Benjamin’s Book Joural

Duped

Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married

By Abby Ellin

Trust, after all, was a choice, was it not?

As a journalist, someone whose job it is to ask questions, I pride myself on my gut, my ability to suss out deception. I’m curious about everything, even when I’m not technically on the clock. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. I like to get to the bottom of things, even – especially – when the bottom is muddy and cakey and teeming with snakes.

(Ellin 2019, 10)

Like Ingrid Bergman in the film Gaslight, whose husband has convinced her that she’s delusional when all along he’s set her up, the victims often lose faith in their ability to determine what’s real and what isn’t. (“Gaslight” has since become a psychological term, meaning to deliberately manipulate someone.) Being duped contaminates your entire sense of self. It throws you off-kilter, makes you question your perceptions about everything and everyone – lovers, friends, and acquaintances. Cocktail-party banter becomes a mental game of true-or-false.

And being blamed, and blaming oneself, for one’s own betrayal causes even more trauma.

(Ellin 2019, 34)

Although we might find dupers’ behavior morally reprehensible, in some cases we root for them. The hero of the TV show Younger is a forty-something woman posing as a twenty-six-year-old. Grace and Frankie is about two women whose husbands were cheating on them – with each other! – for twenty years. And these shows are comedies.

We might even fantasize about leading a similar existence, like serial impostor Frank Abagnale, whose life story spawned a cottage industry of deception: a book, Catch Me If You Can, a movie of the same name with Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Tony-nominated Broadway show.

Thanks to social media and the Internet, it’s easier than ever to covertly straddle two (or more) worlds. With a simple mouse click, you can connect with almost anyone, anywhere, at any time. 

About 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men have had affairs, according to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. That number increases by about 20 percent if you consider emotional and sexual relationships without intercourse.1 

More than thirty million people were signed up for Ashley Madison, a website for married people seeking extracurricular activities, in 2015. Some social scientists estimate that in the general population about four out of every one hundred people are mistaken about who their biological father is.2 In other words: there’s a whole lot of pretense taking place in households across the country. 

(Ellin 2019, 35-36)

It could happen to any of us, at any time. Duplicity is rampant and has been for eons. Literature is rife with characters who are not what they appear. So is the Bible, in story after story: God fooled Abraham into almost slaying Isaac. Rebecca coaxed poor bling Isaac into blessing her favorite, Jacob, instead of the more hirsute Esau. Laban tricked Jacob into slaving for seven years before allowing him to marry his daughter, Rachel – and then finished the wrong daughter on him at the altar. The bride was veiled, and Jacob didn’t realize he’d been tricked until the next morning.

(Ellin 2019, 39)

(Being an FBI informant isn’t as rare as you might think: about 15,000 people are secretly in cahoots with the feds.3 A New Yorker article noted that in a 2023 letter, the FBI said it had authorized informants to break the law more than 5,900 times during the previous year.4 Rat upon rat upon rat.)

Thanks to the Internet, heavily scripted “reality” TV, social media, and websites dedicated to adultery, the lines between fiction and reality have blurred for all of us. Sure, digital footprints might make it easier to get caught than in years past; so do identity verification programs like Spoken which claims eighteen million unique visitors per month.5 But the opportunity for deception is just as great, if not greater.

CareerExcuse.com offers fake hotel bills, fake doctor’s notes, fake reference letters from fake bosses, fake receipts for fake office furniture, and fake background noises like hacking coughs or trains taking off. For as little as $69 a month, Paladin Deception Services provides character and personal references, landlord referral, and “verification of specific skills.” Ninety-nine dollars gets you verification of a white lie or “exaggeration,” along with voice mail, a dedicated phone line in the city of your choosing, and your choice of male or female operator.

(Ellin 2019, 40-41)

Our culture is pretty confused about honesty. In theory, we value it enormously. “Throughout recorded human history, treachery and betrayal have been considered amongst the very worst offences people could commit against their kith and kin,” said social-evolutionary psychologist Julie Fitness. “Dante, for example, relegated traitors to the lowest and coldest regions of Hell, to be forever frozen up to their necks in a lake of ice with blizzards storming all about them, as punishment for having acted so coldly toward others.”6

Yet we get – and give – mixed messages about integrity and honesty, Melania Trump delivered a rousing speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where she declared that “your word is your bond and you do what  you say and keep your promise.” It was very inspiring – until speculation arose that as much as 6 percent of her language was lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention eight years earlier.7 Oops.

Society starts sending us these conflicting messages when we’re children, and parents fully participate. Though they say that honesty is the trait they most want in their children, parents are ten times more likely to rebuke a child for snitching than for lying.8 They lull kids to sleep with parables marketers or salespeople or friends. (Don’t even get me started on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.)

(Ellin 2019, 41-42)

On some mundane level, of course, we all lead double lives. We might not think of it that way, but most of us live three or four lives concurrently – at work, at home, in love, with friends. We’re “social chameleons,” with malleable public and private selves.9 Sometimes these seem discordant. One week we’re in sequins and feathers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute benefit, the next we’re in East Texas gorging on barbecue and Wonder Bread. And we’re always putting on a public face. As Chris Rock said, “When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative.”10

(Ellin 2019, 44)

Keeping secrets is a way of maintaining mystery. In an age of compulsive oversharing, when we post hourly updates on our irritable bowels or our safaris through the African bush, remaining unknowable is, perhaps, the ultimate power. It’s the only way to hang on to yourself.

