What Do Con Artists and Religious Leaders Have in Common? With Maria Konnikova | Big Think

Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo
Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is the difference between a cult and a religion? Perhaps not much. There are a lot of questions in this world, and people start asking at a young age. When a baby with a rattle bangs it on the table, it learns that the rattle makes noise. The baby is fascinated by cause and effect. That’s why they like to pull your hair and feel the tension in the strands. It’s why they are always throwing things from their high chairs.

Not everything is quite as simple – the older you get, the larger and more complicated the world becomes and as psychologist and writer Maria Konnikova points out, cause doesn’t always link up with effect. The world is often arbitrary in its motions, and there isn’t always meaning to be found. This gap in meaning is where con artist, cult leaders and spiritual advisors walk in. Konnikova has spoken before about con artists, and how they work. One big thing she pointed out is that con artists listen, and "solve" people’s problems by giving them what they desire.

That is a cult leader’s method too. These are people who seek out opportunities in others. Cults are as scary and as morbidly fascinating as it gets, because rather than losing mere money in a scam, people who fall into cults can lose everything about themselves – and then a fair amount of money, too.

Konnikova points out that organized religion works on the same psychological principles. People in the world have questions. Big ones, that have been around for thousands of years. And the scoundrels of the worlds have been around just as long, coming up with the answers, getting rich and powerful thanks to the hard-wired trust within humans. Surely many of the world’s religious and spiritual leaders are honest and good, and they truly believe in their cause. But the foundations of religion may be where one can find the deviants, who are still swimming around in organized religions up to this day.

Maria Konnikova's book is The Confidence Game.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARIA KONNIKOVA:
Maria Konnikova is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Confidence Game , winner of the 2016 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes , an Anthony and Agatha Award finalist. Her new book, The Biggest Bluff , will be out from Penguin Press on June 23, 2020. While researching The Biggest Bluff , Konnikova became an international poker champion and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings—and inadvertently turned into a professional poker player. She is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker , and her writing has been featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing and has been translated into over twenty languages. Maria also hosts the podcast The Grift from Panoply Media, a show that explores con artists and the lives they ruin, and is currently a visiting fellow at NYU's School of Journalism. She graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in psychology from Columbia University.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Konnikova: I think humans really have a deep desire for meaning. And it's something that is really hardwired into us. So if you look at an infant who is just learning about the world, that infant needs to learn rules of cause and effect. What happens – you sometimes see babies and they keep dropping objects so you think it's so incredibly annoying. You say stop dropping that, you know, I just picked it up for you. They're learning about physics. They're actually really curious to see that every time they drop it it falls. That is a totally amazing and mesmerizing new concept if you think about it. So we start looking for cause and effect right away. That's how we make sense of the world. And as you grow older you're still looking for that cause and effect that same if I cry mommy comes back. Cause leads directly to effect. An event leave directly to what that event causes.
We are really uncomfortable when that's not the case. And the world is really, really messy. It's not all about the dropping a ball and it falls. The world really is all about uncertainty. It's ambiguous. Causes don't lead to effect, things just happen without any action on your part. Sometimes you take an action and nothing happens, even though you want it to happen. So there are lots of gaps in meaning because that meaning that we want to be there it's not there and we still search for it. And so we still want that meaning to be there. We want certainty.
To read the transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/maria-konnikova-on-cons-and-cults

Видео What Do Con Artists and Religious Leaders Have in Common? With Maria Konnikova | Big Think канала Big Think