When the information first broke that George Santos, the freshman Republican consultant from Long Island, had lied on his résumé, my first thought was, Well, after all—he’s a politician. As the scope of the lies grew, nonetheless, my analysis modified: not a politician, however a con artist.
It’s a distinction that I’ve harassed repeatedly within the years since I revealed a e book about con artists. Branding anybody who misrepresents one thing or lies a bit as a con artist is perhaps handy, but when we achieve this, the time period loses all which means. For con artists, mendacity is a means of being. It reaches previous exaggeration or misrepresentation right into a prevailing disconnect from actuality.
Santos’s lengthy checklist of fabrications brings to thoughts among the most prolific con artists of the previous century. His instructional historical past is made up: no attendance at Horace Mann, so far as anybody can inform. No Baruch, no NYU. In truth, no school diploma in any respect. Though it’s important to admire his penchant for specifics—high 1 p.c of his (nonexistent) Baruch class! (For one among many historic analogues, see Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a.ok.a. the Great Impostor. Demara, a high-school dropout, made a behavior of claiming others’ credentials as his personal, together with Ph.D.s, M.D.s, and every other diploma he may come up with.) Nor do Goldman Sachs or Citigroup have data of Santos working there. (For a historic tour de power of faux employment histories, see Clark Rockefeller—actual identify, Christian Gerhartsreiter—who was not solely a faux Rockefeller but additionally a claimant to fairly the nonexistent enterprise pedigree.) And that’s merely a sampling of Santos’s lies.
How does somebody within the public eye ever hope that deceptions of this magnitude will go undetected? What explains con artists’ impulse to deceive, repeatedly, even because the fictions they inform turn out to be tougher to take care of? These questions have fascinated psychologists for years—and we’re starting to seek out solutions.
In three years of analysis on con artists—interviewing them, spending time with them, submitting them to psychological questionnaires, and studying any obtainable psychological literature on them—I discovered that con artists are likely to exhibit some mixture of the so-called darkish triad of persona traits, which have been studied in misleading conduct extra broadly: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Although psychopathy tends to get a variety of consideration—few issues are as eye-catching because the phrase psychopath—the trait that, to me, exemplifies the psychology of the con, and explains the hubris behind a pyramid of lies as excessive as Santos’s, is narcissism.
Narcissism within the case of the arrogance artist is just not narcissism within the sense that you simply and I would use when speaking about somebody who feels that the world revolves round them. It’s an nearly pathological hubris; the thought that you simply haven’t gotten caught but, so that you by no means will get caught. The sense that, out of everybody, you deserve it probably the most, no matter it is perhaps. True narcissism helps you to rationalize all method of sin; it’s self-delusion taken to an excessive.
Narcissism breeds, as properly, a self-reinforcing cycle: The extra you lie, the extra entitled you’re feeling—and the extra certified. In 2019, a global group of psychologists—Francesca Gino of Harvard, Wiley Wakeman of the Stockholm School of Economics, and Celia Moore of Bocconi University, in Italy—ran a collection of research that checked out dishonest’s results on self-image. Would individuals who lower corners on a process really feel kind of assured of their abilities afterward? The outcomes had been considerably counterintuitive: Subjects who lied about their efficiency on a collection of matrix issues truly felt extra competent afterward. I should be good at this! Look at how properly I did! (Ignore, for a second, that I inflated my outcomes.)
The psychologists additionally went a step past the everyday laboratory video games to a pursuit extra immediately related to Santos: mendacity on a résumé. Participants got a process—apply for a job utilizing equipped credentials—and would obtain a bonus if their software was deemed to be within the high 25 p.c of all candidates. The trick was that every of the equipped credentials might be twisted or misrepresented, if the applicant so desired. Oxford Brookes University may turn out to be the University of Oxford. A two-week executive-education program at Harvard may turn out to be an precise diploma from Harvard. And second-class honors might be inflated to first-class honors. A full 35 p.c of contributors selected to misrepresent themselves on not less than one among their credentials—and those who did reported feeling considerably extra competent on the finish than those that had precisely conveyed their {qualifications}. It’s the intense of dressing for the job you need—to the purpose the place you start to imagine you’re extra certified for that job than those that labored for it.
The result’s a perverse dynamic. The extra an individual like George Santos misrepresents himself and cons others for his personal acquire, the extra entitled he feels to maintain going. Why ought to I resign once I’m probably the most certified for the job? The con artist, not less than to some extent, involves imagine his personal lies. One current collection of research discovered that individuals who had been confronted with proof of self-deception—believing themselves to have carried out higher than they really did, and higher than the typical individual, on a collection of trivia questions—not solely did not acknowledge their self-delusion however started to see others as those vulnerable to it. (Cue Santos’s current interview with Piers Morgan, through which the consultant largely deflected accountability for his lies.)
Of course, it’s not sufficient to lie and justify your conning to your self. You need to persuade others to imagine in you. I’ve argued that there’s a con for everybody: Not everybody will fall for each con, however anybody can fall for a con that’s properly suited to them. The grasp con artist is aware of the way to choose the correct victims and the correct venue—after which the way to promote his story most successfully.
Here, Santos selected properly. Politics is an space the place shades of grey aren’t simply tolerated; they’re the norm. So if anybody ever catches you in a lie, it’s simple sufficient to elucidate it away. Add to that Santos’s alternative of district—on Long Island, the place there was little competitors (he ran uncontested for the Republican nomination) and a component of time strain (last-minute modifications within the district-map traces thwarted would-be challengers)—and you’ve got an ideal stage for even the largest lies to go largely ignored.
Even within the perfect enviornment, how do you get others to place their belief in you? Con artists appear to intuitively grasp what psychology researchers know: We are likely to belief individuals who seem and act equally to us. (Some research have grouped folks collectively in comparatively arbitrary methods, like whether or not they over- or underestimated the variety of dots in an image or whether or not they most popular artwork by Kandinsky or Klee, discovering that contributors had been kinder to these they thought had been like them.) Santos claimed to be Jewish, as an illustration, when he ran in opposition to Jewish opponents—and presumably wished to seize that voter demographic. (He later claimed he had mentioned he was “Jew-ish,” moderately than “Jewish.”)
When all else fails, emotion, emotion, emotion. The extra emotional we’re, the extra seemingly we’re to offer somebody the advantage of the doubt and put our logic apart. Santos’s mom dying due to 9/11 was apparently false. Some of his staff dying within the Pulse nightclub shootings was additionally apparently false. His grandparents surviving the Holocaust, once more, seems to have been fabricated. As Demara, the grasp con artist, as soon as put it, Americans wish to be favored greater than they wish to be proper. We’d moderately err on the facet of sympathy than mistrust. My coronary heart goes out to the sufferer of tragedy—and if I believe he’s making it up, I’ll maintain it to myself.
Sure, there are requires Santos to resign, and a House ethics investigation may be coming, to look into a number of complaints about his conduct. “A sick puppy,” Senator Mitt Romney referred to as Santos on the State of the Union. And but he’s nonetheless in Congress, head apparently not bowed in disgrace.
By Maria Konnikova
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