304 - Nobody's Fool - Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris (rebroadcast)
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Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 304.

If we'd known that that video when we first made it was going to go viral, this was before YouTube, right? So we would have probably filmed it in better quality. I feel so fortunate to have one greatest hit. I'll keep on playing it as long as anybody wants to hear it.

Those are the voices of Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris. And what they're talking about is their mega-famous invisible gorilla experiment, which is one of those psychological experiments that just about everyone has heard of because it's also one that everyone has seen because it is one of the first things that truly went viral on YouTube and then the internet at large. And if you've never seen this video, well, stop now and go to YouTube and look up the invisible gorilla. I'll just...

wait a second for you to probably not go do that.

And now I will tell you that in the video, you are asked upfront to count the number of times a basketball gets passed back and forth between some people in a relatively small room. And then they start passing it back and forth. And by the end, most people feel like they've counted the number of passes and they get ready to see their score. Then the video says, did you see the gorilla? Because most people fail to recall seeing a person wearing a gorilla suit passing

walking very obviously on screen, then through the group, and then off screen, which is what happens in the video. When you watch it a second or third time, it freaks you out, and then you can't wait to show it to other people, and hence the virality of this thing. It's an example of something called inattentional blindness, and Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris would then go on to write a mega best-selling book about all of its implications, and that book was titled The Invisible Gorilla, which is a really great title for something. It's got a lot of syllables in it.

What is inattentional blindness? It's missing something right in front of your eyes because you're paying attention to something else. And it's something that you experience minute by minute every day of your life, but you can spend a lifetime without ever noticing it's happening. Even stranger, you tend to have an intuition that it isn't happening, that you see everything you're facing, everything that's coming into your eyeballs, like one-to-one, like a video camera. And if something out of the ordinary was to happen,

it would instantly grab your attention. But this is not what psychology has discovered. Basically, you're blind to that which you are not attentive. Yet your conscious experience and your memories do not reflect this. And way back in 2009, that was the subject of the very first post on You Are Not So Smart back when it was a blog.

And it's a chapter in the book, You Are Not So Smart, that this blog led to. And then in 2011, it was the very first topic on the first episode of this podcast. And Dan Simons was the first guest on that first episode. Here's some audio from those early days of the show. Daniel, your book, The Invisible Gorilla, focuses on something you call the illusion of attention. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure. So the illusion of attention is the mistaken belief that a lot of us have that we really take in everything in our world when we look out at the world around us. That if there's something important or unexpected in our life, we grab attention and then we see it.

We can now welcome Dan Simons and Christopher Shabrie back on the show to talk about their new book, their latest book, which is called Nobody's Fool. It's a book about Ponzi schemes, fraudulent science, fake art, crypto hucksters, phishing scams, and all the other forms of modern con artistry that keep tricking us, thanks to the psychological vulnerabilities that we all have. The ones that Simons and Shabrie have been studying for decades.

And that's the unique hook for this book. It explores deception and cons and scams and chicanery from the side of the person being fooled. What's happening in our brains when we fall for scams. And they detail all the cognitive habits and tendencies that serve us well most of the time, which can be hijacked by people who wish to deceive. And then they offer advice on how to inoculate ourselves against such deception.

So let's just get right into it. Daniel Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where he heads the Visual Cognition Laboratory. His research explores the limits of awareness, memory, and the reasons we often are unaware of those limits.

And Christopher Chabris is a cognitive scientist who has taught at Harvard, whose research focuses on decision-making, attention, intelligence, and behavior genetics. He is also a chess master who once wrote a column about games called Game On in the Wall Street Journal. Their new book is Nobody's Fool, why we get taken in and what we can do about it. So let's pick their brains. ♪

There it is. Ponzi schemes, multi-level marketing, email scams, Bernie Madoff, this Varsity Blues scam that I'd never heard about, the Fyre Festival, cryptocurrency, cheating at chess, the McDonald's Monopoly stuff, and of course, Nigerian email scams. That's not even close to a comprehensive list of what we're getting into. Wow, that's a lot of things to think about, but not really, because you do the thing that scientists do and say, what is similar across these domains? And then if we're talking about brains and minds...

What seems to be the very particular pieces of the puzzle that lead to all of these things emerging from the chaos of human interaction?

