Fool Proof by Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
The Psychology of Being Duped
There are few experiences more emotionally painful than that of being suckered, of willingly offering your trust, only to get betrayed and have the other party profit at your expense. Suckerdom is a uniquely powerful experience because it combines two emotions that are already powerful in their own right. One of these emotions is regret, an emotion which is hard to process and which frequently causes over-correction; regret is so unpleasant that people are often willing to forgo usable information or refuse to make decisions to avoid feeling it. The other emotion is social humiliation, a stressful experience that invokes a similar brain response as literal physical violence.
People are wary of suckerdom and generally avoid situations where suckerdom appears likely, even if the material costs of being wrong are minimal and even if no one else would be around to learn about the foolish mistake. The fear of suckerdom is sometimes so emotionally powerful that it overrules all other considerations, essentially acting like a phobia.
When being duped, the intial emotional response is moral outrage towards the operator. However, most real-life sucker stories do not end with retaliation, but instead with the victim cooling off. Most bad deals in life don’t fit the narrow mold of a scam, so they are open to alternative interpretations. To save face and to reduce pain, victims often convince themselves that the outcome wasn’t as bad as it really was, that their participation was more forced than it really was, that they may still end up vindicated, or that the whole experience was a worthwhile lesson. Skilled manipulators know this tendency and know that it can lead people to accept extremely unfair treatment.
Despite suckerdom being so painful, people are generally unsympathetic to other scam victims. Betrayals and disappointments are always more obvious in hindsight. People have a known bias for assuming by default that the world is fair and that other people’s bad fates are self-inflicted.
The social norms surrounding suckerdom differ by gender. Men are less trusting in general and are culturally held to higher standards of vigilance. Getting suckered is rarer for men, but it tends to be more humiliating, even downright emasculating, when it occurs. In contrast, women face cultural pressures to be people-pleasers, which makes them more likely to make concessions in negotiations or to try resolving conflicts through appeasement. This leads to women falling more often for scams, which leads to a stereotype of women being gullible, which leads to salespeople of all stripes targeting women more aggressively, which leads to women falling more often for scams.
Suckerdown and Behavioral Economics
As the field of behavioral economics has repeatedly shown, people are not always selfish rational agents. Even in contexts where selfishness is the best strategy, people still appear to have an instinctive drive to cooperate and to be seen as cooperative. However, when social trust is betrayed, when some people make themselves vulnerable in the name of cooperation while other people defect by free-riding or exploiting, cooperators become furious. Wronged cooperators are willing to go to extreme lengths to punish defectors, even at the expense of their own individual interests.
People are highly perceptive to social norms and to relative standing. In many group environments, once defection establishes itself as a strategy, it leads to a spiral of increasing distrust and selfishness, leaving everyone worse off in the long run. However, social pressure can also run the other way; the presence of people who steadfastly continue cooperating despite the risk of betrayals often gives other people more courage to do the same.
From a purely economic standpoint, litigators spend too much money to recover damages, societies over-police petty frauds relative to big ones, and organizations guard benefits behind excessive amounts of bureaucracy. The reasons for these phenomena are social rather than economic.
Suckerdom and Social Power
The fear of suckerdom is intertwined with power dynamics. In a successful scam, the operator gains resources and social status while the victim loses them, which puts the victim through the painful experience of a demotion. People are much more sensitive to scams from people of lower or equal social rank than from the people above them. When trickery is top-down, it does not change the social hierarchy, it can be shrugged off as a normal exercise of power, and the decision to cooperate may have been at least partially forced. However, when trickery is bottom-up, falling for it is a completely self-inflicted mistake that subverts the social hierarchy. Getting fooled from below is especially painful because it often amounts to being fooled by a fool.
Due to this asymmetry, underclasses in society are commonly associated with scams and are widely viewed with suspicion. Low-ranking social groups are regularly viewed both as dysfunctional fools and as cunning tricksters, with the narrative switching depending on what is convenient. Whether it’s children seeking to get attention or leniency, students seeking to cheat for grades, low-ranking employees seeking to steal from their employers, women seeking to seduce their way to the top, or minority ethnic groups seeking to game the government welfare system, people normally viewed as incompetent can suddenly be viewed as threatening. Even if the cons are small, they still pose a symbolic threat to the hierarchy and to the social order. People in positions of power typically respond to sucker threats by increasing surveillance and verification, which makes the community more authoritarian and bureaucratic while entrenching the hierarchy even further.
Bottom-up sucker threats are a near-constant feature of right-wing political rhetoric. In the usual narrative, some undeserving group is tricking society into giving it money, jobs, social status, sex, or special favors, usually using techniques or sob stories not available to ordinary people. The left contains gullible fools who are falling for the scam, but the right sees the scam for what it is and promises the necessary crackdowns to restore fairness. People from underclasses regularly deal with the invisible handicap of being distrusted, which makes it hard for them to succeed through official channels and helps perpetuate their underclass status.
If sucker threats go too far, organizations can get so wrapped up in con-proofing themselves that they become bad at their original function. For instance, the general public believes the government should do more for the poor, but it also hates government welfare programs due to the possibility of fraud. When people make charitable contributions voluntarily, they usually prefer highly specific aid that is less likely to be abused (for instance, food instead of money), even though such systems usually end up logistically inefficient and hard to scale. The public also usually prioritizes beneficiaries based on perceived innocence, even though that’s usually not where the material need is greatest.
Managing the Fear
From a purely social perspective, it pays to be vigilant. Warning others about scams or declaring mistrust towards others makes the speaker look savvy and makes the listeners feel gullible, elevating the speaker’s social power. However, hardline suckerdom avoidance is not a good strategy for navigating life since it causes extreme risk aversion and leads to missed opportunities. People who trust and get burned are more likely to change their behavior than people who don’t trust and quietly miss out, so the end result is that most people are less trusting than they should be.
Governments increasingly recognize that, far from being a utopia of justice, a world that allows unbounded liability or retaliation for broken promises is a world in which strangers will be too scared to deal with one another. Modern incorporation law, contract law, and bankruptcy law are all designed to cap the revenge that a furious sucker can inflict on a hustler, even though this superficially feels unjust. The occasional bad deal is part of the cost of doing business and a risk that no amount of vigilance can fully avoid.
The fear of being a sucker or a try-hard tends to peak around adolescence, the phase of life where social status anxiety is highest, then decline later in life. More mature thinkers learn to put the fear of suckerdom in its rightful place, not as an unarticulated and overpowering emotion, but rather as just one consideration among many.