Bob Sullivan
The most dangerous hack is a brain hack. And criminals are getting very, very good at that. Meanwhile, I fear, the rest of us have spent precious little time learning to defend against brain hacks. Hopefully today’s piece will help a little. Today I’m going to discuss an important way to think about brain hacks — the amygdala hijack. And crucially, I speak with an expert who offers practical ways to calm your amygdala. Who knew crafting could be a fraud-fighting, cybersecurity tool?
Our brains were designed thousands of years ago, in large part to help us run away from large predators. Human brains haven’t really caught up to the digital age, and that fight or flight instinct is exploited by criminals constantly. There’s a warrant out for your arrest; there’s child porn on your computer; wire $2 million or you will be fired…and so on.
The key for criminals is to knock us off our game, separate us from our rational selves and shove us into our reactive selves — then tell us the only way to avoid the dinosaur chasing us is to buy a bunch of gift cards or shove money into a crypto ATM. You can tell people not to do these things in a classroom or an email a zillion times — those consumers will nod their head and maybe even remember those words in the rational part of their brains. But it won’t do a lick of good when criminals cook up just the right story at just the right time — grandma, I’m in jail! — and instinct takes over.
That’s an amygdala hijack, and it can happen to anyone.
Every time you hear the story of a terrible Internet crime and say “How could they fall for THAT? How could anyone in their right mind…” you are feeding the problem. You are an unwitting accomplice to these crimes. All this quiet superiority keeps us in the situation we find ourselves in. The implicit “they should know better” keeps us from investing in training and tools that counteract these very human attacks.
It’s all part of the trap we are falling into right now; we’re playing into the hands of organized cybercrime, and it shows. Fraud is skyrocketing at extraordinary levels, by any measure. Our grand tech tools are being used against us to feed crime gangs, foreign governments, and yes, terrorism. These crimes pay for North Korean missiles, for heck’s sake. We are counting on the most vulnerable people in our population to form the front line in this war we’re losing. Worse yet, these foot soldiers are fighting criminals armed with billions of dollars of research and even more valuable tech tools, and they have to “win” 100% of the time. We need a new strategy.
A big part of this will be understanding how brains work, and planning around that reality. To that end, I was thrilled to interview Austin Cusak recently. He’s an expert in behavioral science and a trainer at the FDIC. I’ve seen him give talks on amygdala hijacking before, so I was eager to interview him about that. You can listen to our chat at The Perfect Scam podcast — and I hope you will — but if podcasts aren’t your thing, here’s a transcript of our chat. This episode also includes an interview with a repeat romance scam victim, so we have an example to discuss. My chat with Austin begins at about 32 minutes. Don’t miss his amygdala calming techniques at the end.
Click play to listen or click this link
————-PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT——————
[00:32:07] Bob: We are in a different world, yes, but it’s a world we need to understand. We all have questions about how someone we know might become a victim of an ongoing long-term crime like this, how a person’s heart and mind can be well hijacked. And here to help us understand that much better is Austin Cusak. He’s Assistant Professor of Leadership Development at the FDIC. He’s an expert in behavioral science.
[00:32:35] Austin Cusak: A lot of us don’t realize that our brain right now is in the exact same configuration as its been for the last 35,000 years. And so our brain is very worried about snakes in tall grass, about sabretooth cats. It’s very worried about attacks from other tribes. So the brain is going to do whatever it can to be a good member of its tribe. So we are very tribal in that category. So the current configuration of our brain is not wired for social media, it is not wired for fraud from the inside. So that’s the first thing that happens to Anola is criminal is convincing her that they are part of her group, part of her tribe, a safe person first.
[00:33:29] Bob: Once on the inside, once a criminal gets a victim to feel like a member of the same team, the same tribe, then the criminal can get to work turning off the victim’s rational side.
[00:33:41] Austin Cusak: The easiest way to kind of explain why this is happening is, so Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel Prize for his work on why the brain does what it does, over 20 years of research, and he boils it down to these two types of thinking. And so I’m going share this as just like a simplistic way for us to understand a lot of these complex things. You are either doing fast thinking, or you are doing slow thinking. Neither is bad, it’s just that your brain is going to receive input and when it’s receiving input, it’s going to say, okay, am I in danger? And if you are in danger, or perceive some type of danger, it goes right to the amygdala and it says, fast thinking, I’m going to use the emotional reactions that I know. I’m going to poke through really quick this limbic region which stores our memories. Do I associate this with something bad? Yes. I run or I fight. And then there’s the slow thinking which is what we want to have engaged which is, there’s no immediate threat. I can now take my time, go out to the prefrontal cortex, think about associations, what kind of long-term planning do I associate with this? What kind of risk assessment might there be with this? So the brain’s going to go one or two ways. And so the criminal’s goal is to prevent Anola at every stage from having this slow, rational logical thinking.