Where did the idea for this book start? Like, how did this become an obsession initially for both of you? We actually had several drafts of proposals related to the kind of elements in this book. That's the voice of Dan Simons. Over many, many years. And we started working on this shortly after Invisible Guerrilla came out in 2010. And we just never quite stumbled on an integration that we really liked. And

It was only kind of after we were noticing so many of these sorts of scams appearing and realizing, you know, last time we were talking about how our intuitions about our own minds don't really capture how our minds actually work. And we started to realize that

All of these sorts of scams had a lot of elements in common that capitalized on sorts of the things that we do really well most of the time, but that can be hijacked and misused. But it didn't crystallize into really focusing on fraud and deception and scams until quite late 2000s.

in the game, maybe even around 2020 or so, just a couple of years ago. So we'd really been batting ideas around accumulating material for a long time. That's the voice of Christopher Chabris. And I think one of the influences or one of the angles that I think leads me to it, or at least helps me understand how we got here, is that in The Invisible Gorilla, we talked about an experiment

where people are asked to pay attention to one thing and then we the experimenters make something else happen at the same time in the same place on the screen in front of them and they don't notice it and it's it's a you know a demonstration of selective attention and how selective attention can be and how people often miss things that are right in front of them and

You could say that, you know, we are manipulating the audience in a way by telling them pay attention to this and then something else happens and they don't notice it. Well, that's exactly one of the main things that anyone trying to deceive you or, you know, commit fraud or or con artists do and so on. That's one of the main things they exploit is our ability to pay attention so well, but at the same time not notice other things that are happening around us.

That became one of the basic ideas that we talk about in the book. But then there's so much more beyond that. That's, I think, one of the main weapons, you know, the main the main things they weaponize, you know, in a sense. But there's there's so much more. But it definitely has a connection with the previous work. It also felt like, you know, it felt like the world was changing a little bit since we wrote that book, you know,

at least talk about fraud and stories of fraud and fraud in the news and the media and in movies and so on definitely seems to be on the rise. And there are some indications that there is actually more fraud and cheating happening, but at least we sort of seem to be more aware of it and think about it more. I think that helped us focus on it. Something that interested me for a long time is

Psychology of magic is a growing field. Magicians are professional liars, they're professional deceivers. And as Chris was saying, we were using an element of deception in sort of the gorilla video where we're getting people to miss something that's right in front of them. But that's what magicians have worked on for hundreds or thousands of years.

And I've taught a couple of graduate classes on psychology of magic that focus on how it is that magicians misdirect us. What is it that they use to cause us to misremember what we're seeing? And they're the masters at this, right? They're the ones who have really mastered this idea of fooling you when something's right in front of you and having you miss critical things and not ask, what am I missing? What elements am I not being told? What am I not being shown? So for me, that was kind of a...

The bearing the lead part of this, the subtext that comes out a lot in what I've been doing all these years is

undeserved confidence, you know, that they're very like this, that you're not aware of it. It's the process, it's the result of thinking, not the process of thinking that emerges spontaneously in consciousness to quote a psychologist whose name I didn't remember as well as his quote. I'll have to edit that in. The psychologist is George Miller and it's from a 1962 book, Psychology, The Science of Mental Life. Selective attention and all these things that are part of the human experience

It's just not and not knowing that's part of the human experience and having confidence, assuming that it's that you aren't taking it all in and that the subject reality is a one to one representation of what's going on out there. My memory is perfect and I am an expert on this and I would notice things if they were weird.

This is the domain of confidence men, the con artist, the confidence artist. The confidence is the big part of all of it. And I love that. So this naturally bridges out of your previous, your book and your previous research. And yeah, we're in this moment in time where there was a cover of Time magazine asked, is truth dead? Post-truth was word of the year in the Oxford Dictionary.

It turns out as this epistemic chaos descends upon us and the complexity of the information ecosystem that we're all in now, from Gen Z up, we're all across several generations, you need a certain skill set to be an effective member of society. And then leading right into, yeah, Brian Brushwood, who you've spoken with, he's a good friend and we talk about this kind of stuff all the time. And you're right, yeah, magicians really know what's up. Con artists and magicians are

are sort of independent psychological researchers for different purposes. His work, though, focuses so much on the scammer. I love that your book does something very interesting. It sticks to the receiver of the scam, the believer, the scammed.

