Someone Like George Santos Could Only Thrive In The GOP
It was inevitable, of course, but still satisfying, to see the strands of the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal and the George Santos scandal come together. Santos wound up with thousands of stolen FTX dollars in his campaign, some of it from straw donors tasked with the job by SBF and Ryan Salame. Let’s hope they share a cell some day. Yesterday, Maria Konnikova, psychologist and author of The Confidence Game (2016), Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (2013) and The Biggest Bluff (2020), looked at Santos’ psyche— What Psychology Can Teach Us About George Santos. She sees Santos not as a deceitful politician but as a full-blown con artist… which, or course, he is. “For con artists,” she wrote, “lying is a way of being. It reaches past exaggeration or misrepresentation into a prevailing disconnect from reality.”
She posed 2 crucial questions that psychologists are beginning to be able to answer
How does someone in the public eye ever hope that deceptions of this magnitude will go undetected?
What explains con artists’ impulse to deceive, repeatedly, even as the fictions they tell become harder to maintain?
As you read her explanation of Santos’ pathology, do yourself a favor and keep Trump in mind as well.
In three years of research on con artists— interviewing them, spending time with them, submitting them to psychological questionnaires, and reading any available psychological literature on them— I found that con artists tend to exhibit some combination of the so-called dark triad of personality traits, which have been studied in deceptive behavior more broadly: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Although psychopathy tends to get a lot of attention— few things are as eye-catching as the word psychopath— the trait that, to me, exemplifies the psychology of the con, and explains the hubris behind a pyramid of lies as high as Santos’, is narcissism.
Narcissism in the case of the confidence artist is not narcissism in the sense that you and I might use when talking about someone who feels that the world revolves around them. It’s an almost pathological hubris; the thought that you haven’t gotten caught yet, so you never will get caught. The sense that, out of everyone, you deserve it the most, whatever it might be. True narcissism lets you rationalize all manner of sin; it’s self-delusion taken to an extreme.
Narcissism breeds, as well, a self-reinforcing cycle: The more you lie, the more entitled you feel—and the more qualified. In 2019, an international group of psychologists— Francesca Gino of Harvard, Wiley Wakeman of the Stockholm School of Economics, and Celia Moore of Bocconi University, in Italy— ran a series of studies that looked at cheating’s effects on self-image. Would people who cut corners on a task feel more or less confident in their skills afterward? The results were somewhat counterintuitive: Subjects who lied about their performance on a series of matrix problems actually felt more competent afterward. I must be good at this! Look at how well I did! (Ignore, for a moment, that I inflated my results.)
The psychologists also went a step beyond the typical laboratory games to a pursuit more directly relevant to Santos: lying on a résumé. Participants were given a task— apply for a job using supplied credentials— and would receive a bonus if their application was deemed to be in the top 25 percent of all applicants. The trick was that each of the supplied credentials could be twisted or misrepresented, if the applicant so desired. Oxford Brookes University could become the University of Oxford. A two-week executive-education program at Harvard could become an actual degree from Harvard. And second-class honors could be inflated to first-class honors. A full 35 percent of participants chose to misrepresent themselves on at least one of their credentials— and the ones who did reported feeling significantly more competent at the end than those who had accurately conveyed their qualifications. It’s the extreme of dressing for the job you want— to the point where you begin to believe you’re more qualified for that job than those who worked for it.
The result is a perverse dynamic. The more a person like George Santos misrepresents himself and cons others for his own gain, the more entitled he feels to keep going. Why should I resign when I’m the most qualified for the job? The con artist, at least to some degree, comes to believe his own lies. One recent series of studies found that people who were confronted with evidence of self-deception— believing themselves to have performed better than they actually did, and better than the average person, on a series of trivia questions— not only failed to acknowledge their self-delusion but began to see others as the ones prone to it. (Cue Santos’s recent interview with Piers Morgan, in which the representative mostly deflected responsibility for his lies.)
Of course, it’s not enough to lie and justify your conning to yourself. You have to convince others to believe in you. I’ve argued that there’s a con for everyone: Not everyone will fall for every con, but anyone can fall for a con that’s well suited to them. The master con artist knows how to pick the right victims and the right venue— and then how to sell his story most effectively.
Here, Santos chose well. Politics is an area where shades of gray aren’t just tolerated; they are the norm. So if anyone ever catches you in a lie, it’s easy enough to explain it away. Add to that Santos’ choice of district— on Long Island, where there was little competition (he ran uncontested for the Republican nomination) and an element of time pressure (last-minute changes in the district-map lines thwarted would-be challengers)— and you have a perfect stage for even the biggest lies to go largely ignored.
Even in the ideal arena, how do you get others to put their trust in you? Con artists seem to intuitively grasp what psychology researchers know: We tend to trust people who appear and act similarly to us. (Some studies have grouped people together in relatively arbitrary ways, like whether they over- or underestimated the number of dots in a picture or whether they preferred art by Kandinsky or Klee, finding that participants were kinder to those they thought were like them.) Santos claimed to be Jewish, for instance, when he ran against Jewish opponents— and presumably wanted to capture that voter demographic. (He later claimed he had said he was “Jew-ish,” rather than “Jewish.”)
When all else fails, emotion, emotion, emotion. The more emotional we are, the more likely we are to give someone the benefit of the doubt and put our logic aside. Santos’s mother dying because of 9/11 was apparently false. Some of his employees dying in the Pulse nightclub shootings was also apparently false. His grandparents surviving the Holocaust, again, appears to have been fabricated. As Demara, the master con artist, once put it, Americans want to be liked more than they want to be right. We’d rather err on the side of sympathy than distrust. My heart goes out to the victim of tragedy— and if I suspect he’s making it up, I’ll keep it to myself.
A new national poll released by Fox News-- their first for the 2024 election-- this afternoon, shows Trump leading DeSantis among Republican primary voters, thought not near 50%. Fox offered respondents 15 candidates to choose from, 9 of whom received 1% or less. College-educated GOP voters favored DeSantis put the poorly educated-- the vast majority of Republicans-- are still taken in by Trump. The two are essentially tied among suburban voters and voters with higher incomes. “Florida could be a model for the future of our country.” That was Jeb Bush endorsing Meatball Ron for president.