The Woman Who Used Her Face to Rob Me
She wasn’t particularly attractive, if that’s what you’re thinking.
She was quite homely, in fact.
Nonetheless, this woman – sitting in a beat up Ford Pinto in a Walgreens parking lot in Hollywood – robbed me in the cleverest way.
“Sir, can you help? My car just broke down and I don’t have enough money to have it towed. My kids are waiting for me to come home and cook dinner.”
Nice try. Instantly, I knew it was a scam.
But she got me anyway.
“Ma’am, forgive me for saying so, but I don’t believe your story.”
Sounds heartless, I know. But I’ve learned over time to trust my gut. Having grown up in poverty myself, I know I’m a bit of a sucker for sob stories. And I’ve been burned by slick grifters telling sob stories before.
As I looked in her eyes a single facial expression from her was all it took.
I let out a frustrated sigh, reached into my wallet, and handed her a 20 dollar bill.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you. You’re a good person. God bless you.”
Even as I walked away I knew I’d been scammed.
How did she do it?
Well, persuasion doesn’t work like most folks think it does. See, we think persuasion works though “convincing”, but in reality it has a lot more to do with thinking shortcuts.
This, for example, is why people are so susceptible to influence from figures of authority.
Imagine you’re someone who knows nothing about computers. One morning suddenly yours won’t turn on. You take it into the repair shop and they hand you an estimate.
“Are you kidding me? That’s 1/4 the price of my computer!”
Your brain is then faced with a dilemma:
- go spend years learning how to fix your computer yourself
- trust this “expert” to get the job done and pay them
Trusting the expert is a cognitive shortcut. We know we don’t have the time to figure it out ourselves, so we trust them and take the plunge.
Devious “shortcuts” like this abound. And over the next few messages I send, I’d like to share a few of them with you.
The first set of shortcuts I’d like to share with you were discovered by some clever researchers at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. This is astonishingly effective stuff. And it may shatter everything you think you know about persuasion …
FREE REPORT:
The 5 Facial Expressions Which Subconsciously Control the Behavior of Others
download now (while it’s free)
P.S. The first facial expression in the above report is the exact one the woman used to con me!
