How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves | Hacker News Reader

How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves

online.wsj.com

25 pointsjmadsen6 comments

My favorite trick is to have a salesman tell me that there is a better deal somewhere else. Anyone who says 'the offer is only good until you walk out the door!' knows that once you walk out the door you'll find something better.

Your buying <thing> once. The salesman sells <thing> every day. Whenever I'm given an exploding offer, I hear an expert in the <thing> market telling me that there is a better deal to be found.

This article about Errol Morris from a few years ago includes a related trick.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/errol-morris-the-...

"I wanted to tell you about his private-eye trick, which he learned from a hard-bitten partner.

It wasn’t a blackjack-, brass knuckles-type thing. “It went like this,” Morris explained. “He’d knock on a door, sometimes of someone not even connected to the case they were investigating. He’d flip open his wallet, show his badge and say, ‘I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.’

“And more often than not the guy starts bawling like an infant, ‘How did you find out?’” And then disgorges some shameful criminal secret no one would ever have known about otherwise."

Great article; but I've never been convinced by the authenticity of the King Solomon story.

> "Fetch me a sword," Solomon said. "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other." One woman embraced his solution. But the other begged Solomon not to hurt the baby and give it to her rival instead. Solomon promptly ruled in her favor, figuring that the real mother would rather give up her child than see it die.

The objective of the (dishonest) woman is to get the (living) baby. It seems inhuman for a person, especially someone who wants a baby sufficiently to be dishonest, to "embrace" the baby being killed.

Not to mention the unfortunate implication that chopping a baby in half with a sword was a credible threat from Wise King Solomon.

The guilty often fall back to the thinking of, "If I can't have it, then nobody can."

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