the grifter: we deserve this.

  When Frampton evaluated his chances of success with Milani, he looked past the fact that he had never met her, that she seemed to vanish every time he got close, that he was dealing with an unsavory character instead of his sweet bride-to-be. Instead, he focused on the texts of love and adoration, the photographs, the vision of the future. In that haze, any signs of drug-related banter were simply that: banter.