January 28, 2025 • 48 mins
Being gullible is a weird thing. But are you born with it? Is it learned? Can you be trusting and not gullible? Listen in to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and we're flying solo again, which means we hopefully
won't crash this joint. And this is stuff. That's right,
that's right. How are you man? You're still sick? Huh?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, I mean, and this is kind of I mean,
I don't like playing it this close, but it's kind
of fun to be a little more current with like
listener mails and updates and stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, it keeps us on the edge where we need
to be.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah. So this will be out on Tuesday, I guess.
And in real time, this is the day after the
automat Oyster stewed debacle.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I don't know if it was a debacle that turned
out to be a pretty good.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
App and Aaron Cooper already came through.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Oh good, I haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah, it's funny. I'm okay. You know, things subside in
the early afternoon, so I'm actually feeling a little better
than it was like twenty minutes ago even.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
But yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, I just I gotta go to the doctor and
just get it over with, you do.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I heard that there's a really bad neurovirus going around,
and that's gotta be what you got man going around
Mexico City, going around the world.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Oh really, yeah, Mexico City is included. This feels bacterial
diverticulitis related.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh that's true. I forgot you got that. Yeah, well,
there's still a neurovirus going around, so don't catch that too.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I'll try, but I'm hanging in there. I am working
on less than three hundred calories a day for five
days now, so I am a shell of a human.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
You're gonna look lean and mean, have you been doing
push ups?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
I can't do one push up right now, there's no way.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Well, Chuck, I guess it's entirely possible since I haven't
seen you, I've just you know, been talking to you. Yeah,
while we record, I have no idea whether you're actually
sick or not. And it's entirely possible that you're fooling
me right now. Oh and if you are, I would
argue that doesn't make me gullible because I generally believe
(02:05):
you're trustworthy. There's no reason to believe that you're not sick.
So really, you'd just be a shameful, dirty liar, and
I would be the hero in this situation.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
That's right. This is on gullibility and this you know,
we were just talking offline that there are I think
a hundred different ways to approach this kind of topic,
and sometimes that's like freeing, and sometimes that's really frustrating,
and I think this one was a little frustrating. Lvia
put together a great article, I think, but it's just
(02:38):
a hard one. When I pitched it to her, I
was like, you know what I feel like, especially here
in America, we're at peak gullibility as a nation, and
like I just wondered, like, is there any science of that,
or like there are people more gullible than others? And
can science be gullible? And this is what we came
up with.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, Interestingly, yes, science can be gullible. On the other hand,
you could argue that Americans aren't more gullible than usual,
that there's actually just different factors involved that make people
want to believe things. Maybe it's a it's it's weird.
I think one of the reasons why it's so hard
to wrap our head around is social psychologists are still
(03:18):
trying to wrap their head around it.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
And and you know what happens when social psychologists get
a hold of something.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Oh yeah, it's an oyster stew party.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
It's a little unsteady as they figure it out. That's right,
it's an oyster stew party. So I think it's not
it's not us, as what I'm trying to say. And you,
dear listener, if you're like, what is going on, it's
not you either. It's social psychology.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
That's right. I guess we can start by talking about
I mean, we're going to talk about a different a
lot of different people, a lot of different people that
study this kind of stuff, a lot of different studies,
some of which make more sense than others. But this guy,
Stephen green Span, is an author. He wrote a book.
He wrote the book on it, Annals of Gullibility Colon
(04:00):
Why we are duped and how to avoid it. And
one sort of important thing he does upfront is say, hey,
there's a difference between credulity and gullibility. Credulity is if
you know you'll believe something just without looking at all
the evidence, and gullibility means you have an active response
to perhaps being conn.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I take issue with us right out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I kind of think too.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I think that's a terrible distinction because I think you
can totally fall for something and be duped. Yeah, and
you be the only person who knew that. Who knows it.
You know, somebody could say something that duped you, and
they don't stop and focus to get like that that
that question of whether they duped you or not answered.
They just keep going on. But you know you've been duped.