“In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret, and we all have moments throughout our lives when we feel we’re losing ourselves in our social group, or work or marriage, and it feels good to grab for a secret, or some subterfuge, to reassert our identity as somebody apart,” said the late Daniel M. Wenger, a psychology professor at Harvard. And, he added, “we are now learning that some people are better at doing this than others.”11

(Ellin 2019, 57)

Here’s what I learned: I lie for convenience, out of laziness, social fatigue, the desire for personal comfort, or a wish not to ruffle feathers. Much of the time I’d rather stay home and cut my toenails than go out. That is: I want to be invited places, I just don’t want to show up. Making up an excuse is usually easier than admitting the truth. Lame, perhaps, but easier.

This is what Bella M. DePaulo, an expert on the social psychology of lying, dubbed a “pro-social lie,” a kindhearted utterance to make someone else feel good. (Its opposite, an “anti-social” lie, makes you look good.)12

It’s broadly accepted that pro-social lies, also known as white lies, are a daily occurrence. One study suggests that we tell two to three lies every ten minutes.13 If you doubt this, consider how frequently you feign interest in a tedious story, wave off a compliment you think you deserve, or apologize for a small offense when you don’t completely mean it. I’d go so far as to use a word other than “lie” to describe these. They’re Social Niceties. Necessary Bullshit. With all the horrors in the world, what’s wrong with a little ego stroking? 

(Ellin 2019, 59)

A 1999 study by Robert Feldman at the University of Massachusetts noted that the most effective liars were also the most popular kids.14 They were fun to be around, and they made people feel good about themselves. This is backed up by psychologist Nobuhito Abe, an associate professor at Kyoto University in Japan, who found that people with conditions that compromise the prefrontal cortex in the brain – like Parkinson’s, Asperger’s, and attention deficit disorder – are bad at telling lies.15 That’s because they can’t perceive social cues accurately, and therefore can’t assess if conditions are good for lying, and how their lies are received. Introverts also lie less than extroverts. The ability to lie successfully, then, is partly correlated with savvy social skills. Sucking up. 

(Ellin 2019, 60)

Not everyone agrees. Neuroscientist Sam Harris, in his 2013 book Lying, argued that when we sugarcoat the truth, “we deny our friends access to reality – and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information.”16

(Ellin 2019, 61)

Aside from devotion to a cause – the reason Philby and Young lied – or danger to life and livelihood (like those faced by LGBTQ community), other reasons people construct false realities include greed, vanity, entitlement, the desire for power, and the hubris of believing they should “have it all.” 

(Ellin 2019, 62)

Decidedly less open was the flying hero Charles Lindbergh, who had three families in Germany, a wife in the States, and a gaggle of offspring scattered on the two continents. He was married to Anne Morrow Lindbergh (they had six kids, one of whom, Charles Junior, the “Lindbergh Baby”, was snatched from his crib in 1932 and murdered), but he had a seventeen-year relationship with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a thirty-one-year-old German hatmaker whom he met through his private secretary, Valeska, with whom he was also involved. Brigitte bore him two sons and a daughter. But why stop there? He also sired two children with Brigitte’s sister, Marietta. And, oh! He also had two children with Valeska. No wonder he picked up aviation. How else to make the rounds?

According to Rudolf Schroeck, author of The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh, Lindbergh would land in Frankfurt, drive to Marietta’s home, then see Valeska, and then head to Brigitte in Munich before returning to Frankfurt. He maintained this routine for fourteen years.17

Even more astonishing is that Lindbergh was a rabid anti-Semite who believed in eugenics, including the idea that people with disabilities were inferior. Yet neither Brigitte nor Marietta could walk properly, residue from childhood illnesses. But Lindbergh didn’t seem to care. He built Brigitte a house and took care of her financially. (It’s not known how he behaved toward the other women.) 

Lindbergh spent a handful of days with Brigitte and their children each year. They were told he was an American writer named Careu Kent, and no one was supposed to know about him. The kids finally figured out who he really was when his daughter, Astrid Bouteuil, found letters between him and her mother in the late 1990s. Brigitte made her daughter promise not to go public with them until after her death.

Lindbergh’s children with Anne Morrow Lindbergh were amazed to learn that they had half siblings in Germany, but a DNA test confirmed it. Lindbergh’s youngest child with Anne, Reeve Lindbergh Tripp, now in her seventies, believed her mother “knew something” about her father’s philandering, but she isn’t sure what. “That strikes me as most believable,” she said. “That something didn’t seem right but she didn’t know what it was.”

Her thesis was that her father never recovered from the abduction and murder of her older brother. Despite the fact that her parents had five more children, they led separate lives, and her father, she speculated, propelled himself into the arms of other women because of his inner tumult. (Some speculate that Anne Morrow Lindbergh had her share of lovers, too.)

