Hello and welcome back to the savvy psychologist. I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and every week I'll help you meet life's challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

So today we are lucky to have with us Maria Conakova, psychologist and author of not one, but two New York Times bestsellers. The first was the tantalizingly titled Mastermind

How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.

And her most recent, The Confidence Game,

Why We Fall for It Every Time,

was awarded the 2016 Robert P. Bales Prize in Critical Thinking.

She's a contributing writer for the New Yorker and her writing has appeared in The

Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Scientific American, Wired, and numerous other publications.

So Maria Conakova, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. So I am excited to talk to you about the psychology of the Khan, and I will admit that I didn't know that the term

Khan, as in Khan artist, Khan Man, getting Khan, is short for confidence, as in, do you have confidence in me?

Do you trust me?

Because that's what the con is based on, trust. And we all think we're con proof.

None of us think we would ever be so gullible

as to fall for a con.

But you say that's exactly what makes us so vulnerable.

So what about us

each of us makes us a good mark?

Well I think that so to back up a little bit because a lot of people have

taken issue over time with the fact that I say that everyone is vulnerable

they say, well, I'm not vulnerable or I'd never fall for that.

And I'm not saying that every single person is vulnerable to every single con, saying there's a con out there for everyone and I think the reason that that's true is because you know we all have things we want to believe in we all have kind of our own versions of reality that we live in.

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