[00:35:15] Bob: So criminals want to talk past the thinking part of your brain and talk right to the instinctual part.
[00:35:22] Austin Cusak: Okay, so amygdala hacking by the way that Goldman described it, is this immediately overwhelming emotional response that our brain is perceiving as a threat that is going to trigger the fight or flight and bypass our brain’s logic mechanisms. So it is, in fact, fast thinking. It’s Kahneman’s fast thinking. That is the hijack. I personally in my experiences, I expand the amygdala hijack to not just that overwhelming emotional response, but also the hijack of the slow, insidious relationship-building, trust-building, love-bombing. It is any actions that the criminal is taking to force the victim into fast, emotional thinking all the time. It is, that is the hijack. The hijack is I only want information being received through my eyes, my ears, my skin. All that information straight to the amygdala, emotional responses. That’s the hijack. That’s why we can’t see the red flags, that’s why we ignore things. That’s why the brain says, something’s fishy, but it would be too painful for me to actually explore that road. Too painful. I’m going to avoid the pain; my emotions feel this. And part of the amygdala hijack is creating lots of cognitive dissonance, which for a criminal is a very good thing. The criminal wants to create cognitive dissonance where there are these two competing thoughts in the victim’s brain because then they can provide the answer. They can have the emotions tied to that. That’s the hijack.
[00:37:19] Bob: And when our brains are hijacked, criminals can really get down to the business of grooming and financial manipulation. It is so hard after the fact to talk about some of these stories, to compress 18-months of manipulation into a few minutes of a podcast. Even the language we’re using is rational, and we’re talking about irrational things. It’s really important to understand that all of us, under the right circumstances, say and do things based on purely emotional or instinctual responses.
[00:37:51] Austin Cusak: I tried to talk with even some of my neighbors about this and her story, and I was very disappointed in their responses to it. Well she should have known better. So it really does, like we, we tend to very quickly move into that victim attribution or the attribution bias, like we should all know better. Now that scam and how that went down, it was kind the same playbook that they used, is that they saw the opportunity, it wasn’t an immediate, I’m going to ask for money, it was a slow, them impersonating someone. They did the same thing. But she was very–, she was wary, she didn’t send them money, but the tactics didn’t change that they, the brain still needs that stability. The brain still hopes that it’s going to happen someday. So when I heard the second story, like on first blush you hear that it happened to her a second time, and the first thing that we think of is, she should have known better. It’s that attribution bias. But then when you hear her explanation of it, and how that started to go down, and how they did it, you’re like, wow these, these people and whoever is creating these textbooks that they’re following, they’re very good. Like they are very good at what they’re doing, and think of it kind of like a car salesman, and I don’t mean to demean car salesmen, but there was, there was a time where I had a friend that was going to get a car, and they were like, ah, I’m going to win this negotiation. I’m going to talk them down, and in my head, I was like, wait a second. So you’re not a negotiator, you don’t have experience doing negotiations, and you’re going to go up against someone that does this all day, every day, and you think that you’re going to like conquer them? This is you against them. This is their job. This is the full-time thing that they do day in and day out every year making small tweaks, making minor things. That’s what these criminals do. They are masters at manipulating, they are honing their craft, they are making little tweaks here and there, so when she is reaching out, right, so this is, the brain needs closure. So that’s part of it is that she has this terrible thing happen to her, and our brains are wired to seek closure.
[00:40:13] Bob: While it might be hard to understand why Anola suffered a second romance scam, in some ways the first time set her up for the second. Remember she reached out in an attempt to warn a person she thought was a victim too. The man’s image was being used as a lure by criminals.
[00:40:29] Austin Cusak: That second criminal is looking at this as, she’s already in this very heightened emotional state. It is very easy for me to now trigger her fast thinking once again by pretending to be the person that she really hopes me to be, because she’s trying to do the right thing and I can take advantage of that.