And you note early on that all successful deceptions exploit these sort of adaptive functions of the mind that in the best case scenarios or in scenarios that were more about speed versus accuracy, they're great. If you're spread across a bunch of individuals and you're trying to survive as a species, but if someone is A-B testing ways to try to reverse engineer all that and get something else out of the dynamic, there are some really dependable trigger points. And you identify those early on.

I love all that. This is not a question. There's just me saying, Hey, crazy, cool idea for a book. I love it. Let me, let me,

Pivot into a question here. My dad got taken in by a phishing scam, email phishing scam, and was totally blown away because he thought he was the smartest person who's ever lived. And it was just so easy. It was like, hey, this is Lowe's. You forgot something at the store. Click this link and we'll get you all fixed up and just fell right into it. And I had to do that immediately.

hold your hat in your hands thing that happens on Facebook where you're like, hey, everybody, guys cam, if you're getting messages from me, it's not me, sorry. I'm wondering, Chris, you had any friends or family get roped in by something like that? I can talk about, I mean, that exact thing has not happened to me, but my father was an attempted victim when he was in his 90s. He got these phone calls saying,

uh you know i'm calling from so-and-so tech support i need your password for such and such and so on it's a very common you know very common scam and um he didn't you know he didn't fall into it unfortunately but that's that kind of thing you know i think it happens to everyone nowadays in some form or another i don't think i've gone so far as to lose money to any of these scams but um there have been a bunch of

a bunch of things that have happened to us that, you know, I think count as scams or cheating. Like, I'll mention that our previous book was plagiarized, you know, by another bestselling book. I won't mention the name of the other bestselling book, but literally passages from our book were reproduced in that other bestselling book. And one very funny form of deception that happened to me was I was a guest on the first season of the show Penn & Teller Bullshit.

And they were doing a segment about the Mozart effect, which was the old idea that if you listen to Mozart's music, you'll get smarter. Like if you do an IQ test right after listening to Mozart's music, you'll do better. And they wanted to interview me about it. And they sent me a they contacted me through a company called Seymour K. Learley Productions.

which if you say it fast is see more clearly. And I did not notice that at all on the release form or the contact information and so on until after the producer had come and the camera crew and they'd interviewed me and so on, it was all over. And then one day I was looking at that form and suddenly like I saw what it actually said there. And then later I found out I was on Penn and Teller bullshit. So it was sort of like, you know, it was a complete deception in a way.

Of course, a kind of a friendly one, you know, a very, very funny one. In retrospect, in the in the book, we actually do have a story of me being of me being cheated in and playing chess online, which actually happens a lot. There's there's it's possible to cheat at chess and other games online now. And I've played against many cheaters, some of which I've actually figured out that they were cheating or they were caught cheating.

and so on. So there are many little cases like that, but I haven't lost my fortune yet. - The one time I actually have accidentally clicked a phishing style link was, and I think this kind of speaks to how these sorts of scams work, was I got a direct message from somebody I know, a friend who said, "Hey, I saw you in this video." And for most people, we know that that's kind of likely to be a nonsense link, it's a spam link.

But I'm in a lot of videos and interviews. And I've had friends out of the blue email me and say, "Hey, I saw you when I was traveling in Alaska on this television program." So to me, it wasn't out of the ordinary. And I clicked it and then immediately realized, oh, that was not good. And just changed my passwords immediately before they could even probably even get the click.

But, you know, that worked on me because that was within the realm of the sort of things that I get regularly, which is how phishing often works. It looks just like the sort of thing you get all the time. That wouldn't work on people who are never in videos. So it's and that's a lot of people. So it's one of those that's not targeted in particular. It's just blasted out there. But if it gets enough clicks from a small number of people, then they're stealing accounts.

