tagged w/ clark rockefeller
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A German man who called himself Clark Rockefeller and spun fantastic stories about himself during three decades in the United States has been convicted of kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter.A German man who called himself Clark Rockefeller and spun fantastic stories about... more
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How impostors like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust instantly - and why we're so eager to give it to them.
Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.
But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone's reliability.
Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.
"Trust is the baseline," says Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton University. "Trustworthiness is the very first thing that we decide about a person, and once we've decided, we do all kinds of elaborate gymnastics to believe in people."
According to researchers, the subtler aspects of body language or physiognomy are difficult, if not impossible, to manipulate. But what has become public about Gerhartsreiter's methods - his preppy clothes, penchant for approaching people at country clubs and society events, and modest hints at a storied lineage - matches up with a body of research that suggests just how powerful signals of common identity and status can be, and how they can override our better judgment.
And they illustrate how, though we live in an era of worry over faceless Internet predators and Web identity thieves, we can be at our most vulnerable face-to-face.
Why trust exists in the first place has been something of a puzzle for scholars of human behavior. Evolutionary biologists (and economists) have traditionally assumed that people are self-interested, concerned only with maximizing their own well-being and passing on their genes to succeeding generations. That model doesn't leave much room for trust - why would we assume that someone would act on our behalf rather than simply his own?
Yet human society would not function without trust. We loan things to friends, we take to the road assuming our fellow drivers are not suicidal, we get on airplanes piloted by people we've never seen before, and, when asked to sign something, we rarely read the fine print. If people stopped to double-check the background and references of everyone they had an interaction with, social life would slow to a standstill.How impostors like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust instantly - and why we're so... more
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BOSTON (Reuters) - A man who passed himself off as a member of New York's Rockefeller oil dynasty is really a German who conned his way into U.S. high society, federal investigators said on Friday.
The FBI said "Clark Rockefeller," who is in custody in Boston on charges of kidnapping his daughter, is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
He also used the aliases Christopher Chichester, Christopher Crowe and Charles Smith, and is being sought for questioning in the suspected murder of a California couple.
"Gerhartsreiter is at the center of the longest con I have ever seen in my professional career," Daniel Conley, District Attorney of Boston's Suffolk County, told a joint news conference with FBI agent Warren Bamford.
Gerhartsreiter's identity is emerging after a 12-day international manhunt that ended on August 2 with his arrest on charges of kidnapping his daughter. She had been in the custody of his ex-wife, a high-profile consultant in London.
The FBI said he was born in the former West Germany in 1961 and spent 27 years in the United States under various aliases.BOSTON (Reuters) - A man who passed himself off as a member of New York's Rockefeller... more
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Investigators looking into the mysterious past of a man accused of kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter in Boston are trying to determine if he was once a German exchange student to Connecticut.Investigators looking into the mysterious past of a man accused of kidnapping his... more
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The mother of a 7-year-old believed kidnapped from Boston and taken to New York by her ex-husband has issued a videotaped statement pleading for her daughter's return.The mother of a 7-year-old believed kidnapped from Boston and taken to New York by her... more
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