[00:40:53] Bob: So in some ways, the fact that she was already a victim made her more likely to be a victim again?
[00:41:00] Austin Cusak: I don’t know if that’s every case. I’m sure that there is probably some research that has been done on that. I would say from my understanding of just behavioral science in general, yes, absolutely. Especially if she’s been in that state of fast thinking for a very long time, she does not yet have closure, she has not yet processed everything that has happened for her. The brain is going to reach and stretch, and want to have, ’cause she would still be in the state of cognitive dissonance, I’m assuming, in that moment; where I’ve got these two competing ideas, I need an answer. And that gives the criminal a very good opportunity to start to control that narrative, provide those answers, lead that person where they want it to be.
[00:41:51] Bob: And there is another powerful tool criminals use, they’re very good at appearing to have very intimate conversations.
[00:41:59] Austin Cusak: We’re looking at criminals that are very masterful at using cognitive empathy. They’re not feeling these emotions, but there is a thing called the dark impact where you can use empathy to very much manipulate other people. I would say that a lot of the tactics of dark empathy is exactly what the cult leaders are using to manipulate, to keep manipulation, and they get very good at it.
[00:42:25] Bob: Dark empathy is a new term to me.
[00:42:27] Austin Cusak: The dark empathy?
[00:42:28] Bob: Yeah.
[00:42:29] Austin Cusak: There, there’s quite a bit of research on it that you can kind of dig in in the leadership realm, and this is why I mentioned this because it’s going back to leadership development. When we are trying to develop leaders, sometimes, and this does not happen very often, but sometimes we do come across someone who is a textbook narcissist. And I don’t mean that in kind of the, ah, they’re narcissistic. I mean that they would top off if they took an assessment for narcissism. They are drawn to tactics of leadership, because at its core, a tactic of leadership is to positively influence others towards a common goal. I can remove that positively and just influence others towards a common goal. And so the people that want to manipulate, the people who want power, find that by studying leadership, by studying how to use cognitive empathy, by studying active listening, they study those same tactics which they can then use to move upward. They can then use to shift others’ behaviors. And that’s essentially what she ran up against.
[00:43:35] Bob: Meanwhile, the victims are in the throes of a crime and what feels like a very real romance. The end is an incredibly painful moment, so is telling people about what happened. Criminals use that to their advantage too.
[00:43:50] Austin Cusak: And so just like with a lot of people not reporting these things, or not talking about these things, is because we fear that we will experience more pain of rejection, pain of betrayal if we openly talked about these types of things with people. So we avoid that pain, and that is a normal thing, it’s just kind of a crappy thing, especially in regards to this. The criminals know this. They know that we are going to avoid those feelings of embarrassment because our, again, 35,000-year-old brain says, if I show myself to be a weak link, if I show myself to be someone who can’t be trusted by this group, I might get kicked out of the tribe, then I’m dead. So this is a survival tactic that the brain is going to constantly push is I must hide these things because this could lead to a problem with the tribe, but also, I’m going to avoid this because I know that this will experience, like I will feel pain if I go down this road. And so as we start to kind of approach that pathway, like that physical pathway, the brain’s like, nope, nope, I’ll do it another day.
[00:45:07] Bob: I don’t think we talk enough about the avoid, pain avoidance element to this, because it is very painful that moment when you realize, my money’s gone forever. That’s a very painful recognition.
[00:45:17] Austin Cusak: I think the threat of betrayal of the whole thing not being real. As a personal thing, I actually had a conversation with someone very close to me who was in a religion, and some stuff came out about the religion that kind of debunked some of the founding tenets of the religion, and they stayed in it. And I was asking them, why? Why stay in it? And it was understandable and it was very hard for me to listen to them because they’re much older, and they said, my entire life I believed this. My entire life. It’s part of my identity, it’s my community. If you took this away from me, it would break me.
[0046:03] Bob: Austin really wanted to drive home a point about these powerful tactics that criminals use. Some of them are used in traditional persuasion. He already mentioned sales tactics, but you might find some of these ideas in leadership training or management training which is part of Austin’s job at FDIC.
