IN April 2015, an empire came crashing down: the empire of the self-styled wellness guru, Belle Gibson. “None of it is true,” she admitted. Her career had been based entirely on lies.
And what lies they were. Two years earlier, Gibson had created a bestselling food app, The Whole Pantry, and was set to publish a cookbook by the same name. She had amassed millions of social media followers, in the process becoming a media fixture, a spokesperson for the eyebrow-raising notion that diet wasn’t just important for health; it could cure brain cancer.
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It’s a claim that would have sounded inane even to the most credulous audience were it not for Gibson’s own story: herself diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2009, she had foregone traditional therapy and managed to cure herself with “nutrition and holistic medicine.” Even for those not suffering from a particular ailment, the ebullient blonde offered an exciting prospect. If her diet could cure cancer, what else could it do?
Whether you care to admit it, or even know it happened, the likelihood is that at some point you too have fallen for a similar kind of scam, the carefully crafted long con. But what motivates the Gibsons of this world to play out such outrageous lies at the expense of others – and what causes even the most rational mind to fall for outlandish claims, time and again?
The snake oil salesman – the peddler of false cures to the masses – is at least several centuries old. In the late 19th century, an actual seller of “snake oil”, Clark Stanley, plied his trade through dramatic demonstrations with rattlesnakes, promising an end to everything from headaches to paralysis. The public flocked to see him, sales rose, his fame grew. His concoction turned out to be 99 per cent liquid paraffin. Not only did it cure nothing, it didn’t even come from snakes. Or take John Brinkley who, in the early 20th century, preyed on the male fear of impotence to peddle the cure to beat all cures, a transplant of goat testicles. And today, of course, there are detox diets, and the pills and supplements that claim to do anything from enabling you to lose weight effortlessly to curing cancer. Fearmongering has no expiration date.
But even in that bleak landscape, Gibson is a standout: she not only offered false hope, she invented her own illness. And cancer is not something you lie about.
It would be appealing to dismiss Gibson as a pathological liar. If we could label her as a woman in the throes of an illness, it would significantly limit the number of real con artists out there. Yet, for Gibson and those like her, it’s not a pathology – it’s far too calculated, and calculating, for that. It’s a deliberate choice.
Unlike truly pathological liars, who lie for no reason at all, con artists lie for a very specific reason: personal gain. And their lies are believable – they are meticulous and well planned – whereas a pathological liar’s are often too big and elaborate, or too disjointed, to be taken seriously.
If not simply a pathological liar, who then is the con artist? Con artists often possess some or all of the so-called dark triad of personality traits: psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism. One review of about 600 cases of company fraud in 78 countries between 2011 and 2013 captured the personalities of the perpetrators – and a number of them fitted the dark triad mould quite closely. A fifth admitted to having committed fraud “just because I can” – a typical dark-triad response if ever there were one.
Good intentions
But a good portion of the perpetrators seemed both less sinister and less coldly rational in pursuit of personal gain: 35 per cent were seen as quite friendly by their colleagues, 40 per cent were highly respected.
And often, fraudsters’ rationale can seem almost benign. Just over 20 per cent of them said they simply wanted to hide bad news. Gibson said something similar when she was caught out: she had wanted to come clean, but it was never quite the right opportunity.
Whatever her rationale, Gibson clearly had an excellent grasp of the workings of human psychology, a grasp that told her that a harrowing story about a lethal disease, above any other, could elude scrutiny even with sparse facts in its service.
What is harder to explain is why she was able to get away with it for several years. Vast sums of money were coming her way, from individuals and establishments, and it’s easy to think of the thousands who fell for Gibson as saps. We would never be so gullible.
But the truth is that we are far worse at spotting shaky evidence than we might wish, for one simple reason: trust is a more evolutionarily beneficial path than adeptness at spotting deception. On top of which, con artists use an arsenal of tricks to tap into our emotions, engaging our trusting side even at the expense of our more sceptical impulses.
People are trusting by nature, and that may be a good thing overall. Studies show that having higher so-called generalised trust – a willingness to generally assume the best in others – comes with better physical health and greater emotional happiness. Countries with higher levels of trust tend to grow faster economically. And the smarter you are, the more you are likely to trust: a 2014 study found a strong positive relationship between trust, intelligence, health and happiness.
As well as making us feel better, a blindness to deception can help us perform better too. In 1991, Joanna Starek and Caroline Keating, then at Colgate University in New York, followed the progress of a first-division college swim team. They wanted to know if swimmers who were better at self-deception – ignoring negative ideas about themselves and interpreting ambiguous evidence as positive – performed any differently from those who were more honest and perceptive. They asked each swimmer to complete a questionnaire, as well as a more objective test of their biases. Either a negative or a neutral word flashed up at the same time in each eye, to see which they were more likely to notice. When the coach then revealed which of the swimmers had qualified for the diving championships, the researchers found that the more adept a swimmer was at self-deception, the more likely they were to have made the cut. It wasn’t the people who saw the world most clearly who did best, it was those most skilled at seeing the world as they wanted it to be. And the world as we want it to be is precisely what the con artist sells.
