The success of con artists actually reveals something positive about human nature

Frank Masi/Warner Bros.

You probably wouldn't feel so silly if one of the con artists of "Focus," played by Will Smith or Margot Robbie, was the one who fooled you out of your money. I mean, they're charming!

For the most part, there's no chance that we'll see a con artist coming, according to psychologist Maria Konnikova, author of "The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It ... Every Time."

Admitting this is hard, because it makes us feel stupid.

But really, there are very good reasons that we're susceptible to con artists, according to Konnikova, and those reasons reveal something good about human nature.

Con artists take advantage of our natural trust for others and of our desire to assign meaning or narrative to what's happening in the world.

We've evolved as a species to trust each other, Konnikova says. "It makes a lot of survival sense if you think about it," she tells Tech Insider. "You survive better if you bond together; if you create societies; if you create communities that you can rely on that will protect one another."

That trust is what has allowed us to build social groups. And as she explains it, "societies with higher levels of generalized trust end up doing better" economically and socially. They build more effective institutions.

And for the most part, trust works for us. But it's also part of what makes us vulnerable to those willing and able to take advantage of that trust.

At the same time, con artists have to give us reasons why we should trust them, believe them, give our money to them. By analyzing us and finding a story that we might be vulnerable to, they can come up with a reason why falling in with them makes sense, or at least, it seems to until we realized we've been had.

But this fraud and deceit only works because it's rare. Plenty of people might try to get away with fooling others out of their money, but only a few have the skills and personality traits that help them get away with it, time after time.

Most of us have evolved to collaborate with each other. But as Konnikova explains in the book, the tiny percentage of people who are successful con artists may have evolved to take advantage of that trust. As she writes, "the [con] approach only works if few take advantage of it - if everyone did the same the system would self-destruct and we would all end up doing worse."