[00:46:21] Austin Cusak: I may be a very unpopular person for saying this, Bob, but a lot of the leadership tactics that we use is exactly what the criminals use. They use the same tactics but they use it for nefarious purposes. But influencing people, the tactics, the way the brain works, it’s the same. And so in, in some cases it is us saying, these are the things that we’re going to practice so that you can positively influence. And at the same time it is you need to be aware that these people are doing these things to you so that you can actually counter them, so that you can stop them, so that you can be on the lookout for. So in that world of leadership development, there is a surprising amount of crossover in terms of both helping people and manipulating and avoiding manipulation.
[00:47:14] Bob: So there are light and dark ways to use behavioral science, right?
[00:47:18] Austin Cusak: Cialdini has his book “Influence” and his book “Pre-Suasion,” and I’m going to throw out the disclaimer that things that I say are not representative of my agency. These are my own opinions, but I do want to point out that Cialdini has done a lot of great research on this subject, specifically on influence. And he even calls it out in his books about like the tactic is the same. You can use this. It is the knife that you can use to carve something beautiful or stab someone in the back, but the brain’s going to receive it the same way.
[00:47:53] Bob: It did strike me talking with Anola that the criminals did more than just appeal to her emotions, however. Remember, they showed her an account that allegedly had $4 million in it, so they were working to counter any skepticism she might have had.
[00:48:08] Bob: So it seems to me like they, they know how to play in the rational brain space as well.
[00:48:14] Austin Cusak: Yes, so, so that is, that is part of the ethos, pathos, and logos that has been used on us since Aristotle perfected by Plato, so we’re talking what 300 and like 48 BC that we had these three compelling means of persuasion. 3–, 347BC where it is essentially what is going to be the most compelling for you? Am I going to make an appeal to character, lead with an appeal to emotion and then follow it with just enough logic to make it plausible. Those three things, ethos, pathos, and logos, is the core of marketing, like all marketing is based on that. You see a car commercial and it is a basketball player who’s famous driving the car. That’s an appeal to character. So the use of logic, the use of data to reinforce is very compelling. But that is the answer to the cognitive bias. If it’s plausible enough, if it’s data and it’s plausible enough, or if they say, look, I have these bank accounts, why would I need your money? It’s plausible enough to answer and remove the cognitive bias. And that is the insidiousness of this entire thing is that I put like, I, the criminal, am putting my victim into fast thinking. They’re making emotional decisions. The second that they start to have this, and I can feel them starting to pull away, I reinforce it with lots of love, lots of dopamine. When they start to question it, I give just enough data, just enough of a logical response to, to basically shift away from these two competing ideas so they can only hold onto this one idea. I use time pressure, I use empathy, I, right, like I reinforce these things. And then, this is the thing that is really just err, is that they just inspire the shared vision, and then they reinforce it with this is our future together. This is the compelling image. This is the dream of what’s possible with us if this happens. This is the long-term interest. You are the only one that can do this. And they paint this big, shared aspiration.
[00:50:39] Bob: Feeling like you’re on the same team with that shared vision is also a behavioral trick that well-trained criminals employ.
[00:50:47] Austin Cusak: And so when you’re in alignment with each other, the principle of this is a psychological principle called homophily. And homophily is this idea that we really gravitate towards people who like the same things we like, who we perceive are part of the same group. So a great example of this, I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was 8 during the Satanic panic, where we had to hide it from my mom when me and my two older brothers did this. So if I meet somebody and they also play D&D, I instantly like them. They could be a terrible human being, but I’m now giving them the benefit of the doubt because they love a thing that I love, so therefore, they can’t be that bad. And that is that concept of homophily. So Pedro did that very well. And also, what the scammers did, and like she said, I am suspicious, right. So the cognitive processes are happening, he didn’t back out at that moment, he kept going. Even multiple times when in that relationship when she called him out on things, he weathered those storms. He talked her down. He convinced her otherwise. He got outraged. He threatened to walk. And that is really hard for a couple of reasons. One is because we crave that dopamine, we crave that oxytocin, and the threat of that being yanked away very suddenly, that’s going to hurt. And the brain is going to avoid pain. And this is one of the things that we don’t necessarily recognize, is that our brain is going to process physical and mental pain the same way in the exact same area. And it wants to avoid it. So that mental pain must be avoided. The brain says, can’t have this, don’t want this.
[00:52:45] Bob: Okay, so under all this knowledge of how our brains work, and sometimes work against our own interests, what can we do to better protect ourselves from an amygdala hijack? For starters, we could teach ourselves to be more understanding of victims. Austin has a lot of very practical advice for helping someone who you’re worried is under the influence of a criminal.