The irony is inescapable. Those who trust more do better. And those who trust more become the ideal, albeit unwitting, players in the confidence game: the perfect marks. Victims aren’t saps. They may well number the more intelligent and successful among us.
There are other ways the grifter builds our trust further. For Gibson, it probably helped that she was not a celebrity, but an ordinary girl next door. We are more trusting of people who seem more familiar and similar to us, and we open up to them in ways we don’t to people we see as different.
In one study, psychologist at the University of Glasgow in the UK asked people to play a sequential trust game, where the way you act depends on how you think your partner will act. No player’s partner, however, actually existed. What they thought was a virtual teammate was in fact a photograph that had been subtly altered in one of two ways: it was morphed to either resemble a stranger or the player themself. The more the picture resembled their own face, . Further surface similarities, like shared birthdays or names, create an effect of greater liking – and a greater willingness to help and comply.
Over the years Gibson became a familiar, trusted presence. Not glamorous, just someone like us. It didn’t hurt that she interacted with her followers on multiple social platforms. Indeed, even the briefest of interactions can make us more trusting of someone, even in the absence of any other evidence to indicate their trustworthiness. In 1968, psychologist published the results of decades of research – results that are, perhaps, some of the most important insights to be taken to heart by advertisers, marketers and their less scrupulous colleagues in the con industry.
First he showed people a series of images – Turkish nonsense words, Chinese-like characters, or photographs, depending on the study. He then tested how pleasing they found them. The more times a person saw an image, . Zajonc then reproduced the effect using random shapes on a screen. The shapes flashed up so quickly that it was difficult to tell what was being shown and, crucially, how many times it had appeared. Yet over and over, when asked which shapes they found more pleasing, people chose those they had seen earlier – even though they had no conscious memory of ever having seen them and couldn’t distinguish previously seen images from new at above-chance levels. Zajonc called it the “mere exposure effect”: familiarity breeds affection. It applies to people, too. In one study, seeing someone once, however briefly, even with no further interaction, made people more likely to agree to something this person later asked of them.
But the most powerful tool in Gibson’s story, and that of many a successful con artist was the narrative itself – her cancer survival. No one questions a cancer patient. And a good story consistently blurs our judgement.
Spinning a good yarn
When psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock decided to test the persuasive power of storytelling, they found that the more a tale transports us into its world, the more likely we are to believe it. In one study, Green and Brock gave volunteers different types of short story to read, which contained some omissions or parts that didn’t follow. For instance, “Murder at the Mall” is based on a true account of a Connecticut murder, in which a little girl called Katie is brutally killed in a busy shopping mall. Her assailant was a psychiatric patient let out on a day pass. After reading the story, participants answered a series of questions about the events, the characters, policies about psychiatric care, and the like. Then came the key question: were there any false notes in the narrative, any contradictory statements or things that didn’t make sense? Green and Brock called this “Pinocchio circling”. They devised a scale to measure how engrossed a reader was in the story and found that the more a tale transported people into its world, the more likely they were to believe it – and the fewer false notes they noticed.
What’s more, the most engaged readers were also more likely to agree with the beliefs the story implied, in this case relating to mental health policy. It didn’t matter what they believed before the story; the tale itself created a new, strong set of views. And that’s what Gibson’s story did. It shows that you can believe yourself to be a hard-nosed sceptic, only to learn of Gibson’s ordeal and say, “maybe there’s something to this”.
Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University in California, has observed a similar phenomenon in his work on the power of stories in our daily interactions. He has repeatedly found that nothing compels us to receptivity quite like an emotional, relatable narrative. In one study, Zak and his colleagues had people watch a film where a father talks about his child. “Ben’s dying,” the father says, as the camera pans to a carefree 2-year-old. Ben has a brain tumour that, in a matter of months, will end his life, he says. But he has resolved to stay strong for the sake of his family. The camera fades to black. Watching the film prompted about half of the viewers to donate money to a cancer charity.
Why? Zak monitored people’s neural activity as they watched the film, specifically the levels of certain hormones. Many of them released oxytocin, a hormone that has been associated with empathy, bonding and sensitivity to social cues. Studies show that when people release this hormone they reliably donate to a stranger or charity even when there is no pressure to do so.
Then Zak changed the story. Now Ben and his dad were at the zoo. Ben was bald. His dad called him “miracle boy”. But there was no real story arc and no unequivocal mention of cancer or of the boy’s chances of survival. The people who watched this film were less engrossed, their oxytocin levels remained low and they donated little or no money.
Narratives like Ben’s, and Gibson’s, are particularly strong because they appeal to your emotions, rather than logic, and emotion is the key to empathy. It causes our brains to release oxytocin, making us more generous – with our money, our time, our trust, ourselves. The better the story, the more we give. The better the con artist, the better the story.
So as much as we would love to call Gibson an outlier, that’s simply not true. As long as we continue to be swept up by emotional stories, of tales of redemption, of overcoming odds, there will be a Belle Gibson ready and waiting. After all, what’s better than a good story?
(Images: The Advertising Archive, New York Daily News Archive, News Ltd, Newspix; The Advertising Archives )
This article appeared in print under the headline “The irresistible lure of the con artist”