(04:46):
You don't have to respond to a Nigerian prints email
or send somebody a bunch of Walmart cards to get
out of some random federal case that's against you. To
have been gullible, you just have to believe, and usually
in the absence of any kind of supporting evidence, and
sometimes in the presence of contradictory evidence. That's gollibility in
(05:11):
my in my understanding. Thanks You're you're believing something without
bothering to go check it out, and that to me
is the baseline of gollibility.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
I totally agree. I thought that definition was really weird,
and I'm glad both are in here though, because sometimes
it's a nice contrast. But along the lines of what
you were saying, there's a group of researchers social psychologists
from McQuary University. There can be a lot of Aussie's
in this.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
You can say that name better than that McQuary.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Oh like Ausie style, Yeah, McQuary.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Although anytime you do that you sound like Murray from
Flight to the Concord.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Murray present Alessandra k Tenise.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Maybe that's what I'm going to find it.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Much in the way you and I would, and I
think a lot of people would, which is simply the
propensity to accept a false premise in the presence of
un trustworthy clues. That's it. That's it. You don't have
to act on it.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
No, you could just believe and no one in the
world could know besides you that you believed, and you're
still gulible in that sense. The thing that I really
stood out to me that we'll talk about a lot more, though,
is you could make a really good case that people
aren't as gullible as other people think they are. And
I found that kind of reassuring. We'll talk about that later,
(06:34):
but I don't want anybody to get the impression that
we're just like, Yep, people are generally stupid, yeah, and
here's how they fall for stupid stuff now and you're
probably stupid too. That's not actually what the science of
gollibility is turned up.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
No, And there's a lot of factors, And this is
where I think Greenspan did kind of hit on something
his four factors of gullibility. Situational like if there's a
lot of if everyone else is doing it, and there's
a lot of social pre sure, like all the bros
are investing in the same cryptocurrency and it's at a
great price, and you're like, oh man, I got to
get in there. All the guys are right, you know,
everyone's in on that. So there's social pressure where you
(07:10):
can fall for something. Cognitive issues like well, as we'll
get to later with you know, our senior friends. Sometimes
there's like legit brain cognitive issues that's a different thing
than this. But this is just lacking expertise, and you know,
you can't evaluate what you're being told because you're just
not I don't want to say smart enough, you're just
(07:32):
not an expert in whatever that is.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, you're not informed enough in that particular thing.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, what else.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Personality is another one. If you're impulsive, this is a
big one, big one. If you're lowing curiosity and you're like,
I don't care, Just tell me what difference. I'm too
lazy to go figure it out myself. Uh huh, I
got better things to do than think. Or if you
have a high need for independence, And this struck me
quite a bit because if you were, if you're independence minded,
(07:59):
you don't need smarty pants, pencil neck college boys telling
you what's right or what's wrong, or what's true or
what's false. You can figure it out yourself. And those
people are actually a high risk of being duped, which
is really surprising, but if you stop and think about it,
it makes total sense. They're overconfident and that's a huge
(08:21):
factor in being gullible.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah, I totally think it makes sense, you know, because
it happened to his cousin.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Emotion can play a big factor in a lot of ways,
and we'll talk about some of those with some studies
later on, but one way is, like, let's say we're
specifically talking about being conned. If it gives you a
positive feeling, whether it's a somebody catfishing you and making
you feel loved, or you know, some sort of financial
thing that you think might provide for your long term
(08:52):
security or like, man, no one else knows about the
steal but me, I'm so smart for getting in on
the ground floor here that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Right, and as strangely ironically, almost as if he did
it on purpose, because it supports everything he wrote about.
Stephen Greenspan, the author of that book about golibility, he
finished his book and shortly afterward he was informed by
I guess his stockbroker that he had lost a bunch
of a bunch of money by investing in Bernie Madoff's contest.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Scheme with the ironies. Huh.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
So he was like, even the guy that researched this
and wrote the book on golibility can fall for it.
That's a really great little tidbit. Yeah, but I think
it also goes to show just how specific golibility is,
because I don't get the impression that Stephen Greenspan was like,
this madeoff guy is making a lot of really great
(09:44):
points and this is incredibly high risk, but I'm going
to go along with it anyway, Like he went through
a stockbroker and everything. So, yeah, there's only a certain
amount of golibility.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
It's just.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Bernie Madoff is like shorthand for fooling people, you know
what I mean, not to pick on Stephen green Span
or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Now I feel very bad for him despite his poor definition.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Right. So some other people have said, well, we really
want to show off as social psychologists, we're going to
create a gibility scale, and in fact, Alessandra to Nie
from Macquarie University, I'm not even gonna try that one.
But it's Australian for university. Sorry, Australians. There's this beer
(10:30):
called Fosters that here in America we think you drink
a lot of. And in America the ad campaign says Fosters,
it's Australian for beer.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
I love that you barely use an accent. You just
say it seriously and that gets the point across.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
It makes people pay attention.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Australian for beer.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
That's the best I can do. That's how I think
Australians talk.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Uh yeah. So this gullibility scale was self report did
basically like do you self reported, meaning do you think
others do you perceive yourself as gullible? And do you
think others perceive you as gullible? And then they you know,
they filled in with some other questions like how persuadable
are you? And stuff like that, and it actually for
(11:16):
a self reported study, which you know a lot of
those can be tough. This seemed to work out pretty
good for them, don't you think it did?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Because they backed it up. They I can't remember what
it's called, but they tested the validity. They tested the
validity of this self reporting panel and found that the
people who reported themselves or scored the highest on gullibility
on this test were more likely to click a link
(11:45):
on a phishing email than people who scored low. Right,
So it seems like a valid test. And one of
the things I went and looked at up Chuck, and
one of the questions wasn't even a question. It was
you are very persuadable, And the only option to check
was yes, Ah, what I'm kidding?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Oh man, this is so upciting.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
That's all right, You're not at one hundred percent at all.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I didn't think you would take advantage of this today.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
It was more of the joke. I wasn't trying to
take advantage of you, although I realize now that I didn't.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
It's okay. All for the show. On that scale, they
found some traits that were common among those that scored
high in gullibility. Social intelligence was one of them that'll
keep coming back over and over. Vulnerability, emotionality, which we've
talked about a little bit, a weak sense of self
which also comes up in different ways. I think you
(12:40):
found an article about how parents can wreck kids by
not giving them self confidence, right, and they'll end up gible.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, pretty much, and depending on And it doesn't even
have to be like you're such a stupid kid every day.