Lindbergh’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, A. Scott Berg, was equally mystified by his subject’s double (triple? quadruple?) lives, which came to light in 2003, not long after Anne Morrow Lindbergh died. Charles Lindbergh, who hated people with disabilities, who was a devoted husband and father? None of this made sense. 

“He was the most celebrated living person to walk the earth, the first modern media superstar,” said Berg. “And yet there wasn’t a single clue.”18

(Ellin 2019, 65-66)

Most of us don’t lead double lives to that extent, and so we can tell ourselves we’re completely different from the Lindberghs of the world. But we all present many different “I’s.” And the vast majority of us, if only we’re willing to admit it, live in a perpetual state of contradictory desires. So many of us are divided, wishing we could have it all by doing it all. We might not act on it – hell, we might not acknowledge it – but it’s always there, rumbling beneath the surface. We are married, and we want to be out at the bar. We are single, and we long to be snuggled on a couch, binge-watching Shark Tank with our sweetheart. We want kids, and then, once we have them, we pawn them off on our in-laws. 

Evidently there’s a biological explanation for our tendency to want what we don’t have. “We’re always looking to adapt ourselves to our circumstances in order to survive, and variation lets us do that,” said Jordan Grafman, director of Brain Injury at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. 19

Matthew Hornsey, a social psychologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, said impostors often have an enormous sense of entitlement but feel they can’t reach their potential on their own merits. So they take on someone else’s.20

(Ellin 2019, 67)

To compensate, we become social chameleons, adjusting our attitudes and behaviors to fit whatever circumstance we’re in, like Woody Allen’s character in Zelig. This, too, is a form of impostorism.21

Donald W. Winnicott, the famous analyst, chalked it up to the “false self,” which he said arises in children when they’re taught to focus on other people’s needs and ignore their own.22 

“If you have a false self and it’s powerful, eventually you get self-destructive,” psychologist Joel Weinberger, a professor at Adelphi University, told me. “A false self is normative to a degree. But when the false self takes over to achieve a goal or convince someone of something, then that’s when that line gets crossed.”23 That’s when the version you present to the world can become exploitative and destructive. 

(Ellin 2019, 69)

We like to think that extreme subterfuge, or the ability to maintain a large-scale deception, is only carried out by those with psychiatric labels – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, part of what Delroy L. Paulhus, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, called the “Dark Tetrad.” (Sadism was added later.)24

Which is to say, people fundamentally different from you and me. We don’t want to think we are like them in any way.

In the early 1800s, psychologists began noticing that some of their patients who appeared normal didn’t possess the same ethics as other people. They called this “moral depravity” or “moral insanity.”25

“Psychopath” was the preferred term until the 1930s, when it became “sociopath” to connote just how dangerous they were to society. Both psychopaths and sociopaths hide their true selves behind a mask, as American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley wrote in his 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity. (The film Three Faces of Eve, about a woman with multiple personality disorder, was based on another one of his books.)26

Interestingly, “psychopath” has never been listed in any edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychiatric bible. Since some psychopathic traits are similar to antisocial personality disorder. About 1 percent of the general population – and 4 percent of CEOs27 – are thought to be psychopaths. An estimated 9 percent of the population has some kind of personality disorder.28 Experts disagree on the exact numbers, but they all say that men are more prone to psychopathy than women. Among prison inmates, up to 17 percent of women meet the definition of psychopathy, compared to 25 to 30 percent of men.29

 (A word on terminology: Laypeople sometimes prefer to use “sociopath” because it sounds somehow gentler than psychopath, which conjures images of Norman Bates and wig-wearing cadavers in rocking chairs. Some experts do use “psychopath” to refer to a genetic disorder and “sociopath” to describe people whose aberrant behavior is shaped by external factors, but the two words are actually synonyms. Today, “psychopath” is the more accepted term, so that’s the world I’ll use.)

Psychopaths are most commonly diagnosed through Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R), a twenty-tiem inventory of personality traits and behaviors that include glib and superficial charm, impulsivity, need for stimulation, and pathological lying.30

Pathological liars sometimes believe their own fabrications, as I think the Commander did. They usually have a reason to lie, but they don’t want anyone to know they’re doing it. So they vehemently protest when confronted. Another name for this kind of compulsive lying is pseudologia fantastica, which sounds like a Tchaikovsky ballet.31

Liars at this level can’t stop making things up. They might not even have a motive; they do it for fun, as Demara did.32

(Ellin 2019, 73-75)

But although labels can be helpful, they can also be a little too pat. Individuals rarely fit into perfectly tidy categories. And not everyone who leads a double life is a psychopath.

(Ellin 2019, 75)

In addition to these evolutionary roots of deception, evidence suggests that the human ability to lie comes from deep in our brains. 

A study published in Nature Neuroscience found that the brain adapts to dishonesty, making it easier to continue to fabricate over time.33 When you first tell a lie, the amygdala and insula, areas associated with emotion, light up. By the twelfth time you do it, the brain has acclimated and so the response is less potent. “After a while, the negative value of lying – the negative feeling – is just not there, so much, “ said coauthor Tali Sharot, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.34

Children’s brains, psyches, and values are greatly shaped by external forces, but what about adults’? For a quick answer, we need only turn to social media. Facebook, Instagram, and the like not only allow but encourage us to emphasize – maybe even exaggerate – the lucky, fun, and enviable aspects of our lives, and to downplay or conceal our struggles.35

We’re creating our own doubles in our Facebook profiles, said Alissa Wilkinson, an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York.36 “I call it our ‘better double’ – that is, a sexier, smarter version of yourself who steals your girlfriend and your friends like more than they like you.” 