I want to start the official get into this book stuff with, because we're already talking about it is, uh,

Truth bias, and of course I have an affection for anything that gets an official title in the domain of biases and fallacies and heuristics and things. Truth bias, you can put quotation marks around it. I'll start with Chris and then Dan, you can chime in anytime you want. What is this thing? What is your simple definition of it? And then the second question that comes along with that is, why would we have such a thing installed in our wetware? So truth bias refers to the idea that

we tend to assume that any information coming in that could possibly have a truth value, true, false, or otherwise, is true by default. So there's an argument that

as being sort of debated with experiments and so on that, you know, the brain automatically tags incoming information as true, even if it's obviously false or you have information to the contrary or whatever for a brief moment, you know, you sort of hold it in mind as true and it takes extra time, effort, attention, some kind of resource in order to retag it

Right.

in something. And this is it's a concept that comes, I think, mainly from philosophy and philosophers talk about how you sort of can't even carry on a conversation with someone if you don't, at some level, assume that they're telling you things that are true, and that there are good reasons why we have truth bias. I think one thing you can add to this is this is kind of a default, right? So if you have no particular reason to approach what somebody's saying with skepticism or belief,

right, then you're just going to assume what you're hearing is true, right? If you know that somebody is a liar, and you're told upfront that they're a liar, you're going to be skeptical of what they're saying, you're gonna be trying to counter it and think about it. But most of the time, we don't want to do that. And, you know, most of the time, that's how you need, you need to interact in order to function effectively, right? If you just meet somebody, and they're telling you something, there's no reason to doubt them. And if you're constantly doubting, you'd never make progress in a conversation.

I seem to remember, I think I read it in a Dan Gilbert paper where he described it kind of like a library where like if you're trying to save time, money and effort, you just label everything as nonfiction. And then you take the extra step to add a fiction label to that thing just to make it easier to sort all the books out because you just got like a

shipment of 10,000 new books and like okay it'd be easier to do this first than this thing second that's the way he was trying to like describe it in some metaphor and I could see that like evolutionarily if we were going to like try to come up with some sort of just so story that it would be we're trying to save some sort of cognitive labor and at the end of the day calories here is that you know that

land for you in any way? Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, most of the time people are being truthful, right? If you're just having a, you run into the mail, you know, the postal service person and they say, hey, I got your mail here, right? You're not going to assume they're lying, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Is that really my mail? Do you have all of my mail? No, I mean, it's, it's,

Most of our conversations, most of our interactions on a daily basis are based on truth, right? It's, you know, deception isn't the majority of the time that we're interacting with somebody. So it makes sense that that's a default. That's great. And you talk about a study, Chris Street and Daniel Richardson, where they had people, they actually tested truth bias. If that's fresh in your memory, I'd love to hear you describe it. Yeah, I can, I can, I can.

I can try my best. Of course, I might misremember a detail or two, but just assume that what I'm saying is true. I can't do otherwise. Exactly. So a lot of studies on studies on truth bias often have the form of sort of a lie detection game where the participant in the experiment sees a bunch of statements or maybe a bunch of video clips of people saying things and has to decide for each one whether they think the person is telling the truth or lying. For example, in one study,

People would describe trips they had taken, like places they had traveled to, and they could either be telling the truth or making something up. And of course, the experimenters who prepared the video clips and told them, okay, now tell us about something that actually happened. Okay, now tell us about something that never happened and so on. And, you know, people try to figure out

whether they're telling the truth. And even when the proportion is sort of 50-50 of lies and true statements, people tend to think that more of them are true, maybe 65 or 70% or something like that.

One interesting thing that was done in this particular experiment is that the participants were in one condition of the experiment were offered the option to say they were uncertain. And when you have a third option of explicitly expressing uncertainty, you judge fewer of the statements to be true. So you sort of get to a more realistic level of uncertainty.

of believing statements are true. That sort of turns into sort of, you know, one of our pieces of advice in the book is explicitly consider remaining uncertain. I think there's a lot of pressure these days as social media, you know, sort of accelerates it. A lot of pressure to express our opinions, to say what we think, you know, to take stands, you know, to do all that and trying to hold ourselves back and remain uncertain is maybe sort of the first step.

you know, the first step towards not sharing as much misinformation and maybe, you know, keeping our beliefs more well calibrated to reality. Truth bias studies are often of this form, as Chris was saying, of the, you know, game like two truths and a lie, where you're supposed to pick out which one's a lie. And in that context, you know that people are lying, right? You know that some of these videos are not true, and you still tend to inflate

how much you judge them to be true, how many of them you judge to be true. The problem is much worse in our just daily communication where we're seeing things on social media where we don't know for a fact that what we're seeing is a lie or could be a lie. We don't tend to think about that. So, you know, the truth bias is going to have a bigger effect when you're not actively engaged in being skeptical.

