Robert Zajonc devoted much of his five-decade-long career to the study of emotion—how it affects us, how it colors our thoughts and actions, how it compels us to move in one direction or another. When he first entered psychology, the behaviorists were holding sway. These were the great minds like B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson who looked toward the environment for cues as to why we act the way we do. Behavior, they argued, could largely be accounted for by almost purely cognitive reactions to discrete, identifiable environmental stimuli. Zajonc was at the forefront of a group that begged to differ. Yes, the environment was crucially important. But so, too, was the way it made us feel. We didn’t react in a predictable, logical, purely cognitive way, in the manner of a rat who presses a lever once he realizes that it leads to food. Even the rat, in fact, is likely not acting like a stereotypical rat in most cases. Shock it, fail to provide it with food, and it can bite and lash out—an emotional response rather than a cognitive one. Lashing out at the hand that feeds you, after all, isn’t the best way to go about getting fed.
On September 2, 1979, Zajonc addressed the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, held that year in New York City. He was there to receive an award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, and his remarks on the occasion contained the culmination of his thinking and study on the nature of emotion in our lives. A year later, they were published as a paper titled “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences.” What he meant by that is one of the fundamental principles of the successful play. For it is during the play, first of all, that con artists appeal to the most base emotions. Our desires, our fears, our loneliness, even our physical pain. They go right for the heart.
In his work, Zajonc told his listeners, he’d found that the conventional wisdom in the psychological community—that feelings come after thought—was wrong. Our emotional reactions are often our first. They are made naturally and instinctively, before we perform any sort of evidence-based evaluation. Early psychologists had recognized that fact. Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of the Gestalt movement in the nineteenth century, wrote, “When any physical process rises above the threshold of consciousness, it is the affective elements which as soon as they are strong enough, first become noticeable. They begin to force themselves energetically into the fixation point of consciousness before anything is perceived of the ideational elements.” In other words, any experience was, first and fundamentally, an emotional one. The ideas and cognitive processing came after. “The clear apperception of ideas in acts of cognition and recognition is always preceded by feelings,” Wundt concluded.
Zajonc emphatically agreed: that was precisely what he had been attempting to prove through his research. Emotion, he had found, could be activated quite easily—the mere exposure effect that makes many a put-up a success—and, as it turned out, it also inspired great confidence. Far more confidence, in fact, than cognitive reasoning. The process wasn’t logical. Mere exposure, his studies had illustrated, often didn’t breed any sort of objective sense of familiarity or recognition. You didn’t remember that something had happened, that you’d seen something, heard something, felt something. Instead, it bred a simple, subjective liking. You didn’t know why, but you preferred this one thing. “Which do you prefer?” had become a question of “Which do I like more?” Our quick like-dislike judgments of something or someone, Zajonc found, happened all the time, in the absence of any conscious memory or cognitive effort.
In lower animals, an affective reaction is often the only one. If you’re a rat, you have to respond fearfully to a snake long before you process what the snake is. Otherwise, you’ll be a very dead rat. Fundamentally, “Friend or foe?” is a more important survival question than almost anything else. If you accept that those types of instant judgments are essential to our continued survival as a species, you, in a sense, accept that feeling precedes thinking.
“Human beings are social information processors before they are processors of facts, figures, and logical arguments,” writes Michael Slater, a psychologist at Ohio State University who studies how media influences beliefs and behaviors. “Every parent soon learns how effectively even a toddler with limited language skills can process information about emotions and manipulate human relations.” Even without the elaborate cognitive skills of logical argument and persuasion, an effective emotional manipulator, from babies to rogues, can achieve almost limitless ends.
It’s not surprising, then, that the cues of emotion predate language. They are in the voice, the posture, the eyes, the tone, the touch. We can reliably interpret the emotion in a voice even when the words are completely obscured. In one study, when people were asked to interpret a video, the tone of voice was twenty-two times more effective at predicting the variance in judgments than the content of the words themselves. Nonverbal cues had over four times the effect of verbal ones on changes in ratings. Even when electronic filtering or masking was used to make the words of a recording unintelligible—in this case, it was the audio recording of a play—people could still reliably report on the emotion those words had expressed. In fact, how we say something ourselves, even if we’re asked to do so in the absence of any genuine emotion, can often boil over into how we end up feeling. Merely smiling or frowning, for instance, changes the pattern of blood flow to our brains. The result is a physiological change in our emotion that can come quite close to mimicking the genuine artifact.
Not only do we form emotional impressions long before we create any rational understanding, but those impressions, in turn, are “irrevocable.” “We can readily accept that we can be wrong,” Zajonc told his audience that September afternoon. “But we are never wrong about what we like or dislike.” Or, in a con artist’s interpretation, most any cries of foul play will fall on deaf ears if you’ve already decided you like the person doing the conning. They “feel” more right. We trust our feelings more than anything anyone can tell us to the contrary. Our preferences need no inferences—and activating those preferences is what the play is all about.