[00:53:08] Austin Cusak: When we suspect someone is ignoring these types of red flags, when they are stuck in that amygdala hijack, they are not in control of this. They have someone who is manipulating them and the self-acceptance that they are being manipulated is going to hurt. It is going to cause a lot of pain. So the first thing that we want to do with that person is to use our own cognitive empathy, because if we’ve not been through something similar, it can be very challenging to allow our emotions or even our compassion in. So cognitive empathy is, I’m going to listen, I’m going to get very curious, I’m going to try to ask questions, I’m not going to give judgment, and then this is probably the first thing that I would say. Approaching this as, I know someone that I suspect is being uh, is, is being manipulated by criminals. So this is that that’s the lens I’m looking at right now. That person needs to say, okay, before I give you any advice, I will always ask if now is a good time for me to share some advice or give you a thought. I always want to give that person the locus of control. It’s not that they’re not going to receive that information, it’s is now a good time? It’s, hey, I have a real concern that I need to talk to you about. Is now a good time for me to share that? That’s the first thing is you don’t let that person off the hook, you don’t say, oh, I’ve got some, I really want to share this. Is it okay for me to share it? Is now a good time for me to share it? Let them choose the time. We want them to have that control, ’cause oftentimes they know, they’re feeling that, and there’s that initial fear, the cortisol is spiking. The adrenaline starts to flow because the brain now feels, I’m in trouble, I’m in danger. So when we say, is now a good time for me to share some thoughts or give you some advice… if they say no, that is amazing. Okay when can I do this then? Let them choose a time or they’ll say I’ll come back to you. They always come back. I use this tactic frequently. Sometimes it’s a day, sometimes it’s two days, the person almost always comes back to me and says, I am now ready to talk about this thing. But you don’t want to try and force the flag on them when they are in that state of emotion.
[00:55:42] Bob: Getting back out of the highly emotional state, out of the amygdala hijacking often requires something Austin calls calming the amygdala, talking with empathy can help others, but you can do that for yourself too.
[00:55:56] Austin Cusak: If you do physical movement, you can also have a mental shift with that movement, hence the beauty of going and getting coffee. I can’t tell you, Bob, I do a lot of coffee at work, and the code for, hey, can we get coffee, it’s not really a, I need coffee, or I want to spend time with you, the code is, I really need to get a sanity check from somebody, and I don’t really want to ask, ’cause that’s embarrassing. But in the act of walking to the coffee and walking back, that allows the person to share the thing and calm the amygdala. The other thing is breathing. So there’s been a lot of research that’s done on the, the 4×4, the breathe in for 4, hold for 4, release for 4, hold for 4. And then there’s also a lot of research that’s been done on what’s called the 478, which is where you breathe in for 4 seconds, you hold for 7 seconds, and then you do this exhale for 8 seconds. Now the reason why these work so well is because when you are breathing in a normal way, you are cueing and telling the amygdala, I am safe. I am not in danger. So even if that cortisol is starting to spike and the adrenaline is starting to spike and your body is going into fight or flight, you can calm it. Some people are like, ah, I don’t want to breathe. So just go for a walk. Just, just walk and then talk and then say, hey, I want to share this with you. But that’s it, is that those are the very first steps that always work because we have to get that amygdala calmed down before we can share something with them.
[00:57:45] Bob: Amygdala calming doesn’t have to begin with a conversation though.
[00:57:49] Austin Cusak: When someone is suspicious that they might be stuck in one of these things, there’s a lot of advice online, it’s oh, walk away or do this thing, or put your phone down or take breaks; that can be really hard to do. My number one recommendation when I am working with someone who is in one of these highly emotional states, is to try and do a hobby, try and do an activity that allows you to get into flow a little bit, meaning that it is requiring some effort but not too much effort. As an example, I started painting miniatures, these little miniatures that I use for my games. My wife started playing pickleball. I know that some people really like to knit, taking walks. There, there are lots of activities that you can, when you are doing that type of activity that is requiring the brain to hyperfocus on something and it’s requiring effort, but not too much effort, just the, the right amount, right, being in the zone, getting in the flow, that is giving enough space for the brain to say, I’m not in danger, I am going to shift from the fast into the slow thinking. It’s the same thing. We want to try and find ways to move the brain more into this slow, analytical thinking.
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