It can just be things like where your opinion is
not really heard or validated, or just all sorts of
little missteps that parents can make that make parenting a
lit nightmare you can carry on as an adult. And
it can make you doubt your own opinion, so you're
(13:06):
not gonna speak up. It can make you be afraid
of looking stupid, so you don't ask questions because you
don't want to seem like I don't I didn't immediately
get it, so I'm gonna look dumb if I ask
these questions. There's like it just sets you up for
being more likely to be a victim of being duped
than somebody who has a lot of confidence.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, I have a good friend who had a pretty
bad stepfather, and the abuse in this situation was exclusively
he made him feel stupid at every opportunity.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
That is so wrong, Like I should be in jail.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
He's passed on now. But it's I can't think of
any I mean, there are all kinds of things that
are worse, obviously, but something so damaging for such a
small person to do that to a child. Yeah, and
literally like oh you think so, like you know, just
that's how he was talked to it his whole life
growing up. It's awful. That is rough and he's super gullible.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Oh is he really?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
No? Actually, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Oh, you got me back there. You should just do
that to one another, like every d or too.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
One thing we should mention though, because this pops up
a couple of times and I think it's super fascinating.
Is another trait they found on the gullibility scale if
you're very gullible, was belief in paranormal activity. Yeah, just
park it right there.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
But I guess that depends on whether paranormal activity is
real or not.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
You know, well, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I mean that's described from a point of view where
you're just like that's all fake anyway. So yeah, duh.
One of the things about social intelligence that's worth pointing out.
So that's basically a package that you can have. Some
people are much better at it than others, but basically
everyone alive in a society has some degree or other
(14:51):
of this package of skills that forms social intelligence, Like
whether or not you're good at conversation, whether you are
good at effective listening, what your knowledge of like social
roles and social scripts are, and then awareness of like
what make other people tick, and then what people think
of you. And you put all this together, and if
you have like high emotional or social intelligence, you're going
(15:14):
to be able to navigate interactions with other people much
better than somebody with low intelligence. Part of that is
not getting scanned by somebody by being able to be like,
you're a scammer and I'm not going to send you
a Walmart gift card now.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, And it's a trade I think that you can't
necessarily teach, but is really beneficial to have as a human.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah. I admire people with high social intelligence because it's
not just you know, being able to spot a scammer,
it's being able to see the best in other people,
and I think to bring out the best in other
people and let them bring out the best in you.
And that's just it's maybe in another life, maybe in
the next lifetime.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Oh buddy, I think you're great. They did another study
at the University of Leicester where they found that childhood
traumas can really affect you later in life in terms
of gullibility, like any kind of bullying, death of a
family member or something like that. It leads you more
susceptible to fall for tricks later in life. And apparently
(16:16):
they say it could be because that kind of trauma
just makes it hard to trust your own judgments and
you know, I guess everyone else's intent.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
For sure, and then some people because it's actually kind
of counterintuitive if you think if you've gone through the
school of hard knocks, I think is the way that
the study put it. Yeah, you could think that they'd
come out like much more world wary and like suspicious
of people, and so they'd be less likely to fall
first game. But no, instead, like you said, they just
they question their own judgment for having gone through what
(16:47):
they went through.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
So that's terrible.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
It is, It is very terrible. Childhood is just fraught.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
You know, it really is.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
It's a wonder any of us can function in any
like real way.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Oh I know. I mean we're pretty good parents, but
I often think like, how are we messing her up?
Because I know we are in some way.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yep, I mean I can't I can't imagine, Like that's
got to just keep you up at nights sometimes if
you think about it too much. You know, I sleep
pretty good good you just wake up to throw up
every hour.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, I think, just try to limit that stuff as
a parent, Like, there's you can't be perfect. I mean,
my brother is a perfect parent, but there's only there's
only one.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Scott.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Another thing I thought was interesting, and this makes total sense,
is if you rely on your intuition a lot, you're
a lot more vulnerable, vulnerable to being duped by something,
just like you know, some people have a good gut,
and some people think they have a good gut but
do not.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yes. Another one that really stood out to me though
that this this I would not have predicted, is the
more cynical you are. Studies have found like this that
the likelier you are to be gullible or duped. And
the reason why actually makes time sense. Again, if you're cynical,
you think you've got everything figured out, like you're just
(18:05):
you think the world sucks and everybody's trying to take
advantage of you, and the government's constantly screwing you over,
and everyone's going to try to get an angle on you.