Joan met Greg in early 2011. From the first, she was smitten. “He was wonderful, he was brilliant, and he was kind of creative, really, really funny, and really kind and generous,” she recalls as we sip coffee at a small café in New York’s West Village. She doesn’t seem angry or resentful. Just sad. Perhaps a bit bewildered. “He would have charmed you like he charmed everyone else, including me.” They started dating. Early in their relationship, her grandmother became ill. Greg was up to the challenge, comforting her into the early hours of the morning. She was having a problem at work, or difficulty with a proposal. He’d stay up all night to help out. She demonstrated an interest in something. He’d immediately jump in with both feet. “He was kind of improbable, like where you would mention almost anything, like deep-sea diving, he’d be like, ‘Oh, here’s how to do this.’ And then it would turn out that he’s either done it or manufactured a suit for someone else who did,” she says. “He knew how to set bones—he’d been a paramedic. He built me a kitchen—he knew how to make stuff. He knew how to cure things and take care of sick people.” It seemed too good to be true, but in a way that was, in fact, real. They traveled together, talked about the future. Soon, they were talking about moving in together.
Joan was in love. So in love that she didn’t let any minor inconsistencies bother her. He was a graduate student in an exclusive science program. But she’d never met any classmates or labmates, nor seen any degrees or evidence of ongoing research. Her friends loved him—but she’d never met anyone who had known him for longer than a few months. He accompanied her to parties, met her family, came along on her work trips. But she was never asked to do the same for him. It was as if he’d taken on her life. But it didn’t seem strange. “I just kept thinking, God, I’m so lucky.”
One day, she offered to introduce him to a prominent researcher in his field—a Nobel laureate. She’d known Dr. Stanley for many years and thought Greg would benefit from the acquaintance,
especially since he’d mentioned that he admired his work. Greg demurred. At first, Joan was beyond surprised: why would anyone turn down an introduction? But Greg made it very clear. He wanted his career to be based on his own skill and intelligence, not networking connections from his girlfriend. She understood and didn’t give it any further thought.
They moved in together. It should have been perfect, but there was something a bit off about his arrival. The types of personal effects that accompany most any move were oddly missing. No personal history. No records. Nothing of any sort to confirm the reality of his life. Even his mail was off: there simply wasn’t any. He explained that he got it delivered to another address, a PO box. But Joan never saw a single envelope. One afternoon, Joan found an ID from the school where he was studying. It seemed, frankly, fake, so she confronted him. He didn’t deny it. He’d lost his real one, he told her, and a replacement cost fifty dollars. So he had put together a plausible version on his own. She accepted the story.
Still, just in case, Joan started to probe further. Early in their relationship, she’d done what any modern girl does: a Google search. Greg’s name was too common, though, and hardly anything came up. Now she redoubled her efforts, looking for him in the school’s databases. She came up empty. He had an explanation for that, too: he’d failed a few courses and didn’t want to tell her, because it was embarrassing. Now he was working at another lab.
His personality started to change. It turns out, Greg had quite a temper. “He had the ability to go from perfectly fine to extremely angry and upset and volatile within ten seconds for reasons that didn’t seem logic driven.” He was jealous and possessive. He flew off the handle without any seeming provocation. He became emotionally manipulative, threatening to leave if she went on a European bike trip that she’d been looking forward to. In retrospect, something was clearly off. In the moment, she found a way to explain it all away—she loved him too much. “We did play by his rules all the time,” she says, but, she reasoned, “His rules were good ones. He was smart, he did things that were good for me and good for the relationship, and generally kind of maximized everyone’s happiness. And every once in a while he’d pull something like that—but I knew it was bullshit, childish, but no big deal. There was so much good in this relationship, so I just let it go.”
The breaking point came one afternoon when Greg was away visiting family. Joan had been fighting the nagging doubts for too long. Before he left, Greg had blown up at her yet again—this time, because she asked if she could visit his lab. She was being pushy and unreasonable, he’d screamed, before storming out for the airport. It seemed such a trivial request; his reaction set her on edge. She called her old professor friend—the same scientist she’d wanted to introduce to Greg earlier. She voiced her doubts. Yes, she was probably being paranoid, Dr. Stanley told her, but he happened to know the head of Greg’s lab. Did she want Dr. Stanley to give him a call? She did.
Greg had never worked in the lab. He had never been in the program. Everything he’d told her had been a complete lie. The rest crumbled soon after: the scientific career, the college degrees, every single detail about his life—none of it was true. He had crafted an entire persona, complete with false background and family history, for her benefit. She had been in a relationship with a master manipulator, an impostor who managed to make his way into her life in the most intimate way imaginable.
Looking back on it, she realizes that all the red flags were there. But in the moment—well, she was in love. Greg had a knack for getting everyone to like him at first sight, and her friends were on his side. Joan was living a fantasy, but one that is largely condoned by society: an ideal, sweep-you-off-your-feet love that conquers all. She liked him too much to notice anything awry—and nobody told her otherwise. Preferences need no inferences.