Let’s go back to Walter White, of Breaking Bad fame, and Don Draper, Mad Men’s incandescent Lothario. “Those characters root in Jekyll and Hyde, and that’s a pretty modern story of someone provoking a split personality,” Wilkinson said. (Robert Louis Stevenson, who invented Jekyll and Hyde for his 1886 novel, grappled with his own conflicting states of consciousness: he saw that he had “myself,” who was laid back and chill, but then there was that “other fellow,” who was creative and brooding.37)

Does the ability to construct new “realities” online merely satisfy our escapist desires, or does it embolden us? Is our culture forcing all of us to move from our stable identities to more mutable ones? Are more people fabricating and committing emotional fraud because of Facebook?

It’s probably much too early in the social media era to know the answer (although researchers did find a link between high narcissism scores and tweeting about oneself).38 But it’s definitely changed our relationship to presenting and obscuring the messy, multiple truths of our lives. 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist Sherry Turkle labels social media an “identity technology” because it gives us the chance to indulge our fantasies and become anyone or anything. “You can have these friends,” she said. 39“You can have these connections. You can have this love and appreciation, followers, people who want to be with you.” Online, anyway.

(Ellin 2019, 84-85)

Whomever we’re trying to impress, Instagram and the like certainly assist us in our lands of make-believe. Just how different is the real world from the world on social media? In the real world, “The National Enquirer, a weekly, sells nearly three times as many copies as The Atlantic, a monthly, every year,” noted economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. “On Facebook, The Atlantic is 45 times more popular. Americans spend about six times as much of their time cleaning dishes as they do golfing. But there are roughly twice as many tweets reporting golfing as there are tweets reporting doing the dishes.”40

(Ellin 2019, 85-86)

At their core, skillful deceivers give Oscar-worthy performances, according to Dutch researcher Aldert Vrij, who compiled a list of eighteen characteristics common to good liars.41 Good liars are manipulative, confident, eloquent, quick-witted, able to balance guilt and fear, and, yes – attractive. The hotter you are, the more you can get away with. What a shallow species we are. 

Successful liars also rehearse their stories before telling them, avoid follow-up questions as much as possible, and tell the truth more than they lue. Last, they go on the offense when challenged, which good liars do with gusto. To wit: Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill O’Reilly, and Havey Weinstein, all of whom, when faced with clear evidence that they were misbehaving, went after their accusers, …

(Ellin 2019, 97)

Almost everyone despises a hypocrite. It’s one of the worst things a person can be – 8 out of a possible 9 in Dante’s Inferno. As Tennessee Williams once said, “The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite.” 42

But while we’re quick to condemn others for hypocrisy, we’re almost all guilty of morally opposing something and then actively engaging in it. But we’re no good at acknowledging our own contradictions.

According to Kurzban, the mind is punctuated with independent areas of cognition.43 (Philosopher Jerry Fodor’s 1983 monograph, The Modularity of Mind, had a similar argument, though Fodor only believed part of the brain was modular, whereas Kurzban argues that the whole brian is this way.) This modularity allows for gulfs to occur between thoughts and behavior, so that different parts of the brain can oppose each other.44 

So if we’re all hypocrites, why do we find hypocrisy so distasteful?45

For starters, we’re not all hypocrites to the extent of someone like Harvey Weinstein, who supported Hillary Clinton and donated money to pro-female causes and was later accused of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Or former Pennsylvania congressperson Tim Murphy, who sought to reduce reproductive rights and then urged his mistress – his mistress! – to get an abortion. Or Bible thumper Roy Moore, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who was accused of preying on underage girls.46

(Ellin 2019, 105)

In the early 1960s, psychologists divided people into two categories, “repressors” and “sensitizers.”47 Repressors always had a smile on their faces; they skipped through life joyfully. But though they always claimed to be healthy and adjusted, “if you measure their physiological and behavioral responses to things – particularly negative emotions – they react very strongly,” said organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “They seem to be either deceiving themselves or trying to manage the impression of being tough, resilient and calm when they are far from it.”48

(Ellin 2019, 109)

“Human reality is mostly built on agreements that we have with other people about what’s happening and what’s real and what’s true,” said Ault, who coaches clients worldwide. “Reality is in some ways interpersonal. So when we have conceived an interpersonal reality and taken it to be true, it’s very traumatizing to discover we’ve been operating out of a false set of assumptions, what without our consent, we’ve been living a lie through someone else’s manipulations.” 

