Why We Fall for Scams with Chris Chabris and Dan Simons

“What fictional con artists exploit are the same cognitive tendencies that real people have. But everyday scams don’t have to be so precise.” - Dr. Chris Chabris Share on X

Scammers, like magicians, use distractions and illusions to keep you from realizing what is really going on. They may choose to have you focus on something that is urgent hoping that you’ll make mistakes that you normally wouldn’t.

Today’s guests are Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. Dr. Chabris is a Cognitive Scientist who has taught at Union College in Harvard University and is a fellow of The Association for Psychological Science. His research focuses on decision-making, attention, intelligence, and behavior genetics. Chris received his PhD in Psychology from Harvard University. 

Dr. Daniel Simons is a professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, where he has the Visual Cognitive Laboratory. Dan received his PhD from Cornell University. His research explores the limits of awareness and memory, the reasons why we often are unaware of those limits, and the implications of such limits on our personal and professional lives.

“A good scammer will know that if they can get you to focus on one thing, you may not notice something else or more broadly may not think of something else.” - Dr. Chris Chabris Share on X

Show Notes:

• [1:18] – Dan and Chris share their background and what their current roles are in their industry.
• [3:27] – Why did Dan and Chris decide to write a book together?
• [6:12] – Stories of victims are engaging and interesting, but these stories don’t focus on why we are fooled.
• [8:53] – Chris and Dan share the story of a time they were almost scammed.
• [13:01] – Fictional stories in movies get some things right about what con artists exploit, but real scenarios are not always so precise.
• [14:52] – We have the ability to focus on a select amount of the information in front of us.
• [16:39] – There are a lot of different techniques that scammers employ to put you under time pressure.
• [19:59] – Confirmation bias is the idea that you try to find evidence of what you believe.
• [21:04] – There are a lot of theories about why we are good at some things and not as good at others.
• [22:15] – It is logical to trust someone you know, but social media has created the opportunity to trust misinformation.
• [24:38] – Commitments are assumptions that we make and hold steadfastly to.
• [26:41] – It is easy to trust someone when you’ve committed to your perception of them.
• [28:33] – Ask yourself if there is anything you believe that could be proven wrong if you were given new information.
• [31:01] – External validation is a great source for seeing things you might have missed.
• [32:48] – There are scams in literally everything, even chess.
• [38:02] – Are scams increasing or is it awareness of scams that is increasing?
• [40:26] – All scams employ the same principles. They are always going to rely on the same tricks and tap into the same fears.
• [42:37] – Dan’s hope is that people will question the information they get and become less accepting.

“Technology makes it easier to do things at scale. It’s been the last 20 years where we’ve seen industrial scams at scale.” - Dr. Dan Simons Share on X

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• The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons

Transcript:

Daniel and Christopher, thank you so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast today.

Daniel: Glad to be on.

Christopher: Yeah, it's great to be here.

Starting with Dan, can you give us a little bit of background about who you are and what you do?

Daniel: I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Most of my research has to do with visual attention, what we notice, what we miss, how we focus our attention, things like distraction. I have a lot of broad interests in how we think about perception and how we think about how our own minds work. That's most of what I do these days.

Awesome. Chris, same question for you.

Christopher: I'm a cognitive scientist. My day job, as it were, is working for a health system in Pennsylvania, where I'm a professor and also involved in a lot of work trying to help people make better decisions, applying ideas from decision science and cognitive psychology to improve people's decision-making. Also in my spare time, I'm also a chess master and enthusiast of other games.

A grandmaster, or as if just a master is not an accomplishment in and of itself?

Christopher: If I were a grandmaster, I would have said so, so I'm not. I'm several levels below that. But still, I do spend a lot of time on it, so I better be reasonably good at it.

Definitely the person I don't ever want to get in a chess game with, then.

Christopher: It might be fun.

Maybe for you, but probably not for me.

Christopher: There’s scamming in chess, by the way. Maybe you can ask us about that later on. You can ask him about chess scams. We can get to that later, I guess.

We will definitely talk about that. What got the two of you interested in writing a book about—I’m going to call it a little bit differently than you guys have, but why do we fall for scams and what we can do about it?

Daniel: I think that's a pretty close description of what we're talking about. We started thinking about this topic a long time ago. We finished our first book almost 13 years ago now. We started gathering content and examples of things that we wanted to write about.

We started to piece together that a lot of them had to do with deception in general form. It was only a few years ago that we put together a way of organizing these ideas into something cohesive and coherent, which was we realized that across all of these different domains, everything from chess to art, to science, to sports, that scams, deception, and cons—both when other people are scamming and when you're deceiving yourself—all had some common characteristics.

