Almost everyone knows to ignore emails from a Nigerian prince promising vast fortunes and to hide from the people who have been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty. The obviousness of scams like those leads to the mistaken belief that only extremely gullible, dim-witted, or exceptionally naive people get scammed. This misconception can lead to victim blaming and inefficient fraud-prevent training. In reality, even the best and brightest among us can be taken in when we're the target. To better stop fraud and deception, we need to examine why frauds work. To do that, we need to better understand why, when, and how the same cognitive tendencies that serve us well most of the time can be hijacked to deceive us. In this presentation, I describe how and why scams work and what you can do to become Nobody's Fool.

How can we cope with information overload? With more data coming at us from more sources than ever, it’s more likely than ever that we will miss critical information when making crucial decisions. In this talk Christopher Chabris, creator of the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment that reveals how much we fail to notice, explains why we miss so much and uses compelling research studies and real-world stories from finance, medicine, politics, science, and even the world of art forgery, to provide ideas and strategies to help us all see what we’re missing. 

When the comedian Henny Youngman was asked "How's your wife?" he answered "Compared to what?" Every decision we make, no matter what kind, involves a comparison of options. Or at least it should. But sometimes we don't consider options, don't consider the right options, or don’t even realize that options exist. In this talk behavioral scientist Christopher Chabris, creator of the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment, uses entertaining real-world examples to explain why we often fail to make the right comparisons and show how reminding ourselves to ask "compared to what?" can improve our decision-making. 

Everyone who is part of an organization—a business, a nonprofit, a condo board—has experienced the useless meetings, dysfunctional committees, buck-passing, and other pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. In this talk cognitive psychologist Christopher Chabris explains the latest science that shows how and why some teams are smarter than others—why some groups solve more problems and get more done in less time—and suggests how you can apply the lessons of this research to improving the teams you participate in or lead.