(Ellin 2019, 124)

To comprehend sexual assault by fraud, she said, you first have to understand the difference between assent and consent. The American Law Institute, a group of some four hundred lawyers who review the law of the land, created the Model Penal Code back in 1962 to help standardize laws across the United States. Many states adopted parts of its language, including its provision about “consent.” According to Model Penal Code for sexual conduct, consent doesn’t count if it’s induced by force, duress, or deception.49

“Most people think all types of agreement are consent,” said Short. “They’re not, Consent means ‘freely given, knowledgeable, and informed agreement.’ Assent means ‘agreement on the face of it.’ So, when someone tells you a lie, you can be agreeing on the face of it but you’re not knowledgeable or informed. You can assent and agree, but that doesn’t mean you’re consenting. The person who told you that lie, they know they tricked you into thinking you’re consenting, even though you don’t know until you finally learn the truth.

(Ellin 2019, 131-132)

We trust every minute of every day, sometimes without good reason. We trust that the car behind us won’t bash into us. We trust that the pilot won’t deliberately nosedive into the sea. We trust that our bosses will pay our salaries on time, that the company won’t abscond with our pension plans, that our “populist” governor is not shuttering the bridges we use every day just to prove a point. We trust that the surgeon really has a medical license. We trust that the nutritional content on the label is accurate. We even trust strangers. Or, at the very least, we behave as if we do.

But why? Why trust anyone? On what grounds do we believe that most people are generally worthy?

Because it’s usually fruitful. “Most people, most of the time, are honest,” said Jeff Hancock, a communications professor at Stanford. “If you trust people, 99 percent of the time things go really great. Equity is built into the way humans interact with each other.”50

Even if we’re not looking for goodness in other people, trust is useful. “Think about how much of what we know has to be accepted on faith rather than through independent observation,” said Vikram Jaswal, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “This is particularly clear in science: How many of us can actually demonstrate that the earth is round or that the structure of DNA is a double helix? So our receptiveness to information other people provide, even some things that on the face of it seem outlandish, can serve us well.”51

Taking this pragmatic line of thinking further, there are evolutionary explanations for why we trust. We’re wired to believe that people are inherently good, primarily because society couldn’t function without that default. If we all operated in isolation, we would achieve very little, as individuals and as a species. 

We’ve evolved to trust and cooperate, even with non-kin. “It’s a big leap forward in evolution to trust others and take a chance on that,” said Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University. “Is it adaptive to be a trusting soul or skeptical and fearful of being duped? Back with hunter-gatherer bands it was probably adaptive to trust. Out of purely self-interest you have to be trustworthy if cooperation is how your species survive. Once we started relying on that, trusting became important.”52

(Ellin 2019, 144-145)

Another reason we trust people is to not hurt their feelings. In experiments, David Dunning, a retired Cornell psychology professor, found that 62 percent of 645 students would have over $5 to another person if the only two choices were that the original recipient could keep the whole thing or they both would get back a bigger amount if the second person chose to return it. But no one gave the money away just because they were pillars of generosity; it was because they didn’t want to seem rude – even if they were going to be screwed. They didn’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings by implying that he or she was untrustworthy.53

“That tells us that people are responding to issues in the other person’s character,” Dunning told an interviewer for Time. “The signal they are sending is that ‘I respect your character.’ As soon as you take out that issue, people gamble at the rate that would be consistent with greed.”54

The study was done in a lab, of course – as many studies are – so the stakes weren’t very high. Still, the findings were interesting: it’s not that people selflessly want to help their fellow humans, it’s that they don’t want to appear cynical and distrustful. “The situation causes internal conflict,” said Dunning. “We get 30% to 40% of people saying something like, the odds are that I am going to get screwed, or not get the money back, but they still give up the $5 to the other person.”55

(Ellin 2019, 146)

The theory of cognitive dissonance was developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist who believed that humans needed internal consistency.56 He argued that we become psychologically uncomfortable with any kind of irregularity, and so we do everything in our power to diminish this dissonance. Consequently, we avoid situations and information that might increase it.57

(Ellin 2019, 147)

Cognitive dissonance is actually quite valuable, because it causes us to believe we have made intelligent, reasonable decisions.58 Our response is also called “motivated reasoning,” or motivated bias.59 It’s what we do when we seek out information that jibes with our previously held convictions. We discount anything that challenges our views. 

This response is particularly pronounced in politics. If our candidate utters a falsehood, we’re lenient. But if the other guy does it? He’s the most conniving person under the sun.

“Once you hold a belief centrally related to your core worldview – religion, politics, and who you see yourself as – thoughts that are contradictory to that are spin-doctored out,” said Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Believing Brain.60

(Ellin 2019, 148)

Nothing will deplete an ego quite like falling in love. 

Some psychologists contend that being familiar with a con can actually contribute to being deceived, because it makes us overconfident. In a 2009 study, researchers at the University of Exeter found that people with excessive knowledge in a specific area were often duped more than those less well versed.61

This is because people who know things may hold delusions of superiority. They know enough to assume they know more than they do, and can jump to conclusions that are false. “There’s a sense of, ‘Nobody can take me for a fool; I know so much about it,’” said Modic. “They feel no need to fact-check.”62

(Ellin 2019, 149)

By deceiving ourselves, we protect ourselves from information that’s too painful to digest, especially when we have a lot invested in it being true. We want the truth, but we want the truth to be what we want it to be.

