Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.

Maria Konnikova

Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic - the strong attacking the weak.

Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We're in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can't be real.

Maria Konnikova

Mom Men Great

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Maria Konnikova

Travel Time Good

If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Maria Konnikova

Men Experience Environmental

Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.

Maria Konnikova

Knowledge History Future

Understanding the psychology of changing norms starts from a simple insight: although we may wish to be perfectly rational and impartial, bias is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.

Maria Konnikova

Art Wish Understanding

That's the power of the good con artist: the ability to identify your deepest need and exploit it. It's not about honesty or greed; we are all suckers for belief.

Maria Konnikova

Power Good Art

Poker isn't the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Apart from the underlying mathematics, poker depends on the nuanced reading of human intention, interactions, and deceptions.

Maria Konnikova

Chance Art Yin

Perhaps one day we'll be able to identify and block not just scams but the scammers themselves - before they even target their first victim.

Maria Konnikova

Victim Us Tim

We don't appreciate luck in life when things are going well. No matter how smart I am and how I prepare, there are things that catch you off guard.

Maria Konnikova

Life Art You

The truth is that we have no idea what the long-term effects of any artificial enhancement may be. Will our brains be able to withstand running at artificially heightened capacity?

Maria Konnikova

Truth Men Art

The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

Maria Konnikova

Time Where UN

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds.

Maria Konnikova

Life Art Your

The name 'con artist' really does capture it. They're artists, and I have admiration for all artists.

Maria Konnikova

Art Tis T

Humans are startlingly bad at detecting fraud. Even when we're on the lookout for signs of deception, studies show, our accuracy is hardly better than chance.

Maria Konnikova

Chance Art Tin

Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.

Maria Konnikova

Time Wit Victims

Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information - and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate.

Maria Konnikova

T Sources Source

If we rush too quickly to be scientific, to begin our experiment or catch our criminal as soon as possible, we risk never getting to the answer at all.

Maria Konnikova

Men Us Too

Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.

Maria Konnikova

Teen Writing Writer

Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.

Maria Konnikova

Power World Wit

I hate casinos. I have zero interest in gambling.

Maria Konnikova

No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn't taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive.

Maria Konnikova

The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.

Maria Konnikova

Part of how easily we go to sleep is genetic: many sleep disturbances, ranging from insomnia to circadian disruption, have a large genetic component.

Maria Konnikova

Virtual reality has already proved useful in treating phobias and PTSD. It can help people overcome a fear of heights, for example, through simulations of standing on a balcony or walking across a bridge.

Maria Konnikova

Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.

Maria Konnikova

Each of us has a network of emotional and logical associations that is unique to us. Activate one mode of the association, and you activate a predictable pattern of behavior. A situation isn't just the external events that take place; it is how each individual processes those events and integrates them into her thoughts and feelings.

Maria Konnikova

Where anger can be seen as a relative positive in a man, it is hardly ever perceived as anything other than a negative in a woman.

Maria Konnikova

Much of the excitement about virtual reality has come from the gaming community.

Maria Konnikova

Fraternities breed leaders. That, at least, is what most any chapter website will tell you, in not so many words - and the message certainly makes for a compelling rationale for joining the Greek system.

Maria Konnikova

I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.

Maria Konnikova

People want to protect their way of life, and when they think it's in danger they start grasping for more extreme-seeming alternatives.

Maria Konnikova

While today's fraternities are hardly the literary- and debate-inspired groups of yore, their core mission - or, at the least, their ideal core mission and the one touted loudly in their public chapter and promotional materials - remains largely unchanged.

Maria Konnikova

Las vegas shouldn't exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.

Maria Konnikova

Play up the outrage factor and suddenly groups bond together like never before - and prepare to attack like never before.

Maria Konnikova

I don't think anyone could have predicted that I would have gone in less than a year from not knowing how many cards were in a deck to winning a major poker title.

Maria Konnikova

I've been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I'm between events and in New York, I'm reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.

Maria Konnikova

I really had to go back and remind myself that trusting makes society function on an individual level related to health and on a social level related to economic growth and development.

Maria Konnikova

To the untrained eye, poker seems deceptively easy.

Maria Konnikova

Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all.

Maria Konnikova

As our understanding of fraud evolves, we might one day be able to develop predictive algorithms that could identify would-be con artists based on patterns of behavior.

Maria Konnikova

The perfectibility of the human mind is a theme that has captured our imagination for centuries - the notion that, with the right tools, the right approach, the right attitude, we might become better, smarter versions of ourselves.

Maria Konnikova

Electrodes aren't the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.

Maria Konnikova

Down the road, the most controversial approach to neuroenhancement could be a way not of stimulating the brain but of reengineering it.

Maria Konnikova

Creating groups is easy - but to make them meaningful and lasting, you have to give them a common identity that not only unites them but shows them why they are unique.

Maria Konnikova

Once fraternities became tied to power and leadership, the powerful and would-be-leaders wanted to join.

Maria Konnikova

Gender perception can be a pernicious thing: Where a lack of warmth passes in a male, in a woman, it's deadly.

Maria Konnikova

It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.

Maria Konnikova

The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.

Maria Konnikova

Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.

Maria Konnikova