They relied on the same sorts of thought patterns that we tend to use very effectively most of the time, but they get distorted at times by people trying to deceive us. They relied on the same kinds of information that we find really appealing that sometimes can be hijacked to lead us down the wrong path. That was what eventually put everything together for us, recognizing the similarities across all of these different deceptions.

Were there events in either of your lives that made you feel compelled to do this, a family friend had gotten scammed or something like that, or you'd seen a news story about something like that?

Christopher: We've seen dozens of news stories, if not hundreds, and documentaries, podcasts, and all that. One comes to mind in my case. It was actually my father who lived to be 97 years old, died while we were working on the book.

He would occasionally, very late in life, get these phone calls from some guy claiming to be some tech person who needed to help him fix his internet or something like that. My father is a pretty savvy guy. He was cognitively intact until the very end, so he would usually get annoyed and hang up on these people, but he told me about it.

I felt annoyed by proxy for him, and I started investigating it a little bit. I thought I had some hypotheses about what it was. I never tracked it down. He was not victimized for it, but I could see how easily he or someone else like him. For all I know, whoever was calling was going down the phonebook and just trying everybody, or everybody who lived in the neighborhood because there were a lot of older people in the neighborhood. Who knows what?

That was something that didn't happen to me personally. I can't say that that caused me to want to write the book. But really, as Dan said, as we were working on this book. It just seemed like we were seeing more and more about scams, deceptions, fraud in a variety of areas. Whether that means there's more and more of it happening, or we're just learning about more and more of it, either way, it seems to be an issue of such great importance that it was worth diving into.

Daniel: One of the things that's interesting about it is that all of these stories are really entertaining and engaging. They just have a great narrative structure to them, which is why these grand con films are so popular. But not all that many of them seem to focus on why it is that we get fooled. What is it about us that works well most of the time but that can lead to even really highly educated, smart, careful people getting fooled?

That was one of the organizing issues that we had for this. Why is it that we don't seem to learn from all of these movies that everybody's so engaged in and all of these stories that end up in newspaper articles and podcasts? Why do we not get it? Why do we not know what the risks are?

Speaking of highly educated people being deceived, have either of you been deceived or almost become a victim of a scam?

Christopher: I have a number of times. I probably can't count all the times that I have. But one that comes to mind right now is I would say maybe about 15 years ago, maybe a little more than that, maybe closer to 20 years ago. When I was still a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, I got contacted by a guy who seemed to know who I was and seemed to have a lot of people in common.

He dropped a few names of famous people in our field, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience. He told me about this really interesting person he knew who had a neurological problem. He thought it was really interesting and wondered if I could be involved in doing a case study of her, trying to figure out what was really going on with her. It was quite logical.

He thought the issues he described that she had were very much related to things that I studied, things that my boss in the lab studied, and so on. I had a number of phone calls with him and was trying to actually get this to happen, when at some point that contact ended. In fact, coincidentally, Dan was contacted by the same guy in some way. Maybe Dan can pick up the story and tell you what it all came to in the end.

Daniel: Yeah, the same guy had contacted me. He was very interested in some of the visual perception work I was doing. He was very much interested in visual illusions and was interested in some of the videos that I'd created, and was trying to figure out the best way of making this stuff better well-known. It was the same thing. He wanted to establish a collaboration.

At some point, he asked me to potentially help work on some website, which I didn't do. It all just fell through because we were busy. We're both academics. We had lots of other things going on. Multiple calls, and multiple emails over a period of months. It was only very recently that we learned that he passed away under very bizarre circumstances not very long ago.

It turns out that he was a small-scale scammer and con artist. He had been bilking people out of their rare books for some time, selling them, and then not giving them the money. He had maneuvered himself to be affiliated with high-profile researchers and universities but didn't really have any actual affiliations. It just showed up.

People kept him around thinking that everybody else knew him when really nobody knew him or knew him or knew him well. It was a really interesting case of, yeah, we could have been led down a path where we were basically helping to bolster the reputation of somebody who was a scammer trying to collect academics in some way.

Christopher: Once he was friends with us somehow through this work, there may have been another ask later on or another event that happened. I'm not sure it was his plan all along. I would say he was more of a recreational con artist. I don't think it was his full-time career. I would call them more of a hobbyist con artist. For whatever reason, he did a lot of this stuff. We didn't know anything about it until writing the book. It was actually while writing the book that we recalled this story and looked up the details.

One reason why we come back to this story is that it illustrates a common way that some people can avoid being scammed, which is look up whether the guy you're doing business with has been convicted, sued civilly, professionally sanctioned, or whatever, of scams, cons, frauds, other relevant crimes, maybe not speeding. But have they done the same thing before that they might do to you? That's a really basic question to ask. 