(Ellin 2019, 154)

There’s one more element at play, and it is this: we assume that other people share our language and define things the same way we do. But the older I get the more I realize that people have their own frameworks and lenses for almost everything. That we manage to communicate at all astounds me. 

Words and concepts mean different things to different people, especially abstract terms like Love, Trust, Fidelity, Hate, Friendship, Lies. Each one of us defines things in our own unique way, and our definitions are often at odds with other people’s. 

(Ellin 2019, 159)

Certainly, broad social factors – our cultural background, the time period in which we live, our country of residence – influence our beliefs, fears, and actions. And so do specific personal experiences, like our parent’s behaviors, the pop culture we consume, the friends, romantic partners, colleagues, and acquaintances we’ve chosen or fallen in with. Then there’s individual character, molded by biology and upbringing. What determines how much and whom we trust? What about other men and women – do different genders have different ideas about truth-telling, lying, and trust?

(Ellin 2019, 160)

Alas, there are no Geneva Conventions for love. Only war.

(Ellin 2019, 161)

…Phil’s coteacher, Don Tennant, a former National Security Agency research analyst, asked us to take a piece of paper and divide it with a straight line. 

We all did it dutifully, like elementary school kids in art class. I wondered if there would be crayons or glue sticks.

Everyone split the page in half in two vertical columns – except me. I did it horizontally. And that was Don’s point: language is imprecise. So we translate it to fit our needs. “People put their own spin on what they’re heating,” he said. “I never specified ‘in half.’”

(Ellin 2019, 191)

…non-answer statements give someone time to formulate a better answer, or to search for wiggle room to squirm their way out of the question. “People don’t realize the distinction between ‘I wouldn’t do something’ versus ‘I didn’t do something.’ It creates a real epiphany for them.”

Qualifying words – like “basically,” “frankly,” “honestly,” fundamentally, “usually,” and, of course, “believe me” – Donald Trump’s favorites – are red flags. Red blankets! So are qualifying statements like “Trust me,” “I’m a good person,” and “I’m an honest person.” 

(Ellin 2019, 194)

The polygraph’s accuracy is hotly debated. The companies that sell the devices and the people who rely on them, not surprisingly, boast that they have a 90 percent success rate. Others put it much lower. A 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that when the contraption was used to investigate a specific situation, its accuracy was “well above chance, though well below perfection.”63

Almost every polygrapher I interviewed agreed that the test is only as good as the person administering it. “Rates tend to reflect the bias of whoever’s doing the study,” said Phil. “In the hands of the right person they can be very valuable.” The more intimidating the person administering the test is, the more likely the subject is to confess – or, at the very least, to be unnerved.

(Ellin 2019, 198-199)

Then she sent me a list of traits psychopaths and narcissists possess and had me mark the behaviors I’d seen in the Commander. Among them: Deceitfulness. Manipulativeness. Failure to conform to lawful social norms. Insincerity. Grandiosity. Pathological lying. Egocentricity. 

…Because my personality led me to miss danger cues. Even though I was able to extricate myself from bad scenarios relatively quickly. “I’m hesitant to say you’re low risk to a predator,” she said. “What makes you at risk is your conscientiousness and openness. You’re warm and approachable. They love that.” Extroverts are more likely to engage in social settings, and that’s what psychopaths look for. Introverts typically don’t tolerate engagement from strangers. 

(Ellin 2019, 214-215)

“Some behaviors go in one bucket, some in the other,” she said. “You can’t just rely on one behavior or another to tell you who is good or bad. You have to wait to see a pattern develop.  That’s why we beg people to move slowly in new relationships – to manage the pace. This allows you to see what patterns of behavior develop over time. Your responsibility is to go super slow and watch for patterns. Don’t push, don’t rush. Stay back and watch.”

(Ellin 2019, 215)

References

Ellin, Abby. 2019. Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married. N.p.: PublicAffairs.