We will return to this interview right after this commercial break.

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And now we return to our program. You also have this great concept. It's not the tweets, it's the retweets that get you in trouble. It's that propensity to go, oh, that really...

hit me emotionally or that really signals how I am in the right group and I should tell everybody about it and I'm going to do that and boom, now it's viral. And just the power of its virality magnifies the strength of its truth-seemingness. You say that early on and so you have this beautiful book that follows that to say, well, here's the things that get us in trouble and here's some advice to become a better citizen of the chaotic, epistemic landscape in which we have landed in. So I want to

Go in here a little bit and talk about these sticking points that you talked about in the beginning, these psychological mechanisms, these features of the brain that we all were born with. They become accelerants when it comes down to it for people who want to do cons, big and small. You call them habits in the book, and you have focus and prediction components.

commitment, and efficiency. I'd like to talk about all of them. We may not get to everything, but we'll give it a go because there's a lot when it comes to focus. Clearly, you are experts on focus. If the president needed someone to come in and talk about focus, you would be the two people that were invited to come talk about it. Let's get into focus. What do you mean by this when you say that this is one of the components of your susceptibility to con artistry?

What do you mean when you're using the word focus in that way? What we think of as focus is that we tend to pay most attention to what's right in front of us. And Danny Kahneman uses this phrase, what you see is all there is. And that really is kind of the aspect of focus that's most critical. We don't tend to think about the information that we don't have, the information we're missing.

And because of that, we tend not to stop and question. So we kind of open this chapter with an example of a stage psychic, John Edward, who uses very rapid banter and shifts around to cold read his audience, not using actual psychic abilities, but using standard sort of mentalism tricks and

But he's so quick about it that you don't have the time to stop and ask yourself, oh wait, could he have just made anything, any answer fit what he just asked for? It's allowing himself that opening to pick and choose what he wants to choose. But he's going fast enough that you never question what you're missing. It's too hard to do that. It takes time. This is sort of a general principle. Show people something. Right?

Don't tell them about what they're not seeing and they often won't think to question it. So this comes out in corporate demos, for example. You see a demo of this amazing self-driving car, for example.

And you don't stop to think, hey, did they try that same thing a whole bunch of times and only show me the one that worked? Or did they have lots of other cases where it crashed? Or does it only work under these perfect conditions? It's hard to stop and think in real time when you're seeing something that's a vivid demonstration, a positive example of what they're trying to sell you. And that tendency to kind of focus on what you're seeing right now plays into a lot of frauds.

right it's it's one of the reasons why we we don't stop to ask a little bit more questions we don't stop to ask what are we missing here great job picking uh john edward as your as your opening example i do cold reading as an example sometimes when i'm doing presentations and it works every time it works every single time like i'm getting an image of summertime i'm getting an image of summertime i'm getting was it did something happen to you in the summertime once that really kind of

I feel like there's someone that was important that was there. And I don't know why. It's like either it's a P or it's an R word maybe. And then like they give you the answer and you're like, yes, that was exactly what I was thinking of. Thank you for clarifying it. I had a blurry vision of it. Now I have a clear vision of it. And now we just talk about that thing. And on the other side of that, the receiver of that is just like, wow, this person has a gift. Yeah.

I want to start with Chris because this is a thing we do. And I find that probably for me, you have it early on the book, but it's one of those things that comes back over and over again. And I had never heard of this. The Possibility Grid. It's a great, a lot of books like this are just tell you how weird we are and move on. Not this one. As you go, you get tools to deal with these things. There is prescriptive advice here. And one of the most powerful ones is Possibility Grid.

Chris, tell me a little bit about this thing. And then, of course, Dan, chime in as much as you like. I want to know, what is it? How does it work? So the possibility grid is sort of our name for a very simple way of depicting possible things that happened or could have happened that has actually been studied quite a bit in psychology, cognitive psychology, decision making, but I think rarely turned into sort of just a practical piece of advice. And

You can think of it this way. Imagine, this is my favorite example, at least. Imagine a person is a person applied for a job recently. And, you know, the interview was a few days ago. And, you know, one, you know, then in the afternoon, you're thinking, you know, wouldn't really be great if I got that job. I really like to have that job. And then right at that moment, an email comes in your inbox with a job offer. This is the kind of

Well, these things are called coincidences. But the important part is that people don't interpret them as coincidences all the time. In fact, there are whole sort of mystical schools of thought that have names like the power and the law of attraction and the secret and so on that actually ascribe causality to those things. You know, you got the job offer because you thought about the job offer. And, you know, if you had thought about not getting the job offer or thought about getting into a car crash, that thing would have happened to you instead.

