 second part of the book, we talk about four hooks, which are aspects or features or qualities of what we're shown that we find especially attractive. The first one is consistency. Again, we can go back to the Madoff story for this. We're attracted to symmetrical patterns, smooth lines, basically the absence of randomness, noise, anything. It's almost like a fundamental property of the visual system. We recognize objects by using properties like symmetry and smoothness and curves and so on. It turns out when people show us things that look like that or give us data that conforms to those patterns, we tend to believe them more. What Madoff did was it's often said that Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme, and that's true, but it was really a new form of Ponzi scheme. The original Ponzi scheme promised people 50% back in six months, 50% return, not just 50% back, 150% back essentially in six months in the 1920s. By the way, Charles Ponzi was not the original Ponzi schemeer. People had tried similar things before, but he was the first one to be so successful that he got the naming rights. Madoff came along like he did something a little different. He did not promise anyone anything. He said, here's by track record, people do well. If you looked at the statements people got in the mail and so on, every year they gained between 8% and 12% in their accounts. They never even gained less than 7%. There might have been one year when it went down to 7% and the financial journalist Diana Enriquez, who wrote the best book about Bernie Madoff, told us that customers were very upset when it went down to 7%. Bernie, yeah, exactly. He kept it in the 8% to 12% band, which is not unrealistic for the long run average. If you invest in the stock market for 30 years, you might be up 10% per year on average by the end, but there will be some negative 20% years and some positive 30% years and some close to zero percent years. Too much consistency. People liked that. First of all, there were no losses. Second of all, it was just a smooth upward trend. It's a beautiful look for your bank account and there was nothing to worry about. Consistency is one of the main hooks that people use, another one which is, I think, equally valuable as familiarity. Repetition, because of the way memory works, makes us more likely to remember things but also believe that they're true. This is sometimes called the illusory truth effect. You take a statement which has no truth value at all, but just say it enough times and it starts to sound true. I've experienced this myself. I've sometimes felt like there's a piece of political propaganda, which I recognize as propaganda the first time, but like the fifth time I hear it, it seems like it might be true. It's hard to describe the feeling, but it feels different from the first time you heard it. Once something's in the environment, once it's common, once it's familiar to us, we become more accepting of it. There are lots of ways this can work. Familiarity can be based on similarity to things you already know. For example, there's this phenomenon called ghost candidates where political parties will run candidates with the same last name as an existing candidate that they want to siphon votes off from because if you voted for Rodriguez last time, maybe you'll vote for Rodriguez again this time and not notice there are two Rodriguez's on the ballot and you voted for the wrong Rodriguez, that's actually happened. If elections are close, you only need to siphon a small percentage of votes off with a third party candidate to maybe tip the balance. That's just a very simple familiarity hack, basically. It wouldn't work if you ran someone with a totally different name from Rodriguez, but if you find someone with that same name, then you might be able to do something with it. The last two are precision and potency. Precision is just our attraction to precise claims, concrete claims, as opposed to vague approximations. This happens, I wouldn't say everyone uses this, but when someone does tell you that you're going to get some very precise quantity of improvement or something like that, and when you do something, you should worry because almost everything is variable in life. It's not the case that everybody recovers from a disease in exactly the same number of days. There's huge variability around there. It's not the case that everybody responds to a medication the same way. The more precision people put in their pitches, unless it's some kind of technical engineering thing and you're already an expert or something like that and you understand what those numbers mean, the more you should be on guard. Potency is our desire to see big effects from small causes. I think I mentioned this earlier. This is the basis for ideas like a lot of fraudulent medical scams. You don't need surgery. You can just have some simple complementary medicine procedure will solve your cancer. You don't need surgery, chemo, radiation, all that complicated bad stuff. There's something much simpler that can do much more. In the realm of psychology and social science, there's a vogue lately for the idea that very simple interventions like having students do a one-hour exercise at the beginning of college will have a dramatic effect on the grades they get for the next three or four years. Often when you dig into this kind of research, you see that there's one very small study that found this and then we get back to the problem we were talking about earlier. Has anyone else replicated that? Does it work at any other colleges? Does it work when any other researchers administer the same thing? All of these things, consistency, familiarity, precision, and potency, they draw us in and get us on the hook in the first place. Then once our attention has gotten, we can perhaps be sold. That's why we have to be wary of those ideas and tend to ask questions like, why does this sound familiar? Why have you seen something like this before and so on? Recognizing the patterns of when these things happen, that's important.