ISBN  978-1-61039-800-8

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    ↩︎
  2.   Mark A. Bellis, Karen Hughes, Sara Hughes, and John R. Ashton, “Measuring Paternal Discrepancy and Its Public Health Consequences,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59, no. 9 (2005): 749-754, https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2005.036517. ↩︎
  3.  Trevor Aaronson, “The FBI Gives Itself Lots of Rope to Pull in Informants,” The Intercept, January 31, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-gives-itself-lots-of-rope-to-pull-in-informants. ↩︎
  4.   Patrick Radden Keefe, “Assets and Liabilities,” New Yorker, September 21, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/assets-and-liablities.
    ↩︎
  5.   “2016: Spokeo’s Year in Review,” Spokeo, January 4, 2017, https://www.spokeo.com/compass/2016-spokeos-year-in-review.
    ↩︎
  6.  Julie Fitness, “Betrayal, Rejection, Revenge, and Forgiveness: An Interpersonal Script Approach,” in Mark R. Leary, ed., Interpersonal Rejection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195130157.003.0004. ↩︎
  7.   “Melania Trumps Speech Took 6 Percent of Words from Michelle Obama: Text Analysis Company,” NBC Bay Area, July 19, 2016, https://www.nnbcbayarea.com/news/local/6-percent-michelle-obama-meliana-trumpOalkand-Company-Turnitin-plagiarism-387503341.html. ↩︎
  8. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (New York: Hachette, 2009), 88. ↩︎
  9.  Bruce Watson, “Catch Us If You Can,” Nautilus, November 17, 2016, http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/catch-us-if-you-can. ↩︎
  10.  Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker (HBO, 1999). ↩︎
  11. Benedict Carey, “The Secret Lives of Just About Everybody,” New York Times, January 11, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/health/psychology/the-secret-lives-of-just-about-everybody.html. ↩︎
  12. Bella DePAulo, “The Many Faces of Lies,” in A.G. Miller, ed., The Social Psychology of Good and Evil (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 303-326, http://smg.media.mit.edy/library/DePaulo.ManyFacesOfLies.pdf.
    ↩︎
  13. “UMASS Amherst Researcher Finds Most People Lie in Everyday Conversation,” UMass Amherst, News Archive, June 10, 2002, https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-researcher-finds-most-people-lieeveryday-conversation.
    ↩︎
  14.  “Link Between Lying and Popularity Found by Researcher at UMass Amherst,” UMass Amherst, News Archive, December 14, 1999, https://www.umass.edu/nesoffice/article/link-between-lying-and-popularity-found-researcher-umass-amherst.
    ↩︎
  15.  Nobuhito Abe, Toshikatsu Fujii, Kazumi Hirayama, Atsushi Takeda, Yoshiyuki Hosokai, Toshiyuki Ishioka, Yoshiyuki Nishio, et al., “Do Parkinsonian Patients Have Trouble Telling Lies? The Neurological Basis of Deceptive Behavior,” Brain 132, no. 5 (May 2009): 1386-1395, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awp052.
    ↩︎
  16.  Michael Shermer, “The Truth About White Lies,” Salon, April 8, 2014, https://ww.salon.com/2014/04/08/the_truth_about_little_white_lies_why_theyre_actually_more_dangerous_than_you_think_partner/?source=nesletter.
    ↩︎
  17. “Lindbergh’s Double Life,” DW, n.d., https://www.dw.com/en/lindberghs-double-life/a-1620936-1.
    ↩︎
  18. “Lindbergh’s Double Life,” DW, n.d., https://www.dw.com/en/lindberghs-double-life/a-1620936-1. ↩︎
  19.  Telephone interview with author. ↩︎
  20. Matthew Hornsey, “Imposters: The Psychology of Pretending to Be Someone You’re Not: Matthew Hornsey at TEDxUQ,” YouTube, posted by TEDxTalks, May 22, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSjlCJaEwZE. ↩︎
  21. Ronald E. Riggio, “Are You a Skilled Social Actor or a Social Chameleon,” Psychology Today, January 11, 2012, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201201/are-you-skilled-social-actor-or-social-chameleon. 
    ↩︎
  22.  Carey, “Secret Lives of Just About Everybody.”
    ↩︎
  23. Telephone interview with author.
    ↩︎
  24. Jan Hoffman, “Everyday Sadists’ Among Us,” New York Times, September 16, 2013, https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/everyday-sadists-among-us; Lucy Jones, “How Did Evil Evolve, and Why Did It Persist?,” BBC, April 4, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160401-how-did-evil-evolve-and-why-did-it-persist. 
    ↩︎
  25. William Hirstein, “What Is a Psychopath?” Psychology Today, January 30, 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mindmelding/201301/what-is-psychopath-0.
    ↩︎
  26.  Bruce Weber, “Chris Costner Sizemore, Patient Behind ‘The Three Faces of EVe,’ Dies at 89,” New York Times, August 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/us/chris-costner-sizemore-the-real-patient-behind-the-three-faces-of-eve-dies-at-89.html. ↩︎
  27. Victor Limpan, “The Disturbing Link Between Psychopathy and Leadership,” Forbes, April 25, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership/#49e8841d4104. 
    ↩︎
  28. “Personality Disorders,” National Institute of Mental Health, 2017, https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statisitics/personality-disorders.shtml. ↩︎
  29. Rolf Wynn, Marita H. Hoiseth, and Gunn Pettersen, “Psychopathy in Women: Theoretical and Clinical Perspectives,” International Journal of Women’s Health 4 (2012): 257-263, https://doi.org/10.2147/IJWH.S25518. 
    ↩︎
  30. Hirstein, “What Is a Psychopath?” ↩︎
  31. B.H. King and C.V. Ford, “Pseudologia Fantastica,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 77, no. 1 (1988): 1-6, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3279719. 
    ↩︎
  32. Chris Josefowicz, “Understanding Compulsive Liars,” Psychology Today, October 1, 2003, https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200310/understanding-compulsive-liars. 
    ↩︎
  33. Neil Garrett, Stephanie C. Lazzaro, Dan Ariely, and Tali Sharot, “The Brain Adapts to Dishonesty,” Nature Neuroscience 19 (2016): 1727-1732, https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4426. ↩︎
