Planet Money had a great piece yesterday on a third-grader’s cake-based confidence game:
“Even, at a certain point, I believed in the cake, even though I’d made it up. Because I just imagined the hero’s welcome I was going to receive when they wheeled this Technicolor, baked colossus into the schoolyard, and how incredible it was going to be,” Bearman says. “So there was this mutually reinforcing psychology: We all just bought into the idea of this cake.”