It's really a very pernicious, you know, ideology to sort of blame people for their own suffering, blame their, you know, their bad thoughts. But leaving that aside, the reason why people ascribe a lot of significance to that is that that's the top left corner of a very simple two by two grid. So here, you know, um,

the cells in the grid would be, you know, I'm thinking about something and they contact me right at that same time. So that's the top left. You know, you're thinking about things. That's the left. And the top row is, and they happen. But

There's also three other possibilities. One is you're thinking about the thing and it doesn't happen. So most of the time when you're thinking about that job interview, you didn't actually get the job offer, right? You probably thought about it a lot of times before that one moment when you actually got the job offer. And of course, there are many other things you think about that don't actually happen to you. And then, of course, there's the top right box in this two by two grid, which are

things that happen when you weren't thinking about them. Right. So a lot of times you get a job offer when you're not thinking about it or you're not thinking about your friend from years ago and they suddenly text you or call you or something like that. That's the top right. And then, of course, the bottom right is times when you weren't thinking about the job offer and you didn't get the job offer. And that's, you know, almost every moment of life. You're not thinking about something and it doesn't happen. And you

You don't need to do the statistics and try to calculate the proportions of all these numbers and so on to get some benefit out of thinking about things this way. Merely thinking there are these other three boxes, especially the top right and the bottom left, when you're sort of thinking about things, they don't happen or things happen when you weren't thinking about them.

And just knowing those boxes are there and that there are lots of stuff in there will sort of decrease the significance of the fact that every so often there's a coincidence in the top left. And in the book, we apply this to a lot of maybe more consequential kinds of, you know, situations where real money and real decisions are at stake, as opposed to, you know, sort of believing in, you know, in some kind of pseudoscience about, you know, about what makes people successful and what makes you get what you want in the world.

I think one way to think about this is that it gives you the information you need to decide if there actually is any relationship there in the first place. So you see John Edward make a great prediction, right? And that's just in that top left cell. It's like he made a prediction and it turned out to match reality.

But what we don't think about are, we need to know, are the predictions he makes any more successful than the predictions he doesn't make? And in order to do that, what are the predictions he misses? So in order to do that, you need to know, what did he predict that actually happened? What did he predict that didn't happen? What did he fail to predict that really did happen? And what did he fail to predict and never happened? Right?

And if you have all of that information, then you can actually determine whether there's anything there. There's a really nice large study

The Australian psychic prediction study that identified world events over a period of decades and then looked at all of the psychic predictions to see were they predicted, which real big events were predicted, which real big events should have been predicted but weren't. And when you kind of start filling in the cells of the possibility grid, you can realize, oh, okay, this is not right.

legitimate prediction, right? There's, you know, if these people really were psychics, they would have predicted things like, you know, the tsunamis, right? They would have noticed, they would have predicted COVID, but they didn't. That's right. I love this grid so much. I probably should have just started there and we could have talked about it the whole time because it is the big takeaway for me, at least early on in the book, but you apply it everywhere because the very next chapter is about prediction isolated as

When our experiences match our predictions, we tend not to question them. And you take that and you go with it. And it has all sorts of fun stuff in it. You have the Dan Kahan cream study, which is one of my favorite examples of stuff. These propositional logic things that are...

Easy to swindle people with and you talk about how where people's identities and their loyalties lie in there and what their experience is previous beforehand how it will manipulate predictions and everything I'm saying that quickly so we can skip to the next thing because I don't have a lot of time left I want to talk about commitment. I was shocked to get to this section and all of a sudden the Mandela effect appeared and

How in the world does the Mandela Effect apply to all the stuff we're talking about here? Well, I mean, so the Mandela Effect, for people who don't know, is this idea that I have a memory of something happening.

