Journal Entry #3

One thing that stood out to me this week was discussing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Tuesday and talking about how con men get portrayed in film and media in general. It's interesting because the movie clearly wants you to root for Lawrence and Freddy even though they spend the entire runtime lying to people and taking their money. The writing does a lot of work to make that feel okay: the marks are usually wealthy, a little oblivious, or somehow deserving of getting fooled, and the cons themselves are framed as clever rather than cruel. It made me think about how differently we'd probably react if the same tactics were used on someone sympathetic instead of someone rich and gullible. The movie is really just using the same psychological tricks we've been discussing all along, authority, charm, confidence, but it dresses them up as entertainment instead of manipulation. That distinction between a "con man" and a "scammer" in pop culture seems to come down mostly to how likeable the writers decide to make the person doing the conning, not anything about what they're actually doing.

Separately, today's social engineering activity was very fun to be a part of. Nobody else in the room knew it was happening until the professor revealed it at the end, and it ended up being pretty funny because no one saw it coming except the three of us doing it, and everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy the reveal. For me, the actual challenge was figuring out how to naturally bring up a pretty personal topic in the middle of normal class discussion. That's not really something I'd normally do, so it felt forced at first, but it got me thinking about how much people are willing to share information if they already trust you. As a classmate, I already had that baseline trust built in, which made the whole thing easier than it probably should have been. It made me realize how much social engineering relies less on skill and more on just being someone people don't think to be suspicious of.

Putting the two together, I think the throughline for me this week is that likeability and trust are doing most of the heavy lifting in both fictional and real manipulation. The Scoundrels con works because we like the con men, and the classroom activity worked because I was already someone my classmate had no reason to doubt. It's a good reminder that the defense against social engineering probably isn't spotting an obviously "shady" person, since most effective manipulators don't present that way at all.