How Scammers Like Anna Delvey and the Tinder Swindler Exploit a Core Feature of Human Nature

(THE CONVERSATION) Maybe she had so much money she lost track of it. Maybe it was all just a misunderstanding.

This is how Anna Sorokin’s Marks explained the supposed German heiress’ bizarre requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or put plane tickets on their credit cards, which she would then forget to pay back .

The subject of a new Netflix series, ‘Inventing Anna’, Sorokin, who told people her name was Anna Delvey, swindled over $250,000 from wealthy acquaintances and high-end Manhattan businesses between 2013 and 2017. It turns out his lineage was a mirage. Instead, she was an intern at a fashion magazine from a working-class Russian immigrant family.

Yet the people around her were quick to accept her bizarre explanations, even creating excuses for her that strained her gullibility. The details of the Sorokin case mirror those of another recent Netflix production, “The Tinder Swindler,” which tells the story of an Israeli con artist named Simon Leviev. Leviev persuaded women he met on the dating app to lend him large sums of money with equally incredible claims: He was a billionaire whose enemies were trying to track him down and, for reasons of security, couldn’t use his own credit cards.

How come so many people were gullible enough to buy the fantastic stories told by Sorokin and Leviev? And why, even when”[t]Red flags were everywhere” – as one of Sorokin’s trademarks puts it – did people continue to believe these scammers, hang out with them and agree to lend them money?

As a social psychologist who wrote a book about our surprising powers of persuasion, I don’t see this as an unusual problem of human nature. Rather, I view the stories about Sorokin and Leviev as examples of bad actors exploiting the social processes that people rely on every day for effective and efficient human communication and cooperation.

To trust is to be human

Despite the belief that people are skeptical by nature, ready to shout “gotcha!” to any mistake or misstep, it just isn’t. Research shows that people tend to distrust others rather than distrust them, believe them rather than doubt them, and accept someone’s presentation rather than the embarrass by calling him.

Elle Dee, a DJ Delvey once asked for a $35,000 bar tab, described how easily people accepted Delvey’s claims: “I don’t think she even had to make so much effort. Despite its completely fake story, people were too eager to buy it.

It might still be hard to believe that people around Sorokin would willingly hand over their money to someone they barely knew.

Yet psychologists have seen participants hand over their money to complete strangers for many years through hundreds of experiments. In these studies, participants are told that they are participating in various types of “investment games” in which they have the option of handing over their money to another participant in the hope of receiving a return on their investment.

What’s fascinating about these studies is that most participants are cynical about seeing their money back — let alone any return on investment — and yet they still give it back. In other words, despite deep reservations, they still choose to trust a complete stranger.

There is something profoundly human in this impulse. Humans are social creatures, and mutual trust is ingrained in our DNA. As psychologist David Dunning and his colleagues have pointed out, without trust, it’s hard to imagine initiatives like Airbnb, car sharing, or a working democracy succeeding.

Lies are the exception, not the norm

Of course, Sorokin’s claims were often accompanied by elaborate explanations and justifications, and you might wonder why so few people seemed to doubt the veracity of his claims. Yet, just as trust is a default of human interaction, a presumption of sincerity is a default expectation of basic communication.

This communication maxim was first proposed by Paul Grice, an influential philosopher of language. Grice argued that communication is a cooperative enterprise. Understanding each other requires working together. And to do that, there have to be ground rules, one of which is that both parties tell the truth.

In an age of “truth” and “fake news,” such a premise may seem absurd and naive. But people lie a lot less than you think; in fact, if the default assumption was that the person you were talking to was lying, communication would be next to impossible. If I challenge you to find out if you’ve read all the books you claim to have read, or if the steak you ate last night was really overcooked, we’d never go anywhere.

Researchers have found experimental evidence of what is sometimes called the “truth gap”. In a series of studies, researchers asked participants to rate whether statements were true or false. Sometimes participants were interrupted so that they could not fully process the statements. This allowed researchers to understand people’s default assumption: when in doubt, would they default to belief or disbelief?

It turns out that when participants weren’t able to fully process the statements, they tended to just assume they were true.

A reluctance to accuse

Even if Sorokin’s Marks were to doubt her story, it’s unlikely they called her.

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Sociologist Erving Goffman’s classic “facework” theory argues that it is as uncomfortable for us to call someone else – to suggest that they are not who they present themselves to be – as it is to be the person called. Even when people see someone doing something they disagree with, they are loath to say anything.

Other studies have explored this phenomenon. One found that people are reluctant to call out others for using racist language they disagree with or for sexual harassment.

As much as you would like to believe that if you were the targets of Sorokin and Leviev you would have been emboldened to blow the lid off the whole charade, chances are that instead of making things uncomfortable for all the world, you’d just go for it.

The tendency to trust, believe, and accept other people’s explanations of events can seem disadvantageous. And it’s true, these addictions can expose people. But without trust, there is no cooperation; without assuming that others are telling the truth, there is no communication; and without accepting people for what they present to the world, there is no basis on which to build a relationship.

In other words, the very features that look like glitches when exploited are actually the very essence of what it means to be human.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/how-scammers-like-anna-delvey-and-the-tinder-swindler-exploit-a-core-feature-of-human-nature-177289.