MAYBE she had so much money she just lost track of it. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding.
That’s how Anna Sorokin’s marks explained away the supposed German heiress’s strange requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or to put plane tickets on their credit cards, which she would then forget to pay back., Sorokin, who told people her name was Anna Delvey, conned over $250,000 out of wealthy acquaintances and high-end Manhattan businesses between 2013 and 2017. It turns out her lineage was a mirage.
As a social psychologist who has written a book about our surprising power of persuasion, I don’t see this as an unusual glitch of human nature. Rather, I view the stories about Sorokin and Leviev as examples of bad actors exploiting the social processes people rely on every day for efficient and effective human communication and cooperation.DESPITE the belief that people are skeptics by nature, primed to shout “gotcha!” at any mistake or faux pas, this simply isn’t the case.
Yet psychologists have watched participants hand over their money to complete strangers for many years across hundreds of experiments. In these studies, participants are told they are taking part in various types of “investment games” in which they are given the opportunity to hand over their money to another participant in the hopes of receiving a return on their investment.
This maxim of communication was first proposed by Paul Grice, an influential philosopher of language. Grice argued that communication is a cooperative endeavor. Understanding one another requires working together. And to do that, there must be some ground rules, one of which is that both parties are telling the truth.
It turns out that when participants weren’t able to fully process statements, they tended to simply assume they were true.EVEN if Sorokin’s marks were to doubt her story, it’s unlikely that they would have called her out on it.
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