And the memory doesn't match what most people say is true. So the original claim was that from a person named Fiona Broome who remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison. He didn't die in prison. He got out of prison and was a political leader, right? So why would she have this memory? But she was so convinced that this memory was right, so committed to this belief that she

She had to come to the conclusion that reality was wrong.

Right? So that was, that was the really powerful thing. And we all have these sorts of things on a minor level, right? So you might remember, you know, Darth Vader saying, Luke, I am your father, which is not something that Darth Vader ever says. The actual line was, no, I am your father. People misremember it. And if enough people misremember it in the same way, and they find each other on social media, they become convinced that our memory of what happened

was right and that something must have changed about reality. It's so strongly holding to this belief that our memories must be accurate that rather than saying, oh, my memory is fallible, my memory has problems, I don't have a perfect record of what happened in the past and that I could get things confused that were completely natural to confused. Instead of coming

coming to the conclusion that that assumption about my memory is wrong, they come to the conclusion that reality is wrong, right? And there must be a split timeline or something like that. Yeah, my favorite one is Stouffer's Stove Top Stuffing. I have a strong memory that that exists and it does not. That's the one that gets me. And you know, this is kind of a natural tendency in memory, right? We tend to assume that when we remember something vividly,

that it must be true, right? And that's something we talked about a lot in "Invisible Guerrilla," not as much here. The key here is that if you hold an assumption so strongly that it becomes a commitment that you can't violate, that you can't break free from,

then that commitment is something that can lead to misunderstanding of the world and can be exploited. Yeah, so, and you have a lot of discussion of this here in this section of the book about, you know, and this is something that I find myself talking about a lot here lately, a

The beliefs are held in a certain confidence level, a strength, and you sample that strength the way you would sample an attitude about a movie or something. And that's what comes forth, you know, first, and that leads you to feel if I, if I feel this belief so strongly, the way I would feel so strongly about an attitude, then

then the natural conclusion here inside of me in some unarticulated, non-salient way is, well, it's got to be true. But what's contributing to the strength of that belief is often very difficult to determine unless someone is able to sit down and do some sort of Socratic thing with you or there's some other rhetorical technique or you're

a vehement critical thinker in some regard. So I ask you, Chris, like, okay, here's, this is the thing we understand as best we can about memory and confidence and, and our, these feelings of certainty. How is that used by con artists and others scammers to mess with us? Well, it,

It's used in a wide variety of ways because the idea of commitments is a very general one, right? You can have all kinds of commitments that you don't even realize are affecting and biasing your decision-making process. The commitment that my memory is infallible is merely one example. I think a lot of them are sort of more everyday, casual commitments we don't even realize we've made. One of my favorite ones is the person I'm dealing with

is not a crook. Literally, you know, the belief that you're dealing with someone who's not a crook. And of course, most of the time you are dealing with people who are not crooks. So it's not an unreasonable assumption to make, but it shouldn't reach the level of a commitment that you never questioned, especially when the stakes get high and you're making a big business deal. One, one thing that's that, that struck me when sort of studying so many scams and cons and working on this book is how many of them were perpetrated by people who had done similar things before. And I,

you start looking for it in the news there's a case we talk about where um the orlando museum of art had put up a whole exhibition of paintings by jean-michel basquiat and they were a newly discovered set of paintings that he supposedly made in the early 1980s in los angeles and uh you know there were some questions about the provenance of these you know of these paintings and in

In fact, the people who found the paintings, you know, and gave them to the museum to exhibit and so on, had actually been previously convicted of a variety of crimes related to fraud. And I think it's a good piece of common sense advice that you should be extra wary in making deals with people if they have previously, you know, committed similar or related offenses to what you're

You know, to what you're doing, it seems so obvious in retrospect, right? Like, that's just that seems like obvious common sense. But I think often, you know, we have a commitment, we don't really question it. A famous example, I think, is why so many people invested with Bernie Madoff, even in the face of red flags.

They believed that literally believe that Bernie would never screw them, whether because of religious affinity or pre-established relationships or just his fame and his sense of authority and so on. He created the commitment that this guy would never, you know, that he would never he would never screw them. He would never cheat them. And once you believe that.