That's cynicism, right, at least in the modern sense. And
it's actually a lazy shortcut to experiencing reality because on
the one hand, you lose out an opportunity costs you
(18:27):
miss a lot of great stuff, Like you might not
make friends that you could have made because you were
suspicious of this stranger chatting you up at the outset
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, But as far.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
As gullibility goes, if somebody comes along and talks to
you in your language, they can pull one over on
you much more easily because they are tapping into your cynicism,
which again is just lazy shorthand for experiencing reality. It's
based largely on intuition and supposition and not necessarily taking
(18:58):
each experience and looking at it based on the facts.
Is a unique thing. It all has this one cast
to it that's the same, and that's just not how
the world actually works.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, and I think you know, that kind of suggests
that if there's like a country with an authoritarian leader
in place, like the simple sort of easy to understand
radical solutions that are pitched out oftentimes in those situations
are very easy to fall for if you're a gullible person,
because that itself is a mental shortcut. Well, we we
(19:32):
just got to do.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
This for sure. And then conversely too, not being cynical
requires way more brain power and thought and just participation
than being cynical does. Like you have to actually like
ask yourself like, is this true? What kind of source
(19:53):
is this coming from? I might need to go do
some research. I might need to ask people. It's just
so much easier to be like, nope, there's screw me over.
I don't even need to bother to look into that,
because you're also defending yourself at the same time from
getting taken advantage of again until somebody comes along and
is talking your language, and then you will oftentimes fall
for whatever they're saying.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, should we take a break, Yeah, all right, we'll
take a break and talk about mood right after this.
(20:47):
All right, we're back. We promise to talk a little
bit about mood because The fact is you are not
always gullible or always not gullible. Everybody could get due
to that anytime from you know, that changes from day
to day, sometimes from hour to hour, depending on a
lot of factors, like mood. If you're really really tired,
if you're super distracted, if you're upset, you may not
(21:11):
notice something that can, you know, make you fall for
a scam. Also, the same holds if you're in a
really good mood. You know, if you're just feeling great
about everything, you're like, yeah, yes to life, Yes to everything.
There was a study in nineteen thirty eight by a
researcher named Gregory Razran who found that giving a free
(21:31):
lunch made people more receptive to a political message. And
apparently that is sort of where like the sales lunch started.
Taking people out to sell them something and feeding them
you're more likely to close a deal. And I'm sure
the same thing like golf course sales. Things like the
salesperson's not out, they're beating the person in golf that
(21:52):
they're selling to. I guarantee it. I don't know how
that works, but I imagine you're letting them win and feel
good about stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, think about how good you have to be to
purposely lose at golf.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Oh, I could play bad golf on purpose and I'm not.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Really Yeah, okay, well I take that one back and
on accident. So yes. But on the contrary, if you
are an upset, if you're sad, if you're depressed, if
you're mad, if you're in a low mood, you are
actually more likely to pay attention to granular things. I
(22:28):
think it actually kind of ties into rumination. You're just
thinking about stuff. You're turned inwards. So if somebody comes
along and tries to sell you something, yeah, that makes sense,
it's going to be harder to slip it past you
because you're paying attention more than somebody who's like, yeah, whatever,
let's have another round.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Right. So overall, if you think about people who might
be goable, you might think, and you know, if you're
going to stereotype it, like people like kids, very young people,
very old people, and people that aren't very well educated obviously,
but it's not necessarily true. What There is a lot
(23:08):
of factors, one of which I mentioned earlier. You can
get you know, a lot of skewed studies about the
gullibility of someone who's older, because if you're older, you're
more likely to have a cognitive ability that's literally keeping
you from being able to determine whether something is true.
But they've also conversely found that sometimes they're a little
(23:28):
more protected because they're constantly have their children and everyone
else saying like, no, no, no, watch out for scams. They're
trying to scam you. Everyone's trying to scam you.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Right, Yeah, so it's like a self fulfilling prophecy that
they are less likely to be scammed because they're so vigilant.