But surprisingly, a few people or at least many people don't ask, because you can tell when you look at some of these cons that they were big cons done by people who had been convicted big cons of the past.

We've definitely seen that with a number of the crypto scams, that these people have backgrounds, other types of Ponzi schemes, and other types of scams.

Daniel: Those are the people who have gotten caught in the past, but probably plenty who haven't been caught yet.

When you started looking at the background of this gentleman, did he have any real academia experience that might have had him working in this field?

Daniel: He was academically adjacent. He didn't really have the kinds of credentials you would expect of somebody who was in that research field. He passed himself off almost like a wealthy connected patron type. That's not an unusual thing for scammers trying to target academics. They hold out the potential for money and resources that academics are always short of when they're trying to do their research.

I don't think he had much in the way of credentials. He'd published a couple of books that were adjacent to these fields. He was a promoter in some ways, but it wasn't really clear what the motivations were, what the sources were, where his resources came from.

It turns out, he was probably faking a lot of those resources. He was living this weird life in California with B-List celebrities attending parties at his houses and that sort of stuff. It's not clear how he got it. He was just very good at talking his way into things.

I suppose for some people, that might be considered their own form of entertainment. Very interesting.

Daniel: Hard to know what the motivations were. That's not something we typically try and think about too much: What are the motivations of the people who are pulling these cons off? That's not really the emphasis that we're focusing on.

You talked about this love affair that we have with con movies and watching these big cons happen. Are those the plot lines and the way they develop actually reasonably accurate to the research that you've done?

Christopher: I would say they're accurate in the sense of what the fictional con artists exploit are the same kinds of cognitive tendencies that real people have. What's not realistic about those is the intricacy of the plot, and the fact that everything depends on everything happening in exactly the right sequence and exactly the right timing. You need that in order to make a compelling hundred-million-dollar movie. But everyday scams don't have to be so precise.

There are some that are like it. One that comes to mind is Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. He was on the verge of being caught a couple of times. It was down to the wire, down to the minute, the hour, the day, when the SEC could have done one more thing that would have uncovered what he was up to.

When he had to mock up a fake trading screen for someone who came to convince him that he was actually making trades. That kind of stuff could work nicely in a movie, but that's the exception. That's really the exception. Everyday cons don't rely on that. They don't need that clockwork timing, but they do exploit the same mental habits that those ones do.

Daniel: Even those grand cons—we talk about a lot of them, like Theranos, Madoff, and other long-running scams. They're good examples because they draw on so many of the principles that we talked about. They're not just a one-trick pony. They really work because they use all of these techniques. Many of the smallest scams might rely on one or two of them. But for something to last for as long as those did, they have to take advantage of a lot of these principles.

Let's start talking about what are some of these principles that the con artists are using.

Christopher: I guess one good place to start is the concept of focus. We have the ability to focus on a selected amount of the information in front of us, so paying attention to something. I'm looking at you right now on my screen. I'm not looking at anything else in my room. Something could happen over here, over there, and I wouldn't necessarily notice it.

a good con artist, a good scammer, will know that if they can get you to focus on one thing, you may not notice something else. Or more broadly, you may not think about something else. You may not remember to consult some other… Share on X

When we focus on something, we can process that information more efficiently. We can get more out of it, and so on. However, a good con artist, a good scammer, will know that if they can get you to focus on one thing, you may not notice something else. Or more broadly, you may not think about something else. You may not remember to consult some other source of information.

One of the most important things they try to do is get you to focus on exactly what they're providing you, what's right in front of you. Time pressure is, in a way, a tactic to get you to focus. You don't have time to consult alternate sources of information to think about what information is missing, or what you might want to have access to in order to make a better decision. There are many of these key principles, but focus helps us in everyday life. Con artists intuitively know about that, and they try to manipulate it to their benefit.

Time pressure is, in a way, a tactic to get you to focus. You don't have time to consult alternate sources of information to think about what information is missing, or what you might want to have access to in order to make a… Share on X

Daniel: A lot like magic. A magician is going to direct your attention to what they want you to pay attention to, the effects that's going to happen and away from what they're doing behind the scenes, the method, the sleight of hand, whatever techniques they're using to make that effect happen. They don't want you to look at that, they want you to focus attention elsewhere.

A large part of what works in these cons is, by putting you under time pressure, you don't think about context, or you only think about what's happening in the moment. If you can be stuck in that moment, it's really hard to take a step back and say, “OK, what am I not being told? What am I not seeing?”

What are some of the ways that they trigger that time pressure for people?