If you believe he'll never, you know, he'll never cheat me. You can overlook all kinds of other things that he's doing that don't make any sense. Because as long as you have the inviolable assumption that you won't be cheated, it sort of doesn't matter what else happens. Right. So it really skews your whole evaluation of all the other signs and signals you might be getting. Those commitments can can do that. I love this, how this matches how we all got to know you. The invisible gorilla. Oftentimes, I think when people watch that video after they know what's up,

They're like, oh, that's obvious when you look at it. Oh, it's right there. And that feeling after a good scam that someone gets you with is what you just mentioned. It feels like that should have been obvious. Or it's obvious in retrospect. And it's the assumption that it will be obvious in the moment.

And the assumption that everything like that would be obvious in the moment, that is one of the most powerful attributes of all of this. Am I saying anything that makes sense there? Yeah, it's the assumption that, of course, I would notice this if it were questionable. Of course, I would notice if they were being scammed. But, of course, scammers are careful to not give you something that obvious right away. They build up to it so that you don't have that obvious assumption.

trigger to check more and to think about whether your assumptions are right. This happens in every field. This is not just a... One thing that I think is really important is that people who get deceived are not just gullible. It happens to everybody. In the sciences, this is really common. We tend to kind of assume that the information that we're looking at, the data that have been collected and analyzed properly when we see a result.

especially if it's a result that conforms to what we expected. We tend to kind of make that assumption. We don't tend to question it. We should be. And as scientific peer reviewers or scientific critical thinkers, we should be questioning those assumptions, but we often don't, right? Because we just rely on our assumption that what we're seeing is right. ♪

Clearly when you write a book like this at some point you start imagining like who is the ideal audience for it and then you start thinking what do I hope they take away from it after all of this. I'm just gonna ask that as sort of the general question like what do you hope people take away from this and if I had like a follow-up it would be what is your pithy fits on a one of those peel off calendar things a piece of advice that comes out of this current work that you're giving all of us in this book.

So what I hope people take away is really a new way of looking at

the social world, especially when it comes to any kind of time that someone is trying to persuade you of something, sell you something, get you involved in some kind of deal, investment. It's not that everybody's trying to cheat you. It's not that you should be cynical and skeptical all the time and so on, but you should sort of see with a new kind of pattern recognition

why they are doing what they're doing. What are they trying to get you to pay attention to? What beliefs of yours are they trying to exploit? Are they satisfying your expectations? Really sort of like a new template for looking at situations where you could become

You could become a victim and you can apply that, you know, sort of as practice, you know, on examples in our book or the next time you see a podcast about some famous con or some new con you never heard of or the next Netflix documentary there is about, you know, about some famous scam or something like that. Train yourself that way. Learn to see the world a little bit differently. That's, I think, the main thing.

That's the main goal. I would just add, you know, in writing this book and thinking about these sorts of things, we start to see how all of these cons and scams operate using the same set of techniques. And, you know, obviously, they're going to be new scams and new variants of scams, but they're still likely to rely on these same sorts of principles. So once you kind of learn how to spot when these are being used,

it might just trigger you to ask a couple more questions or to check a little bit more before forwarding that amazing story you just saw. So I think for me, the take-home is...

you know, you'll learn. The goal is to learn when you need to check a little bit more and when it's not worth it. And part of that challenge is in identifying when you're actually at risk of spreading misinformation or being fooled or losing money on an investment. Those are going to be the moments when you need to think a little bit more critically about what assumptions you're making and, you know, what...

what sorts of tricks somebody might be using to fool you. So figuring out when you need to check more and then doing it, asking those additional questions is really the key.

Dan Simons' website is dansimons.com, D-A-N-S-I-M-O-N-S. And he tweets at ProfSimons, P-R-O-F-S-I-M-O-N-S. Christopher Chabris' website is chabris.com, C-H-A-B-R-I-S. And he tweets at C-F-C-H-A-B-R-I-S. And the book is Nobody's Fool, How We Get Taken In and What to Do About It.

That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. You can find links to everything we talked about, including the old video, Invisible Gorilla, and the follow-up video, The Monkey Business Illusion, over at youarenotso smart.com or check the show notes inside your podcast player. My new book, How Minds Change, is out there and you can find links to all of that in this episode's show notes right there in your podcast player.

And for all the past episodes, go to Stitcher, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or you're not so smart.com. Follow me on Twitter at David McRaney. Follow the show at NotSmartBlog.com.

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