That's amazing to me.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So there was this one study that kind of backed
all this up from the University of Tirana, and they
found they looked at adults sixty to ninety who handled
their own finances. They didn't have any diagnosed cognitive issues
use and they found that people who had reported being
victims of a fraud, there was nothing that really happened,
(24:10):
or there was no characteristic demographically anything like that that
made them different from anybody else. The only thing that
seemed to really kind of stick out was that they
the people who had been scammed before were low had
low conscientiousness one of the big five. They were less honest, humble,
(24:35):
which is another another kind of personality trait from a
different scale, and that from what I could see, the
honesty thing means. They explained it like, you're if you
are low on honesty, you're more likely to try something
that might be a scam because you might get rich
(24:56):
quick or something like that. You're more willing to take
a shortcut, say, than somebody who would score higher on honesty,
which you put you at greater risk. But that was
about it. There wasn't like, you know, the older you
get or the less educated you are in this group,
you're more likely to get scammed. It was some other
stuff entirely. But they found also that people who do
(25:20):
experience cognitive decline do tend to get taken advantage of more,
which is really messed up, sad, but it's true. And
as a matter of fact, they've started to some people
have started to push this idea like, if you fall
for a scam, you should immediately be tested for Alzheimer's
or dementia because there's a high correlation with getting scammed
(25:44):
as an older person and the early early developments of
cognitive decline. Yes, you got to feel terrible. I mean,
it's bad enough to feel like you're getting scammed, but
then to stop and be like, well, is this it
for me in my mind?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Yeah? Absolutely, I mean thankfully, nothing like that's ever happened
to my parents. But it's you hear the stories all
the time, and it's just you know, it's tragic and
shameful for sure. There was a study in twenty eighteen
that I thought was pretty interesting a woman named Monica
t Witty, another Aussie when we talk about like being catfish,
(26:20):
which is if I guess I threw that word out,
assuming everyone knows that that's like when you get scammed
in a sort of a romantic thing online by someone
who's pretending to be someone they're not.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Generally, we should do an episode on that sometimes because
I just don't I don't. I mean I get it,
but I don't understand like where it started or anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Yeah, let's put that down. That would be super interesting. Okay,
do you remember the Notre Dame football player?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah? I thought he was. Isn't he like the Dolphins quarterback.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Now or no?
Speaker 2 (26:48):
He?
Speaker 1 (26:49):
I don't think he's in the league anymore. He played
the NFL for a little while, but he was a
linebacker for Notre Dame that oh gotcha was famously catfished
and like, you know, smart, handsome, young athlete guy. So
it's not like just you know, the lonely loser in
the basement that falls for stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Have you heard about the lonesome loser?
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, he still keeps on trying, man, little riverman so good.
At twenty eighteen, Monica Whitty did one on sort of
catfishing but really just romance scams is what they called it,
and she said, if you fall for something like that,
you obviously will be a little more impulsive in sensation seeking.
And so if someone's building up about all these great
(27:28):
stories and these big travels, and you know, it's always
it's never just like wow, I just kind of sent
around at home like they always present themselves as offering
some new, exciting life, it seems like. But she also
found that they were more highly educated than average, and Lvia,
I think is on the money, kind of speculates that
could be, and I think it's true. When we did
(27:50):
our thing on online dating, it's generally people that are
college educated that participate in online dating a little more statistically,
But also maybe that if you're more educated. You just
think like, I'm not going to fall for countfishing. I
know all about that, and this is not that right,
over confidence, right, and then you're on that hook.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
And then another thing about being online too. The Better
Business Bureau back in twoy fifteen, I think they looked
at a I guess a bunch of their like scam
complaints that came in just to see who reported them,
and they found that people between twenty five and thirty
five were more likely to lose money on a scam
(28:31):
than older people, which is totally contrary to what people
think of when they think of people who get scammed.
And one of the explanations that they came up with is,
in part, younger people are just online more so they're
just more likely by the numbers, to have scams presented
to them, which means that they're more likely to probably
(28:52):
go for a scam than say, people who are online
less right.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
I agree with that in the old days. I think
that's changing because I've never seen a generation as phone
addicted as boomers are smart.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Oh really good?
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Oh man, they have a lot of boomers, do you
They have gen Z beat every boomer I know, just
obsessively stares at their phone and looks things up and.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, I thought they all had like flip phones that
only dial numbers.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
No, no, no, they want to show you all the
information in the moment.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, I got in the middle of dinner at a
nice restaurant. Even.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I guess I've not experienced.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
That, but I do think that that generally is true. Okay,
I just want to take a shot at boomers.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Well, then that makes it, That makes it even less
understandable that twenty five to thirty five year olds would
be more likely to be scammed. I don't know, maybe
that generation is just more trusting these days or something
like that, or I actually I got to take that back, because,
as we'll see, trusting, being trusting is not necessarily corely
with being gullible.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, which I think we'll get to in a minute
before or after the next break. But can we talk
about science, because this is one thing. When I sent
Livit the idea, I was like, I think I read
an article about scientists being gullible, and I was like, no,
not scientists. But it turns out they very much can
be because a lot of times when you are that's
(30:25):
well versed in a field, you might you might kind
of think you know it all and like, oh, no,
I know what I'm doing, and so you might be
more apt to believe a result that isn't accurate because
you think you did it the right way. Like that's
just one aspect of it.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, Another aspect is, like you said, people people in
science typically know a tremendous amount about their field, but
they can make a mistake and think that that understanding,
that depth of understanding will just apply to other fields
as well if they just don't know as much about Yeah,
and that's another way they can fall prey to it.
