Join fellow scientific skeptics and their guests at the O4SR Annual Meeting for a talk by Loren Pankratz, Ph.D. This talk is free and open to the public.
Fully developed con games can be found in the literature of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Pankratz will review the specific historical forces in which they evolved. More importantly, con games developed from the social interactions between beggars and thieves, which resulted in benefits for both. Then we identify some of the authors of the 19th century who brought con games to our awareness by exposing the tricks and traps that continue to fool the best of us.
Loren Pankratz, Ph.D. is a retired consultation psychologist for the Portland Veterans Medical Center and professor at Oregon Health Sciences University specializing medical and psychiatric syndromes, especially those related to deception in the medical setting. He has written and lectured on a wide variety of topics such as dancing manias, spiritualism, syndromes of the imagination, Greek oracles, ghosts, plagues and the Black Death, moral panics, con-games, self-deception, faith healing, self-surgery, quackery, and renaissance science. His latest book is Mysteries and Secrets Revealed. His previous book, Patients Who Deceive, released in 1998, became available in second edition in May 2021. He was a founding faculty member of the Skeptic’s Toolbox workshop and is a Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).
A short business meeting, including election of the Board of Directors, precedes the program.