Daniel: It depends on the scam. There are lots of different techniques that they could use to do this. One would be, you can be called an exploding offer, something that's going to expire in the next half an hour if you don't act now, which is almost never a useful thing. It's very rarely the case that anything is just going to go away within 30 minutes.

A lot of the scams lately are things like the kidnapping scam, the owed taxes, or questionable immigration status scams where they'll call you up and say, “OK, if you don't pay us right now, the police are coming to your door. You can pay us off by going and getting a cash card, sending us the money, and then we'll call them off.”

Government organizations are never going to actually do that. But in the moment, when you're under time pressure, and you get somebody who's following a very effective script, it's hard to step back and focus on whether or not this would be the thing that should actually happen. You don't have time to think about and question it.

Focusing on just what they're saying, staying on the phone with them, all of that technique, is about getting people to not think about, “Is this real? Does this actually make sense? Is this the thing that actually happens?” Those questions require you to focus on what's not right in front of you.

Is that why some of the scammers will tell people, “I'll stay on the phone with you while you go to the store to get the Apple iTunes card, to get the Target gift card”?

Daniel: Exactly. It's the same technique that magicians use. Magicians use fast banter, fast talking and jokes, to keep you engaged on what they're saying and not what they're doing.

Christopher: Psychics will throw out things rapid fire because they know that you will only focus on the one that actually winds up making sense. You'll forget the four things they said before that had no connection at all to you, but they'll just remember the one that made sense. If they said, “OK, think about this one for 30 seconds, and then let me know if there's any connection” and then they said, “No.” “OK, let's try another one for 30 seconds.” You'd remember all those failures. But instead, they just keep spitting out stuff until you say, “Oh, yeah, there's one.”

It's just the way memory works. We don't forget irrelevant things that happened and went away. When you read a transcript of a psychic performance, you can see all that stuff because it's recorded there, and you can look at it as long as you want. But that's not the way they would, one could say victim, but the way the interlocutor feels during the psychic performance. They don't necessarily feel that way.

The target.

Christopher: Target, sure. Target is maybe a good word. You could say victim in some cases, because I think you are being victimized if there's some guy who was making money by telling you that your grandmother passed through and wants you to feel good and all that stuff. Maybe I don't have the right mindset for this, but I don't really see what is gained by lying to people about what their dead relatives think about them, anyhow.

Because they can come back and tell you more for only $499 a month.

Christopher: Exactly.

Is this part of it that it's a colloquial confirmation bias?

Daniel: Confirmation bias is a slightly different thing. Confirmation bias would be more the idea that you try and find evidence that's consistent with what you believe, what you expect, what you predict. That might fall more into another hook that we have that we talked about, which is prediction. We tend to not be as critical of things that match what we're expecting.

We're all capable of applying logic really effectively when it's something we disagree with, but we tend not to apply it as systematically when it's something we agree with. -Dan Simons Share on X

We're all good at being critical thinkers when somebody tells us something that we absolutely don't believe. Then we can tear it to pieces. Everybody can do that. We're all capable of applying logic really effectively when it's something we disagree with, but we tend not to apply it as systematically when it's something we agree with. Of course, scammers know that. They give you what you're expecting and what you're hoping for so that you don't end up countering it as well.

What's the mechanism, the biological imperative, for us to be critical about stuff that we disagree with, but go with the flow on stuff that we do agree with?

Christopher: I think that's an active topic of research right now. There are various theories about how the mind evolves to be good at what it's good at and bad at what it's bad at. Most people would argue that there must be some logic behind why we're good at some things, but being good at those things leaves weak points behind. You could make that analysis for any particular skill or ability that we have.

I think what unifies all of them is that we're not inherently dumb, and our minds are not inherently poorly designed, especially given the material they're made of. We don't have supercomputers with perfectly precise logic in them and so on. They're perfectly good at all that stuff, but I personally believe that most of the evolution of the mind happened when the world was a bit different from the way it is now.

We have many more people around, many more people who can talk to us, many more sources of information, much more information coming at us all the time, and things are more complicated. That creates pathways for scammers to try to exploit us.

For example, it's normally very good to trust people that you know. It's totally logical. The longer you've known them, the better you know them. The more they're related to you, the more you should trust them. But now, we have social networks. We have these people who are “friends online.”

When our friends spread information to us, I think it tags a little extra amount of credibility to it that it may not deserve at all, because they may just be retweeting it from someone else who we have no connection to, and they have no logical reason to believe. But now it becomes tagged as something from our friends. Disinformation can exploit our preference for information from those people who we are familiar with and we have social connections to.

Daniel: Most of the time, these tendencies that we have works well. Most of us don't get conned all the time. Most people don't get deceived on a big scale very often. Maybe there are little deceptions here and there that don't matter all that much and don't add up to that much.

