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.

In 2022, two Jimmy John's employees in Missouri were accused of stealing more than $100,000. Also in 2022, a Yale School of Medicine administrator was sentenced to 9 years in prison for stealing $40 million dollars. In both cases, the theft relied on gaming the systems that were in place to monitor transactions. In every domain from sales to finance to science, cheaters inevitably exploit loopholes and weaknesses. And in most of those domains, leaders and administrators rely on training and education to prevent fraud. Often, though, leaders don't think enough about the costs and benefits of fraud prevention or the effectiveness of training programs. In this presentation, I discuss why it is impossible to prevent all fraud, what we should do to evaluate whether the costs of fraud prevent outweigh the benefits. Often, thinking like a scammer can help us put up roadblocks to fraud without creating a culture of resentment and distrust among our co-workers and employees.

If your message is vivid and memorable, your customers will see and remember it, right? Not necessarily. In this talk, Dan Simons, creator of the famous "invisible gorilla" psychology experiment, uses real-world stories and startling demonstrations to show how we all miss much more of what goes on around us than we realize. People won’t notice the gorilla in the room just because we think it’s obvious. By better understanding the gap between how we think we pay attention and remember and how we really pay attention and remember you will gain new insights into how your customer's mind works, allowing you to craft a more persuasive and compelling message. 

One of the greatest obstacles to effective leadership is faulty perception. Because of the way our minds are built, we often don't see the world as it really is. Instead, we see what we expect to see and believe what we want to believe, regardless of the evidence. In this talk, Dan Simons, creator of the famous "invisible gorilla" psychology experiment, reveals how common misconceptions about the mind can undermine our ability to lead. With real-world stories, personal anecdotes, and clever experiments, Simons leads the audience to question their assumptions about how they think and to see themselves—and those around them—as they really are. 

Everyone involved in healthcare makes high-stakes decisions. One key to effective decision-making is knowing when to trust your intuition and "go with your gut," and when to take a step back and think twice before choosing a course of action. In this talk, Dan Simons, creator of the famous "invisible gorilla" psychology experiment, shows how our decisions are often clouded by our intuitive ideas about how the mind works. With entertaining examples and surprising scientific studies, Simons will leave audience members with a deeper appreciation of how we all really think, and how to make better decisions in their own lives.