In an era of “ truthiness” and “ fake news,” such a premise may seem absurd and naϊve. Sorokin – then known to her acquaintances as ‘Anna Delvey’ – appears, far right, at a fashion award ceremony in New York City in 2014.

And to do that, there must be some ground rules, one of which is that both parties are telling the truth. Understanding one another requires working together. Grice argued that communication is a cooperative endeavor. This maxim of communication was first proposed by Paul Grice, an influential philosopher of language.

Yet just as trust is a default of human interaction, a presumption of sincerity is a default expectation of basic communication.

Of course, Sorokin’s requests were often accompanied by elaborate explanations and justifications, and you might wonder why so few people seemed to doubt the veracity of her claims. As psychologist David Dunning and his colleagues have pointed out, without trust it is hard to imagine endeavors like Airbnb, car shares or a working democracy having any success. Humans are social creatures, and trusting one another is baked into our DNA. There’s something deeply human about this impulse. Simon Leviev wooed women on the dating app Tinder before persuading them to give him access to cash and credit cards. In other words, despite deep reservations, they still choose to trust a complete stranger. What’s fascinating about these studies is that most participants are cynical about ever seeing their money again – let alone any returns on their investment – and yet they still hand it over. In these studies, participants are told they are taking part in various types of “investment games” in which they are given the opportunity to hand over their money to another participant in the hopes of receiving a return on their investment. Yet psychologists have watched participants hand over their money to complete strangers for many years across hundreds of experiments. It still might be hard to believe that people in Sorokin’s circle would willingly hand over their money to someone they hardly knew. Despite her utterly unsound story, people were all-too-eager to buy it.” Research shows that people tend to default to trusting others over distrusting them, believing them over doubting them and going along with someone’s self-presentation rather than embarrassing them by calling them out.Įlle Dee, a DJ whom Delvey once asked to pick up a 35,000-euro bar tab, described the ease with which people went along with Delvey’s claims: “I don’t think she even had to try that hard. To trust is to be humanĭespite the belief that people are skeptics by nature, primed to shout “gotcha!” at any mistake or faux pas, this simply isn’t the case. Rather, I view the stories about Sorokin and Leviev as examples of bad actors exploiting the social processes people rely on every day for efficient and effective human communication and cooperation. How is it that so many people could have been gullible enough to buy the fantastical stories spun by Sorokin and Leviev? And why, even when “ he red flags were everywhere” – as one of Sorokin’s marks put it – did people continue to believe these grifters, spend their time with them and agree to lend them money?Īs a social psychologist who has written a book about our surprising power of persuasion, I don’t see this as an unusual glitch of human nature. Leviev persuaded women he met on the dating app to lend him large sums of money with similarly unbelievable claims: He was a billionaire whose enemies were trying to track him down and, for security reasons, couldn’t use his own credit cards.

The details of the Sorokin case mirror those from another recent Netflix production, “ The Tinder Swindler,” which tells the story of an Israeli conman named Simon Leviev. Yet the people around her were quick to accept her odd explanations, even creating excuses for her that strained credulity. Instead, she was an intern at a fashion magazine who came from a working-class family of Russian immigrants. The subject of a new Netflix series, “ Inventing Anna,” Sorokin, who told people her name was Anna Delvey, conned over $250,000 out of wealthy acquaintances and high-end Manhattan businesses between 20. That’s how Anna Sorokin’s marks explained away the supposed German heiress’s strange requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or to put plane tickets on their credit cards, which she would then forget to pay back. Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it.

Anna delvey story