The moment-to-moment risks to all of us are relatively low. Most of the time, our tendency to focus on what's in front of us allows us to get things done effectively. Our tendency to trust people we know and who are familiar is worthwhile because most of the time, they're good for it. Most of the time, acting that efficiently, sticking to our commitments generally works for us.

There's a tendency to frame all of these shortcuts and simplifying techniques we use as biases or flaws. I think that's a wrong-headed way of going about it. There are things that work really, really well most of the time and that can be hijacked for the wrong purposes, or can lead us astray if we assume that they're infallible. That's where we get into the most trouble.

I liked that representation of it. It's almost a paradigm shift. People are not exploiting our weaknesses, but they're exploiting our strengths in a way, exploiting something that benefits us most of the time.

Daniel: I think that's a fair way of putting it. If it didn't work well at least over the history of our species, if it didn't work reasonably well most of the time, it probably wouldn't stick around that much.

What are some of these other habits and behaviors that people can exploit?

Christopher: I would point to the idea of commitments. You mentioned confirmation bias earlier. I think the idea of commitments is related to that. Commitments are assumptions that we make, that are very strong ones that we hold pretty steadfastly to, and that often we don't even realize we're making when we're going through some decision process. Most critically, if we accept them as inherently true, then logic will lead us to all kinds of other absurd conclusions because we have to rationalize the rest of what's going on to be consistent with our initial belief.

For example, NXIVM, the multilevel marketing, success, training organization, maybe some sex cult branding women and all that stuff, was founded by a guy who got himself in some book of records, maybe it was Guinness or something else. He certainly got it into the media that he was the world's smartest man.

One of the people who was an early, I think, maybe his girlfriend, at one point but an early member of his organization, wrote in her memoir that she knew he was the world's smartest man. She thought, “Whatever he says, it must be pretty smart. He's a genius.” If you keep that idea in mind that you're dealing with the world's smartest man, you could wind up agreeing with a lot of pretty crazy stuff because it comes from the world's smartest man.

That's a pretty simple example, but cults, I think, often have that idea in them that there's some commitment to the idea that someone's infallible, someone speaks for God, someone's really a genius, et cetera, and then you can do all kinds of dumb things. That's the result of trying to be consistent with that premise.

I think we definitely see it. It's one of those things you see in common sales teachings or courses of, get these micro-commitments, get them to say yes to a whole bunch of things. Now, they feel like they've agreed with you, they must make a big purchase from you now.

Daniel: And it's also just building up that commitment over time so that you start with small things that you do agree with. Once you've agreed to all of those, if you want to be committed to the same ideas that these were good ideas, it makes it easier and easier to go farther and farther.

I think it's important to remember that the people who are falling for these things, once they've committed to it, their logic may be internally consistent in some strange ways because they've accepted that premise. They've built everything around that commitment, everything else might cohere. Whereas from the outside, it might look crazy.

It might look completely unhinged from reality. But it's only within that single framework. If they can get you to throw out all the other stuff and accept that premise, then you can be acting completely logically, completely… Share on X

It might look completely unhinged from reality. But it's only within that single framework. If they can get you to throw out all the other stuff and accept that premise, then you can be acting completely logically, completely reasonably, given that premise. It's very hard to take that step back away from them and say, “Oh, my fundamental assumption was wrong.”

I was about to ask you, how do you make that step back to see the bigger picture or to question the premise that you've now committed to, that you've gone down this path?

Christopher: Just being aware that you've made this assumption. I think part of the problem is we're not aware of it. You may not be thinking. Let's say you're in the NXIVM organization. You're not thinking every day about how the leader, Keith Raniere—I don't know why we can't name him, he's in prison—is the smartest man in the world, but you may have just internalized that, so you have to surface those things and say, “Wait a minute. What am I assuming about the situation I'm in that would make a big difference if it weren't true?”

That's really an important thinking tool in general, saying is there any information that could get me to change my views about something? Is there anything that I believe which if it were wrong, might change everything around? You may not be open to having your belief changed about that, but maybe you are? Maybe there is some evidence that once you realize that you have this belief, there is some evidence that would contradict it, and then that can unravel the entire thing.

Daniel: It's a really difficult thing to think about who does break away from that thinking and who doesn't. David McRaney has a nice book out right now called How Minds Change, that directly addresses that question. What is it that leads somebody to change their mind about a Keith Raniere figure?

I guess where you want to be is when you're on the way to the grocery store to buy the gift cards, then you question, “Is this person really from the IRS? How do I get an external verification of that or breaking it down from someone other than the person I'm talking to?”