But also scientists like to be right as much as
(31:07):
anybody else. And you know, I don't remember what episode
we did this, and I think it was about the
the just reproducibility crisis in science papers if I remember correctly.
But just how like the scientists don't set up experiments
to disprove their hypothesis. They set them up to prove
(31:28):
their hypothesis. That's how you get published, that's how you
get celebrated. Like nobody wants to hear about you failing,
even though that's what science is meant to be. That's
a that's a part of it as well, just wanting
to be right. So if somebody comes along, it's like, yep,
you're right, let's let's uh, let's use that to explain
this other thing that's actually not true. The scientists might
(31:50):
go along with it because if it is true, then
it will prove their their hypothesis and make them very famous,
and they'll probably end up having an HBO movie made.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Well, that was probably a scientific method. Huh.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Maybe maybe, but I mean we definitely talked about papers
just being some of them just being outright fraudulent because
their experiments are set up incorrectly. It could have been
scientific method.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, or like the little student in Rushmore that faked
the results.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
I remember that part.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
You know, Max has his sort of little budding girlfriend
at the end and he says something about she won
some science award and I think she had to give
it back or something, and she said, He's like why,
she said, I faked the results. It didn't work, so
I faked it.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah. I thought that was so her line where she
tells Bill Murray that she won't dance with them, it
was a little out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Oh interesting, Yeah, I get that.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
A little harsh. I think is what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, who didn't want to dance with Bill Murray?
Speaker 2 (32:52):
I do.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
You? And Lucy Lou?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
All right, wait, Lucy Lou doesn't or does want to
dance with Bill Murray.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
No, I don't think she does. They were on Charlie's
Angels together and had some words.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Oh that's right, I remember that.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, so I doubt she's dancing with Bill. Okay, all right,
should we take a break? Wait?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I just before we go to a break, I was
saying I would like to dance with Bill Murray. Oh yeah, okay,
I just want to make sure that no one walks
away to this ad break thinking that I don't want
to dance with Bill Murray.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Yeah. I was being sort of a opposite with my
Lucy lu joke. Okay, this, you know I'm not firing
on all cylinders. I'm doing my best.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I'm not either, apparently.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
All right, we'll be right back and Josh will lead
off with a little bit on trust.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Okay, we're back, everybody. And I mentioned before that trust
is not necessarily correlated with gullibility, and I love that.
That just makes me feel good about the world again.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
You know, you can trust people and think the best
of people and still not be gullible.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah, and so we'll kind of explain why. But there
have been study after study after study that basically say, yeah,
that's actually true, Like you can have a high level
of trust, be tested for that kind of thing, and
you are not more likely to be gible. And in fact,
it seems that if you are a higher trusting person,
you're actually less likely to be gible compared to say,
(34:39):
like the cynic right, Like, there's this researcher named Toshio
Yamagishi who's considered one of the most prominent researchers in
glibility and trust out of Kaido University. I know how
to say, Hokkaido. I don't know why I had trouble
with that at first, but one of the things that
Yamagishi did in the nineteen nineth these was to tell
(35:02):
people who scored high in trusting this and other people
who scored low about the story of Bill and Chuck.
I think you should take it because Bill's got a
great story.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah. I kind of understand this, but not one hundred percent,
but I think I get it. So what he would
say is Bill, your friend. Bill stated at a hotel
for a week, he was only charged one day. Do
you think he would tell the cashier about this even
though there's like no chance, let's say there's no chance
of him getting caught later on, do you think he
would do that? And people who scored high on their
(35:34):
trustworthy score, like people who were trustworthy, they were more
likely to say that Bill would do the honest thing.
But when he added in a twist here, which is
to tell them some negative things about Bill, like by
the way, just want to let you know, Bill also
cut in line. The other day.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
He also makes his steps on feel stupid.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
He also makes his steps on feel stupid. But if
the added in a couple of nuggets like that negative
things about Bill, the people who had high trust in
people generally put a lot more weight on that additional
information than the other people did the people that were
low and trustworthiness.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Right, But the bottom line was even with positive information
like Bill litard, but he also cut in line. If
you took all of the tallies, you would see that
people who are low in trusting others and people who
are high in trusting others they had about the same scores.
