This book, the blurb warns us, was written by ‘an established voice in popular psychology, with a regular column on the New Yorker online’. Maria Konnikova is also the ‘bestselling author of Mastermind’, a book which explains how we can train our minds to see the world as Sherlock Holmes saw it. The Confidence Game identifies a template pattern of stages peculiar to every successful confidence trick, and devotes a chapter to each: the Put Up, the Play, the Rope, the Tale, the Convincer, the Breakdown, the Send, the Touch and the Fix. (The first chapter offers a psychological profile of ‘the Grifter’ or confidence trickster and ‘the Mark’ — his prey.)
Konnikova’s voice might be established in popular psychology, but it’s not always easy to follow. Though most of her sentences are simple, when she sets sail for the choppy waters of two or more clauses linked together, this tends to happen:
The more you look, the more you realise that, even with certain markers, like life changes, and certain tendencies in tow, a reliably stable overarching victim profile is simply not there.
Or this:
Even when we’re anonymous and the group, not particularly desirable, we’d still like to be included more than not — and it hurts when we are excluded.
And such Americanisms as ‘shill’, ‘ass’, ‘ritzy’, ‘morphed’, ‘multifold’, ‘mentalist’, ‘lucked out’ and ‘ramped up’ might leave older British readers ‘beyond surprised’. I love the American language, the slang particularly. But it’s hard to love when it’s arranged as complacently as this.
But hey! Let me try to convey the psychology of the confidence trick in the light of Konnikova’s stages. And let’s pretend that this book itself is an audacious confidence trick, then imagine a potential purchaser, in the popular psychology section of Waterstones, reading the cover.
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