The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (37 page)

Many animals do the same. Elephants, chimpanzees, baboons—even vampire bats and naked mole rats—recognize their own relatives, especially female ones, and act accordingly, meaning nepotistically.
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We’ve already seen that a Japanese macaque will allow another macaque that wanders by to nibble some of her food as long as the two are directly related.
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Meanwhile, adult female baboons spend up to five hours every day grooming different
partners, but primarily their female relatives, write Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, who add that time spent grooming forges sisterly bonds that come in handy when food is scarce or the temperature suddenly drops.
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Such oxytocin-releasing intimacy not only feels good, it pays off.

You might be wondering what all this monkey business has to do with con artists scamming their own. Not just among nonhuman primates but in every culture in the world, people form kin- and belief-based social networks, cooperating with other people as if they were family.
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That baseline trust allows in-group members to escape the scrutiny that any outsider would face. Signs of shared identity and status—accents, tattoos, tight pants or baggy ones, hairstyles, sock colors—are more persuasive face-to-face than they are over the Internet. That’s why we’re more vulnerable to in-group scammers whom we meet in person than to faceless Nigerian princes who, like Earl Jones, want our bank account details. No matter what our culture, we all have the same inclination to trust members of our tribe, and the same feelings of indignation and shame when that trust has been betrayed. Iris Bohnet, a Swiss behavioral economist who is now dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Business, has shown that in countries with dramatically different social mores—including the United States, China, Turkey, and Oman—people everywhere are so averse to being betrayed that they are far less likely to trust another person with their money than they are to trust to nature or chance.
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Only a member of the in-crowd can circumvent this betrayal aversion.

WHAT GOD WANTED

“God wanted the Brazilian community to be prosperous,” Sann Rodrigues and Victor Sales told the Brazilian-American community in a hotel near Boston in 2007. Promising their countrymen, most of whom were also evangelical Christians, that they could earn as much as $17,000 a month if they paid $2,000 to $5,000 up front to
become members of a prepaid phone card company called Universo FoneClub, they showed a PowerPoint presentation with images of golfers and large, pricy houses. They even floated the suggestion that Universo investors could buy their own island. “God did not want the Brazilians to spend their lives working as house cleaners, dishwashers, and landscapers,” the duo said in Portuguese, according to court documents recording the details of their pyramid scheme. “God did not want the Brazilians to be poor.” To underscore that point, checks of up to $7,000 were handed out to members of the audience, which included shills who testified that they’d earned ten grand in eight days. More than $3.2 million was raised from the community, about half of which was later returned, according to a civil suit brought by federal regulators.
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The Amish of Sugarcreek, Ohio, weren’t as lucky. They trusted an elder with their savings, as did about 2,500 other members of the plain community, as the Mennonites and Amish call themselves. Monroe Beachy, now in his late seventies, was a respected financial advisor who lived a modest lifestyle and acquired his financial bona fides in H&R Block classes. Through his company, A&M Investments, Beachy took in about $33 million from his community over twenty-odd years. Much like Bernie Madoff and Earl Jones, Beachy promised a rate of return that was better than the bank’s—and all through risk-free government bonds. “Word spread about his safe, steady returns. Parents encouraged their children to practice thrift by opening A&M accounts, too,” wrote business reporter Diana Henriques. When the Ponzi scheme broke, Beachy’s own family members and more than a dozen churches, nonprofits, and charities lost their shirts. Though Beachy was accused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission and lost at least $16 million of his community’s personal savings, many of his investors testified in court that they’d rather forgive him than recover their money. But their extraordinary social cohesion couldn’t protect him from the consequences. In June 2012, Beachy was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.

Affinity fraud within tightly knit groups is universal. Betraying the trust of Christian pacifists who ply Ohio’s back roads via horse and buggy is one thing, but pulling the wool over the eyes of Hezbollah’s leaders is quite another. When entrepreneur Salah Ezzedine defrauded the advisor to the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to the tune of $200,000, people started to refer to him as the Lebanese Madoff. Reputed to have personal ties with the Shiite movement’s top brass, Ezzedine was known as a pious man who was generous with his oil fortune. He had built a mosque as well as the Stadium of the Resistance and Liberation Martyrs near his home town in Maaroub. He organized pilgrimages to Mecca through the travel agency he owned. That apparent civic-mindedness, combined with his links to Hezbollah, is likely why so many of the region’s residents entrusted their life savings to what turned out to be his $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
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(Being promised a 40 percent return on their investments didn’t hurt either.)

To perpetrate such a scam, Ezzedine banked on honest signals—the shortcuts that tell our brains who to trust in the real world. In most cases, as we’ve learned in previous chapters, honest signals help us to find lifelong friends, lovers, neighborhoods, and spouses. Piggybacking on the same neuroendocrine infrastructure, affinity fraud takes advantage of the human tendency to migrate toward others much like ourselves, and to relax our suspicions in their company.