Daniel: Yeah. They're going to do everything they can to keep you from talking to anybody else to get any other perspective on it.

Christopher: Some of the accounts I've heard of these kinds of scams, that's, in some ways, when the browbeating starts. When people question, then sometimes that shifts into a more aggressive mode, a more threatening mode, or something like that. I think a lot of these scammers are aware that you might question that, and they have a script ready for that. I think anyone listening to this podcast can be aware that no legitimate organization is asking you to pay by gift cards, so you're not risking anything by hanging up that call once you realize what's going on.

In that place, the result of some of the things that we've talked about, you've already made commitments, you've already laid out some foundational beliefs that this person is who they claim to be, so now your internal logic says, “Well, for some reason, gift cards seem to be a viable way to pay for my tax bills.”

Daniel: Or you just are under so much pressure that you just want it to stop. You want to end the situation, and you just don't have the resources to step back and say, “Wait a second. Is this legitimate?” Even if you are saying that, you're still being constantly put under pressure to not have the time to focus on something else.

Christopher: I would say one of the best things you can do in those situations is ask somebody else. There were many cases we found in working on the book, where people were about to be scammed. By accident, someone saw what was going on—a friend of theirs—and said, you know this is a scam. It was just so obvious to the other person, so unobvious to the person being scammed. Once the bubble was pricked by this other person saying it, you have license to change your beliefs, because now you have some external validation that you can go to.

Of course, there were other cases where someone said, “You know this is a scam.” That advice was not accepted, and people lost a lot of money by not following that advice. If there's time, just ask somebody else what they think is going on in the situation. Having not been led down that path, made those commitments, and heard all this rhetoric about the police coming and blah-blah-blah, they might just see the pattern for what it is.

If there's time, just ask somebody else what they think is going on in the situation. Having not been led down that path, made those commitments, and heard all this rhetoric about the police coming and blah-blah-blah, they might… Share on X

They're not the ones who're under emotional distress. They're not the ones who feel the time pressure. They're not the ones who feel all these leveraging techniques. They're like, “No, that's clearly a scam,” because they have no teeth in the game to be vested in the result.

Daniel: They might have a different motivation. If you're desperate to make ends meet, and somebody's promising you big returns on a small investment, you might be completely enticed by that. What's too good to be true for an outsider might be perfectly acceptable and just good enough to be plausible to you. Having somebody else look at it, who might have different motivations, different desires, might see through it and say, “OK, wait. That’s too good to be true,” and force you to think about it for a second.

It's because they're in a situation where they, in some sense, need it to be true because this is their way out of this other situation.

Daniel: Exactly.

Let's change gears here. You talked a little bit about chess scams. I want to hear about a chess scam here. In all my podcasts, I don't think I've heard of a chess scam.

Christopher: I think there are scams for everything. The fact that you haven't heard of a chess scam just means you haven't studied the whole universe of scams yet. You'll get there eventually.

There are a number of chess scams. In fact, the one that I was thinking about when I made that joke is, I thought I was being scammed once. I don't know if Dan even knows the story, but one time I was in San Francisco, I think, at an academic conference. It used to be on Market Street in San Francisco. They had some chess tables set up right near where the cable cars turn around, and I think that's all long gone. I just went down there for fun, and I found some guys who were playing chess.

There are these things called chess hustlers. They're in Washington Square Park, New York, and some other places in New York City. What they'll do is they'll play against you for money, like we'll play for $5 a game or something like that.

At first, of course, they will play badly, maybe even lose the first game, or at least give the impression by playing some strange moves that they're not really that good to draw you into the idea that, “I can beat this guy, I can beat this guy.” But then eventually, they will start winning, and you'll owe them a bunch of money at the end.

I'm playing this guy with this table. I won the first game pretty easily. I didn't tell him, “Hey, by the way, I'm a chess master. I have a rating and so on.” I just wanted to see what would happen. I thought maybe he was better than me and was going to pull the scam on me eventually.

He said, “Double or nothing.” I won the second game, and then he said, “Double or nothing.” I won the third game, and now he owes me $40. He said, “OK, I'm not playing you anymore.” I said, “OK, $40, please.” He's like, “No way. I'm not paying you. You're too good.” I was like, “Where was that fine print on the hustler contract or something like that?”

If you're not too good, you owe me the money. But if you're too good, then the bets are literally off. There's a chess scam that normally works, but this was a double-scam because, like, the guy didn't pay me when I lost. That's a fun example.

There's cheating and chess, and that's one thing we do analyze a little bit to see how that works. The way that people cheat in chess is they consult a computer for advice on what moves to play, but they do it surreptitiously because it's against the rules. They have some method for doing it without being caught.