So this research from yam Magishi and others shows that
(36:33):
you can trust other people and it doesn't open you
up to being taken advantage of. And that just doesn't
make any sense because just the idea of being gullible
means that you're trusting what somebody else is saying. That's
the popular conception of it. But as we've seen, really
the idea of gullibility is trusting what somebody says because
(36:55):
you either don't care enough to go figure it out yourself,
because you don't feel like thinking for yourself, because what
they're saying confirms your biased beliefs, not that you just
trust people in general. And the explanation that I saw
that really kind of drives it home for me, Chuck,
is that people who have high trust are also more discerning,
(37:21):
so they would have probably a better social intelligence than
people who don't trust as much. And that makes sense
because if you don't trust people like the cynic, you're
actually protecting yourself. You're guarding yourself. You know that you
are probably not as discerning as other people, and so
rather than get yourself into trouble time and time again,
you just keep people at arms length, you don't really
(37:42):
trust them, whereas if you are high trusting you are
better at discerning, And that either means that because you're
good at discerning, you have the freedom to trust other
people because you can be confident in your judgment of
other people and you're probably not going to be taken
advantage of. Or if you are just a trusting person
by nature, you have to have a higher discernment or
(38:05):
else you're going to be taken advantage of. Either way,
high discernment and high trust go hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, and that can be a very freeing thing. And
that's how Yamagishi sort of thought about it when he
talked about his emancipation theory, which is, if you're trusting,
you're kind of or if you're untrusting, I guess you're
kind of shackled in a way because you'll you may
just be stuck in a place because why why hire
(38:31):
a different person to do it, because they're just going
to be a scammer two and so you can get
stuck in this cycle. But if you free yourself from
that with his emancipation theory, and you break those shackles
and you start trusting people, it makes you much more
apt to make a positive change in life because you
trust somebody or something or some situation.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Yeah, because at base, you can go through life not
trusting other people, and you can make it all the
way to old age and die at pretty much the
the same age that you would have had you trusted people.
But you're again, you're missing out. There's opportunity costs to
not trusting other people that people who do trust other
people are not missing out on, and you're just not
(39:15):
connected as socially, and research after research after research shows
that social connections are like the number one predictor of
living to a healthy older age. So you're actually robbing
yourself by just not trusting other people. But again, it's
kind of understandable if you were taught that your judgment
is questionable, either through trauma, through a jerk stepdad, or whatever,
(39:37):
it's understandable. And I'm not sure if that's something that
you can learn to break out of, although I sincerely
hope it is.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Yeah, for sure, there are people that think we are
actually not as gullible as everyone thinks. There's this writer,
Hugo Mercier, who wrote a book in twenty twenty called
Not Born Yesterday. Great title for a book like that,
and he's like people are less gullible than we think,
and there are a lot of like criteria people used
(40:07):
to work out if they're if they believe something or not,
and we're better at it than we all think. We
are like a lot most people, or I guess in
his idea, most people are actually looking for well informed
or well intentioned information, or if it's a has logic
(40:28):
to it, if it's logically strong, or you know. Maybe
people are less like this, which is I'm just going
to accept something or I'm sorry, I'm not going to
accept something as a new piece of information because it's
not something that I have found to be true. He
argues that people are less like that than they say.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, and people also judge other people to be more
likely to be duped than they are more gullible than
they are. But yeah, his whole message is like, no,
we're actually as a as a group, as a species,
not all that gulible. What appears to be gullibility is
actually just somebody not caring enough to argue a point,
(41:09):
or they're accepting information but they're hanging on to it loosely. Olivia,
I thought this is awesome. She pointed out that if
you are shown like an AI generated baby peacock that
looks super cute and has huge eyes and is colorful,
and it is nothing like what a baby peacock really
looks like. If you're not like a peacock researcher or
(41:32):
your job doesn't depend on positively identifying baby peacocks, it
doesn't really matter if you think that that's what they
look like, because you're holding onto it loosely enough that
if somebody comes along and it says that's not what
baby peacocks actually look like, you're not going to like,
that's not the hill you're going to die on. You're
going to be like, oh, that's crazy what AI can do?
(41:53):
Or oh it got me, or or just be like, great,
I now know what baby peacocks look like. And that's
his point is that's not gullibility. That's just not stopping
to analyze, you know, whether it's true or not, because
it just isn't that important, right.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Then, Yeah, exactly. He also points out in the book
when it comes to like propaganda, that propaganda isn't something
that can usually really completely change someone's mind. What propaganda
is good at is taking someone who already has those
beliefs and putting them on turbo speed and reinforcing them
even like the Nazi propaganda machine. You know, he contends,
(42:31):
probably wasn't making someone anti semitic, but if you were
anti Semitic, then it really drove you down that road
at a pretty fast pace.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, because it came at your beliefs and said, yep,
go for it. Like that's what that's the official line now,
is anti semitism.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah. And also similarly, political ads don't really work.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
That's what they say.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, And that makes me wonder though, if that's just
being suspicious of the messenger because of polarization, that you're
not gonna be like, hmmm, let's hear what this opposing
political party has to say about medicare I'm really interested.
