When we’re talking about something a little bit more concrete, you can think of a lot of ad campaigns that use the combination of alpha and omega tactics—alpha tactics being things that make you approach something, and omega ones giving you reasons why you shouldn’t avoid it. You can, for instance, say, “Oh, this face cream is going to make you a million years younger,” and you obviously know on some level that that’s not true, but that’s something that we all want to believe. And they say, “Oh and free returns within 30 days, money back guaranteed, if you’re not showing any results.” So you do it. What can you lose? You realize that it's actually a pain in the ass, you can’t really get your money back. But you let your guard down because it seemed to answer all of your queries.

Khazan: One thing I found surprising was that cons are underreported. Why is that?

Konnikova: Part of it is that people really value their reputations, so they don’t want others to know that they fell victim. The other thing is that they value their reputation so much is that they don’t want themselves to know. They would much rather believe that they were the victims of bad luck than that they were victims of a con artist. Our self-deception is incredibly powerful, because we have this very strong protective mechanism where we want to think of ourselves in the best possible light. No one wants to think of themselves as a sucker or as someone who falls for some con artist, who to someone else might seem obvious.

You want to think of yourself as someone who’s smart, as someone who’s savvy, as someone who would know better, and so that’s exactly what you do, you say, “Oh, bad luck, luck of the draw, it was just a bad investment decision or this person just wasn’t ready for a serious relationship,” whatever it is. So the funny thing is, most people don’t learn from their mistakes because they don’t acknowledge that they made them. One thing that I learned while I was researching the book, which I had no idea existed, was that there are sucker lists out there that con artists buy and sell of people who’ve already fallen for a scam. Those are the best victims, the ones who have already been victimized once, because they’ve done such a good job rationalizing that they’ll do it again.

Khazan: That’s sad, because that means it's more likely to happen to those people over and over again.

Konnikova: Absolutely. It’s crazy and it is very sad. Something that doesn’t come out that much in the book, on purpose, because it would have been a very different book, but I struggled with it a bit, is how much of the victims to really put in there, because if you write the entire book from the victim’s point of view, you'll be crying by the end, because there are a lot of really terrible stories. People might seem glamorous and fun, and their stories are a lot of fun, but they do ruin lives. I had people talking to me about how they tried to commit suicide after some of these cons.