There's actually quite a bit of cheating in chess more than there should be, to my regret, and it's happened against me in online chess games, where you really don't know what the person on the other end of the screen in another country and so on is doing. There are some telltale signs that can let you know that that kind of cheating is happening.

For example, if people consistently use the same amount of time on every move, probably they're not really emotionally involved in the game or modulating the amount of their thinking to how complicated their position is. They're just taking the time to type in the move to their phone, and see what their phone says, and then type that back into the other thing. The consistency in people's behavior is often like a telltale sign that there's some fraudulent process going on, not a real human process the way normal human behavior works.

I have to admit, I have a guilty pleasure of watching grandmasters play people in Washington Park and whatnot, who they don't know this person is a grandmaster, so they sit down and start playing with the hustler. The hustler's like, “Oh, you're actually good.”

Christopher: Yeah. There are some fun YouTube videos where grandmasters who are now big YouTubers, they're making their money on YouTube. To make a fun video, they'll go to the park and outhustle the hustlers. Those are very amusing.

What you're talking about that surprised me is how fast these players actually play. Occasionally, they'll stop and think for a little bit. But often, it's almost like it's muscle memory. If you're playing with somebody online, and they're taking longer than they should but making really good moves, that would be suspicious.

Christopher: It's not so much that they take longer than they should. In a game where I was cheated against, you can download a list of the moves, and it tells you how much time each player thought in each move. If you look at my thinking time, it's a graph that goes up and down. There was maybe one move that I thought for a whole minute on, a couple of moves that I thought for one second on. But this guy, it was five to 10 seconds every move.

The unnaturalness of that is that, apparently, he had not memorized any opening moves that he could play right away in one second, but nor was he troubled by a complicated position, where he would spend a minute to make up his mind with a critical choice instead. It's that consistency of time.

If you're playing a game where you only have a minute, you have to move right away. But even still, there would be some variability in time. It's just human. Human decision-making doesn't operate like clockwork like that. It has much more variability than cheaters seem to realize, and is easy to implement in a cheating process.

Daniel: Really good players playing in a chess opening, they've known how to make those moves for a long time. They've played the same openings over and over and over again. There's not that much that's a surprise in the first five moves of the game, so those moves are often really, really quick. It slows down once you get to the middle of the game when it's new, and you've never seen that position before. Or there's something that's really complicated, then you have to think of each move.

Interesting. You guys have been studying this for a while. Do you see scams increasing, or is it just awareness of scams that are increasing?

Christopher: I think that's hard to tell. That's a hard distinction to make. It's like when you hear about three weird things that happened in a row. Are the weird things happening more often, was it just a coincidence, or is someone now reporting on the weird things and bringing them to your attention? That's really hard to know.

It feels like the long-term trend is that various forms of deception are on the rise and becoming more acceptable, almost as everyday business practices. -Chris Chabris Share on X

We did consult some statistics and some public statistics from sources like the FBI. There are companies that monitor trends like this. I would say, to me, it feels like the long-term trend is that various forms of deception are on the rise and becoming more acceptable, almost as everyday business practices. Some companies and some industries have gotten better at figuring out when they can get away with somewhat deceptive practices.

Norms change over time. In some industries like finance, investing, and so on, the norms change a little bit. Of course, whenever there are new technologies and new industries invented that are completely unregulated, they're a ripe area for scams to arise. With so much going on with crypto, AI, and the Internet over the last 15-20 years looking back farther, maybe we really are just having many more new technologies to scam people with. That's why it seems like it's on the rise.

Daniel: It's always hard to tell whether there's just more reporting about it, whether there's more documentation. More people are willing to come forward and say, “Here's what's happened to me,” or whether it's just actually scaling up. Technology makes it easier to do things at scale.

It's really been the last 20 odd years when we've seen large industrial-scale scamming, the call center scams at scale. Even just the Nigerian prince email scams and advanced fee scams at scale is much easier to pull off now than it would have been before email.

Every new advance is going to lead to new variants of these things that are more sophisticated, but they all rely on the same principles. I think that's one thing that you realize. In terms of how they target us, people aren't changing that fast, even if the technologies are improving. They're still going to capitalize on the same habits and the same information that we find really appealing.

They're going to use the same methodologies, but the context is just going to change.

Daniel: Yeah. Maybe something truly new will emerge, but most of these scams are relying on the same tricks that had been used since the pre-industrial era. They're tapping into the same desires, fears, and using the same cognitive thought patterns.

Are there things that you see alarming in the future, the use of AI being incorporated into scams, some technology that you see on the horizon, or a desire for technology that you think is going to be like, “OK, this is the next five years of scams”?