Encountering another member of our in-group triggers automatic feelings of confidence and security. There is also such thing as having an honest face. In a series of amazing experiments, Alexander Todorov, Nikolaas Oosterhof, and their colleagues at Princeton University have shown that we make snap judgments about whether to trust someone after as little as a tenth of a second. Having more time—indeed, unlimited time—simply confirms our first impressions.
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The researchers devised a brilliant way to test the idea that many important decisions hinge on a brief glimpse of someone’s face. They showed potential voters pairs of black-and-white
headshots of candidates who were completely unfamiliar to them. After seeing these candidates’ faces for as little as one second, the observers made judgments about the competence of the candidates that predicted, with a fair degree of accuracy, the outcome of the elections. Indeed, a quick glance at someone’s face was all it took to predict over 70 percent of the winning candidates in several consecutive US senatorial races, on average, and about 68 percent of those sitting in congress.
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Lest one think that Americans are particularly swayed by appearances, these results were later replicated in elections held in England, Finland, Australia, Germany, and Mexico.
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Neuroscientists now think the ability to pick up such emotional cues evolved in the amygdala, an almond-shaped neural area linked to fight-or-flight behavior in our reptile ancestors.
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Though fMRI images underscoring the amygdala’s role in processing people’s faces only appeared in the 1990s, psychologists have long known that snap judgments made during face-to-face encounters can be life-altering. In one study from the early 1980s, several social psychologists closely examined the
Howitzer
, the yearbook of the West Point class of 1950, to see if the cadets’ facial features, height, athleticism, or other aspects of their appearance predicted their eventual rank. It was no surprise that the few blacks and Jews at West Point in 1950—no matter how chiseled their features or their jock quotient—didn’t rise very high. But the physical features of the rest of the cadets, such as whether or not they had a prominent chin and eyebrows, deep-set eyes, and flat, non-obtrusive ears (and were generally handsome and hunky), turned out to be fairly good predictors of the promotions they’d get within the military hierarchy.
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Remarkably, these facial feature studies also confirm one of the first concrete bits of information I learned in graduate school. In my first clinical interviewing course, I was taught that hiring decisions are made within thirty seconds of the first handshake, a factoid that I came to regard as a myth. Yet a generation later, imaging studies validate two basic principles in psychology. First, beauty
pays.
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And second, after we’ve make a snap judgment, we don’t usually change our minds. This is known as confirmation bias. We make decisions based on something as arbitrary as the shape of someone’s eyebrows or an inch more or less of height, and then we selectively pay attention to whatever confirms what we’ve already decided. Though it’s probably nothing more than the residue from a time when one glimpse—signaling whom to trust or who would be a good mating partner—gave us a survival advantage, our brains have clearly developed shortcuts that tell us when to raise our hackles and when to lower them.

By incrementally manipulating the features on computer-generated faces, the Princeton researchers were able to test exactly which facial features engender that automatic trust. They found that a slightly feminine, baby-faced appearance, with arched inner eyebrows, prominent cheekbones, and a cheerful demeanor, increases the impression of trustworthiness.
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In fact, the happier looking the face, the more trustworthy it seems. Meanwhile, a more dominant, masculine-looking face, with lower inner eyebrows and cheekbones, engenders fear and the impulse to keep one’s distance. This is not something we think about—it just happens. In fMRI studies of people looking at a series of faces, the amygdala became increasingly active as the experimenters gradually decreased the trustworthy features in the faces subjects were viewing. And lesions to the amygdala can “turn off” our ability to track the trustworthiness in people’s faces.
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Facial features that elicit trust
. (Image and Figure Credits
9.1
)

HOW THIN SLICES CAN LET YOU DOWN

It seems we’ve evolved an automatic, visceral response to human faces. This is just one part of a deception-detecting mechanism in the human brain. So why didn’t it protect the victims of those pyramid scammers? One reason is that the criminals’ facial features likely conveyed a level of trustworthiness. Combined with their social skills—a natural ability to mimic what their friends were thinking and feeling, for example—they were able to create an illusion of sincerity that psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls psychopathic charm.

These men may have started out on the straight and narrow. But when financial pressures mounted, they likely pulled the wool over someone’s eyes just to keep the money flowing. With each successful foray into deception, they learned to be more successful liars, perhaps even deceiving themselves in the process. To top it all off, they were then amply rewarded for their fabrications.
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Their appearance offered them a competitive advantage, not in the usual evolutionary sense of an ability to snag food, sex, or resources that might have gone to someone faster or stronger, but in the realm of getting others to trust them.

This is just one way that intuition in social contexts can let us down. Psychologists Robert Rosenthal and the late Nalini Ambady coined the term “thin-slicing” in the early 1990s, when they discovered that even subliminal glimpses of someone can stand in for more considered judgments.
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Kahneman calls it “System 1” in his book
Thinking Fast and Slow
, while Malcolm Gladwell calls it “blinking” (instead of thinking) in his bestseller about the power of first impressions. Whatever you call it, first impressions are handy