In 1996, George Loewenstein, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, enumerated the effects that such “visceral influences” could have on our behavior. “Success, in many professions, is achieved through a skillful manipulation of visceral factors,” he wrote. “Automobile salespersons, realtors, and other professionals who use ‘high pressure’ sales tactics, for example, are skillful manipulators of emotions. Con men are likewise expert at rapidly invoking greed, pity, and other emotions that can eclipse deliberation and produce an override of normal behavioral restraints. Cults and cult-like groups such as ‘EST’ use food deprivation, forced incontinence, and various forms of social pressure in their efforts to recruit new members,” he continued. “In all of these cases there is a strong emphasis on the importance of immediate action—presumably because influence peddlers recognize that visceral factors tend to subside over time. The car or house one is considering will be ‘snapped up’ if not purchased immediately, and the one-time-only deal will expire. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for enrichment will be lost if one doesn’t entrust one’s bank card to the con artist, and there is an unexplained urgency to the insistence that one signs up for EST in the introductory meeting rather than at home after careful deliberation.” It is the essence of the play: the heat of emotion, as divorced as possible from the cool rationality of time, reason, and deliberation.
At the end of his life, Zajonc concluded that feeling almost always came first. Emotion was, simply, a more powerful force than logic. If you measured it for brute strength, it would be the ton-lifting muscle man to cold cognition’s svelte and toned but not quite record-breaking physique. It would be the reason a young victim of human trafficking would have countless resources devoted to her cause with nary a question. For who questions a child who has been emotionally wrecked?
* * *
Samantha Lyndell Azzopardi was born in 1988 to a middle-class couple, Bruce Azzopardi and Joan Marie Campbell. Sammy to her friends, she grew up with her mother and brother, Gregory, in Campbelltown, New South Wales, just outside of Sydney, Australia. From her days at Mount Annan High School to a job waiting tables at Pancakes on the Rocks, a welcoming Campbelltown restaurant with wood floors, airy booths, and cheerful orange walls where she worked for four or five months, she was seen as “a lovely girl,” but one “who had issues.”
In the late summer of 2013, Sammy decided to visit her mother’s ex, Joe Brennan, in Clonmel, a small town some 175 kilometers southwest of Dublin, along the banks of the River Suir. It wasn’t much, but it was the largest borough in County Tipperary. For three weeks, she’d lounged about, enjoying a summer break away from it all. Then, abruptly, she left. Joe had done nothing to provoke her, as far as he could tell, but then again Sammy had always been prone to erratic behavior. He wasn’t worried. She pulled this kind of thing all the time.
It came as a surprise—not a shock so much as a reminder that he should have been more vigilant, should have guessed something like this was coming—when he saw the news that November afternoon. That photograph. That poor lost girl. The horrifying story of human trafficking. That was Sammy. Brennan picked up the phone to call the police.
With the help of Brennan’s tip and Interpol, the story of the GPO girl fell apart. Azzopardi had, in her twenty-five years—not fifteen, not even close—acquired over forty aliases. Emily Peet. Lindsay Coughlin. Dakota Johnson. Georgia McAuliffe. Emily-Ellen Sheahan. Emily Sciberas. Her criminal history dated back to her teens.
Was she Samantha? the police confronted her. She wouldn’t speak. As more evidence poured in, she started communicating with short notes—in English. But her steadfast refusal to let the ruse go entirely prompted a second psychological evaluation. The girl might not be who she said, but she did not seem mentally all there.
But she was. Cleared for travel, Sammy was returned to Australia, her native country, with a firm injunction to stay away from Ireland. Her deception, said Justice George Birmingham as the decision came down, had come “as a shock to everybody and as a surprise.”
How had it happened? Azzopardi instinctively knew how to get emotions going to the point where nothing else mattered: when it came to t
he play, she was brilliant. Her pictures had told a story. And what a story. A devastating one, and one that no sane person would ever lie about. Who makes up a history of human sex trafficking? What kind of person do you need to be?
* * *
Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms—the Lascaux cave paintings may date as far back as 1700 BCE—to tribal song and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation and city to city, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world and, as well, enjoying it. And no matter how storytelling formats may change, the stories they convey never get old.
Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them (both liking them and hating them). They are shared knowledge, shared legend, shared history, and, in a sense, shared future. Stories are meant to entertain and educate, to pass the time and record it. They are so natural that we don’t notice how much they permeate our lives. And we pay little attention when yet another one catches our eye or ear. After all, stories are on our side. No matter the format, they are an ever-present form of entertainment.
That’s precisely why they are such a powerful tool of deception, and so vital when it comes to the play. When we’re immersed in a story, we let down our guard. We focus in a way we wouldn’t if someone were just trying to catch us with a random phrase or picture or interaction. And in those moments of fully immersed attention, we may absorb things under the radar, so to speak, that would normally either pass us by or put us on high alert. We may even find ourselves, later, thinking that some idea or concept is coming from within our own brilliant, fertile minds, when really it was planted there by the story we just heard or read.
Feeling is first. And the best way to activate strong feeling is simple: you tell a compelling story. The play begins, first and foremost, with that oldest of human endeavors, a dashing good yarn. Story is the quickest path to emotion. “He has a secret,” after all, makes for a far more intriguing proposition than “He has a bicycle.”