Daniel: I think things like large language models are a really interesting case because they do make it easier to spread variations on misinformation at scale. You don't need people to generate the stuff anymore. You can vary scripts in more automatic ways without having to put more work to it. You can sometimes possibly even take the person out of part of the scamming to make it less costly for the scammers. All of those things will amplify the scale.

It's always an arms race. Whether or not it will lead to scams at a different scale, my hope is at some level, as people start realizing that ChatGPT and things like that, these large language models, speak with absolute certainty and have no connection to truth. They might generate really reasonable answers a lot of the time, which lets us drop our guard because the completely unreasonable or false answers sound just as good as the true ones. All it's doing is predicting what comes next.

My hope is that, as people start to realize that these models are not representing the truth in the world, that maybe it will cause people to start questioning some of the messages they are getting even that aren't driven by these AI models, that makes us realize that, hey, we can be deceived really easily by an alleged large language model. You could also be easily deceived by a person.

Maybe it makes people a little more questioning, a little less accepting of content that they just get sent because they know it could have been faked altogether. Whether that happens or not, it's hard to know. I think there's a dangerous trend whenever you get something we can scale exponentially. We just don't know how that plays out yet.

There's the possibility for it to be utilized for good or for evil. A brick is a brick. It's not inherently good or bad in and of itself.

Daniel: It's not inherently true or false in the case of these language models.

Yes. As we've seen from at least one legal case that created fake citations, fake analysis, and fake rulings by people who didn't exist.

Daniel: We see that in the academic world that if you ask it to generate some content, it will give you citations that are not possible. If you ask it to write a bio for an academic, it'll create positions that you've never had. But most of it will be pretty reasonable.

For people who are public figures, it gets a lot of it right because it's scraped a lot of the Internet, but it will make up other stuff. If you ask it for more, it will just give you more every time. 

That's definitely one of the interesting things that I've run across going down the rabbit hole on ChatGPT. Justify your hallucinations to me. 

If people want to find out more about the two of you, where can they go?

Daniel: Our websites are pretty easy to find. You can search for Chris Chabris or Dan Simons, and we'll pop up. For the book, if you go to my website, which is dansimons.com, you can find the book there. It has a lot more information about it, places you can get it, and that sort of thing.

Christopher: We hang out on Twitter, LinkedIn, and places like that. Also, we're pretty easy to find. I'm the only Christopher Chabris that bothers with social media and that kind of thing.

Daniel: There are other Daniel Simonses, but I'm pretty distinct from the other ones.

And they won't be talking about the book right now either.

Daniel: Probably not. If they are, that'd be interesting.

And much appreciated.

Daniel: Yeah.

Let's see if I can actually put it up here on the screen. Maybe I should put it on the side. There we go. I actually have a copy of it because I was like, “Oh, I've got to read this one. It's Nobody's Fool.

I'm loving that so many people are, at least maybe it's confirmation bias on my side, that I'm starting to see so many more books explaining why we do the things that we do and how to not get caught in that closed loop. 

Thank you both so much for coming on the podcast today. Is there any parting advice that you have for people today?

Christopher: Accept less, check more. That's in four words. That's the summary, I guess.

Accept less, check more. -Chris Chabris Share on X

What is the old expression that trust but verify? Is it now don't trust and verify?

Daniel: Trust and verify is the natural way to go about things.

Christopher: Yeah, I think that's a good one. You can't always just trust; that doesn't work. I think you have to just be a little more willing to be uncertain. Accept less, check more, and don't have to always have like, that'd be true or false, like I believe it. Just be a little bit more uncertain, do a little bit more checking, and that'll start to help.

Daniel: By checking, sometimes just literally asking one more question. It doesn't even have to be a deep and penetrating question. Just one more question. Tell me more, and get a little more information each time. When you do that, you'll realize there are other questions you could ask.

OK, now I have a follow-up question. Is there something that we as humans don't like about uncertainty?

Christopher: I would say, in general, yes. There are these phenomena in behavioral economics and areas like that, ambiguity aversion, risk aversion, uncertainty aversion. There does seem to be something troubling about not knowing or not believing. It's, I think, a habit. It's one of those somewhat unnatural habits that you have to cultivate over time, become more comfortable with, and not have an opinion. I do think it helps quite a bit.

Daniel: It should take some work to have an opinion. You should have to gather some evidence to support why you believe something. That can really help if you do that.

It should take some work to have an opinion. You should have to gather some evidence to support why you believe something. -Dan Simons Share on X

We should all be X-Files fans and want to believe, but figure out why we believe. 

Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you being part of the podcast.

Daniel: My pleasure. Thanks for having us on.

Christopher: Yeah, thank you. That was great.