Major fraudsters often genuinely believed their own false narratives

Evidence

While true crime narratives often frame these perpetrators as miscreants attempting to dupe the public, many of the fraudsters also conned themselves. Young millennial entrepreneurs like Holmes fell prey to harmful levels of magical thinking, which writer Amanda Montell defines succinctly as “the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect external events.” Holmes operated as if everything would somehow work out despite the repeated failure of Theranos’s core technology. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 571

Categorization

• DEFINE: Amanda Montell’s concise definition of magical thinking — ‘belief that internal thoughts can affect external events’ — is the load-bearing concept here.