The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [107]
A little knowledge is famously a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge can be dangerous, too, if a fraudster knows how to exploit it. “There are some mistakes it takes a Ph.D. to make,” Daniel Moynihan once observed. The trick, as in jujitsu, is to find a way to turn a rival’s apparent advantage into a drawback.
Bredius himself compared the best forgers to magicians, though merely as a rhetorical flourish. For once, Bredius did not take his own opinion seriously enough. Magicians and con men fool us by making us jump to unwarranted conclusions. The savvier we are, the quicker we jump, because we see at a glance (or so we think) which way the story is heading.* Adults know (but small children don’t) that two metal rings that clang together are solid. Bredius and his fellow connoisseurs knew that Vermeer painted specks of light shimmering on loaves of bread and favored the color blue. The forger drops a hint, and the connoisseur follows it off a ledge.
A magician named Jim Steinmeyer has put considerable thought into identifying which people can be tricked. “It’s not as simple as finding stupid people who are willing to accept what they’re told or happy to overlook obvious clues,” he explains. Just the opposite. The ideal audience knows a great deal about how the world works and, just as important, prides itself on that knowledge. Any magician would rather take on a roomful of physicists than of five-year-olds.
“The key,” Steinmeyer says, “is finding smart people who bring a lot to the table—cultural experience, shared expectations, preconceptions. The more they bring, the more there is to work with, and the easier it is to get them to make allowances—to reach the ‘right’ conclusion and unwittingly participate in the deception.”
Who would make perfect victims? Perhaps a group of smart people who knew everything there was to know about the Dutch Golden Age, who believed as an article of faith that they could make flawless snap judgments, who knew that forgers could fool other people but could never fool them?
WHAT MAGICIANS LIKE Steinmeyer have learned onstage, psychologists have confirmed in formal experiments. In one classic study of confidence and overconfidence, researchers asked subjects an array of “random knowledge” questions. What is the capital of Ecuador? In the United States do more people die annually from suicide or homicide? The subjects were asked to answer each question and then to rate how sure they were that their answer was correct. “Quito, 80 percent.”
Two trends quickly emerged. First, most people vastly overestimated their knowledge. Not only did they give wrong answers, but they put the odds that they were wrong at one in ten thousand or even one in a million. More surprisingly, the researchers could not shake this baseless confidence, no matter how they tried. With a new group of subjects, the psychologists postponed the test until they had presented a long tutorial, complete with slides and tables, about probability and the meaning of such expressions as “one in a thousand.” Their labors had distressingly little effect.
Maybe the reason for the overconfidence was that nothing was at stake? The psychologists rounded up new volunteers and this time asked if they would be willing to bet real money on their answers. Yes, they would. And when the panicky researchers explained later that they didn’t actually intend to pay off, some subjects were furious.
In another refinement of the original study, the psychologists drew questions from areas the subjects knew well. Accuracy grew, but overconfidence grew faster. In one psychologist’s summary, “It is therefore most important to be wary of our overconfidence, for this overconfidence is at its greatest in our own area of expertise—in short, just where it can do the most damage.”
THE FORGER’S MAIN task is to trick his victims into focusing their attention where it does not belong. To fool the experts who are sure to study their work, they need to lure them into focusing here while the real action takes