  34.  Melissa Dahl, “The Truth About the Ways People Lie,” New York, the Cut, May 18, 2015, https://www.thecut.com/2015/05/8-true-things-about-the-ways-people-lie.html. 
    ↩︎
  35.  Tara Parker Pope, “Does Facebook Turn People into Narcissists,” New York Times, May 17, 2012, https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/does-facebook-turn-people-into-narcissists. ↩︎
  36. Telephone interview with author.
    ↩︎
  37.  Claire Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow (New York: HarperPerennial, 2005); “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Split Personality,” NPR, Author Interviews, November 27, 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5028500. ↩︎
  38. Bruce C McKinley, Lynn Kelly, and Robert L. Duran, “Narcissism or Openness? College Students’ Use of Facebook and Twitter,” Communication Research Reports, April 2012, 108-118, https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2012.666919.
    ↩︎
  39. Bruce C McKinley, Lynn Kelly, and Robert L. Duran, “Narcissism or Openness? College Students’ Use of Facebook and Twitter,” Communication Research Reports, April 2012, 108-118, https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2012.666919.
    ↩︎
  40.   Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable,” New York Times, June 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/dont-let-facebook-make-you-miserable.html.
    ↩︎
  41.  Jesse Bering, “18 Attributes of Highly Effective Liars,” Scientific American, July 7, 2011, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/18-attributes-of-highly-effective-liars. ↩︎
  42.   Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo, 1951, Act 3. 
    ↩︎
  43.   Haley M. Dillon and Rachael A. Carmen, “Struggling with Our Own Hypocrisy: Modularity of the Human Brain,” a review of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, by Robert Kurzban, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology (2011), http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/ebs/5/3/208.html.
    ↩︎
  44.  Sharon Begley, “Our Brains Are Wired for Hypocrisy, Newsweek, October 19, 2009; Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino, “Memories of Unethical Actions Become Obfuscated over Time,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, May 2016. See also Dr. Paul J. Werbos, “Hypocrisy as a Force in Human History,” Werbos, n.d., http://www.werbos.com/pi/Hypocrisy.htm.
    ↩︎
  45. See Masha Green, “In Praise of Hypocrisy,” New York Times, February 18, 2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/02/18/opinion/sunday/in-praise-of-hypocrisy.html; Dean Burnett, “It’s Only Wrong When YOU Do It! The Psychology of Hypocrisy,” The Guardian, November 17, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2016/nov/17/its-only-wrong-when-you-do-it-the-psychology-of-hypocrisy; Jillian Jordan, Roseanna Sommers, and David Rand, “The Real PRoblem with Hypocrisy,” New York Times, January 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/opinion/sunday/the-real-problem-with-hupocrisy.html.
    ↩︎
  46.   Dillon and Carmen, “Struggling with Our Own Hypocrisy.”
    ↩︎
  47.   James F. Lomont, “Repressors and Sensitizers as Described by Themselves and Their Peers,” Journal of Personality (June 1996), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1966.tb01710.x.
    ↩︎
  48.   Adrian Furnham, 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need to Know (New York: Quercus, 2009). 
    ↩︎
  49. The American Law Institute, Model Penal Code, https://www.ali.org/publications/show/model-penal-code; “Model Penal Code: Sexual Assault and Related Offenses,” The Ali Adviser, n.d., http://www.thealiadviser.org/sexual-assualt.
    ↩︎
  50. Telephone interview with author.
    ↩︎
  51. Email interview with author.
    ↩︎
  52. Telephone interview with author.
    ↩︎
  53.  Alice Park, “We Trust Strangers, Even When It Doesn’t Make Sense to Do So,” Time, May 16, 2014, http://time.com/103396/we-trust-strangers-even-when-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-do-so. 
    ↩︎
  54.   Alice Park, “We Trust Strangers, Even When It Doesn’t Make Sense to Do So,” Time, May 16, 2014, http://time.com/103396/we-trust-strangers-even-when-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-do-so. 
    ↩︎
  55.   Alice Park, “We Trust Strangers, Even When It Doesn’t Make Sense to Do So,” Time, May 16, 2014, http://time.com/103396/we-trust-strangers-even-when-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-do-so. 
    ↩︎
  56. L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).
    ↩︎
  57.  Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted and Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).
    ↩︎
  58.  Thea Buckley, “What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance?,” Scientific American, n.d., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-cognitive-dissonance1. ↩︎
  59.  Jonathan Ellis, “Motivated Reasoning: A Philosopher on Confirmation Bias,” interview with Michel Martin, NPR, All Things Considered, January 28, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/01/28/512199352/confirmation-bias; Julie Beck, “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind: The Facts on Why Facts Alone Can’t Fight False Beliefs,” The Atlantic, March 13, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093. 
    ↩︎
  60.   Telephone interview with author. ↩︎
  61.  David Modic, “Willing to Be Scammed: How Self-Control Impacts Internet Scam Compliance” (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2013), https://ore.execter.ac.uk/repositroy/handle/10871/8044/
    ↩︎
  62.  Telephone interview with author.
    ↩︎
  63.  G.T. Monteleone, K.L. Phan, H.C. Nusbaum, D. Fitzgerald, J.S. Irick, S.E. Fienberg, and J.T. Cacioppo, “Detection of Deception Using fMRI: Better Than Chance, but Well Below Perfection,” Society for Neuroscience 4, no. 6 (2009): 528-538, https://doi.org/10.1080/17470910801903530. 
    ↩︎

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