What to Read to Understand How People Get Tricked
Our brains are wired to be deceived. I’m married to a professional magician, so I’m intimately familiar with the kinds of techniques that can fool the eye and trick the senses. But the human mind’s vulnerability to misdirection is more universal than that. Neurologists and psychologists have found that our predilection for trusting others—a trait that has helped us survive as a species—is a major reason con artists thrive. This trait also makes dissimulation fascinating and appealing, especially in literature. Readers love the stories of swindlers and their gullible targets, of grifters themselves being tricked, and every iteration in between. They thrill us by upending the expected and making us question our assumptions.
The six books below all delve into deception. Some tell tales of elaborate confidence schemes; others interrogate people are frequently defenseless against cons that, from the outside, seem obvious. Several books also dig into how we’re liable