I'm gonna keep an open mind. No, it's like this
message is from the opposing party. I'm just gonna laugh
at it because it's just so full of it.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah. I mean, I think political ads are terrible and
ridiculous and so over valued, but I feel like these
days it's less like it's more just beating that drum
of like aren't you mad? Aren't you mad? Go vote?
Go vote?
Speaker 2 (43:30):
I know, man.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
The thing is, though, is this. None of this is
to say that they're like, people don't get scammed. There's
a group called the Global Anti Scam Alliance, which sounds
like a scam itself. They came up with the report,
doesn't it. They came up with a report that found
that worldwide, people lose a trillion dollars to scams every year. Man,
(43:54):
that's a lot of money. But some of these same
researchers are like, hey, there's actually some short like easy
stuff you can walk around in your head with to
use to apply to new information to protect from being
gold which is actually a word.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Let's hear it. Do you have a list?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Yeah, one of them is. The first step is to
admit that you're as susceptible to being scammed as anybody else.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Okay, yeah, just a reality check. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Well, it also puts the kibosh on being overconfident, which
again can increase your chance of being duped.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Don't make emotional decisions like we talked about, keep a
lid on impulsivity. Don't respond to like act now supplies
are running out kind of like come ons. Don't respond
to false scarcity, like remember people hoarding toilet paper. Yeah, oh, Yeah,
those are emotional decisions. You want to just say cool
and level headed. Another one is asked questions, ask for
(44:49):
more information, don't be afraid to look dumb. That's a
that's a big one. Yeah, that's a big one. And
then consider the source. Is there any supporting information? And
when you put all together, you are probably going to
come up with a good decision or understanding. And if
you're being gold by somebody that's a real word, you
(45:11):
are probably going to say, I don't believe what you're saying. You, sir,
are a cad and a scoundrel. Right, please get out
of my face before I smack you with my glove
and we.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
Have to duel. We get I'm sure anyone who works
where big companies get these, and maybe even small companies
do this. But when they send out the the test,
like the test phishing emails, and then like the next day,
you'll get an email that's like did you fall for it?
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Right?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
It's always I'm always nervous. I'm like, oh God, did
I click on that thing that you know from you know,
Facebook dot gold dot au. It's usually there in the
email address, you know.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Well, at least the next day when they send out
the email. They ask if you fell for it. They
don't show like a list with.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
Prices of all the people who did command for it.
They should do that, just pictures of everyone.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:02):
I got nothing else. I think you know we did
a pretty good job on this one.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
I agree, and that is no fooling. And if you
want to know more about gullibility, go do some research
yourself on it. That's kind of the point of not
being gold, which is a real word. And since I
said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
This is a great current listener mail from yesterday's I'm
Sorry Thursday is rather episode yesterday to us on automats right, Hey, guys,
two friends and I gave each other a graduation present
from high school in nineteen seventy and spent a week
by ourselves in New York where we went to the Automat.
And it was still great in seventy four years later.
This gets so good. Four years later, as a senior
(46:44):
in college, a group of us did an independent study
in humor and music as an excuse to do a
concert of Bach stuff. I got to be the soloist
in the Concerto for horn and hard art nice and
he sent a video. Unfortunately it was just audio. I
mean it sound like a hoot, and really it was great,
but I wanted to see everything because here's what they did.
(47:04):
This piece is for orchestra and also a table filled
with various household items to play. Ideally they should have
been picked out of an automat on stage in order
to play them. However, this is beyond our set construction abilities.
We did have the recommended We did at least have
the recommended banner overhead reading in Latin, less work for
(47:25):
mother along with trying to master the rather challenging music.
It involved me running around Gettysburg with a pitch pipe,
trying to find bell's pots, uga horns, and lots of
other items that played specific notes. This is so great.
Thanks for speaking those wonder sparking those wonderful memories. I
discovered you during COVID and have been an extremely faithful
(47:47):
listener ever since. And that is from the Reverend doctor
Mark Oldenburg steck Miller, Professor Emeritus of the Art of
Worship and the music chair at Getty's United Lutheran Semmetary.
Pronounce him wow.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Also the most interesting person we know.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Now totally Reverend Mark. Write in more please the doctor,
Reverend Mark, the doctor Reverend esquire the Reverend doctor.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Sorry either way.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Thanks a lot, Mark. I'm just gonna call you Mark
for now because I feel like we're on a first
name basis. That was a train email. Great story and
if you want to see if you can top Mark,
you can send us an email too. Send it off
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and we're flying solo again, which means we hopefully
won't crash this joint. And this is stuff. That's right,
that's right. How are you man? You're still sick? Huh?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, I mean, and this is kind of I mean,
I don't like playing it this close, but it's kind
of fun to be a little more current with like
listener mails and updates and stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, it keeps us on the edge where we need
to be.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah. So this will be out on Tuesday, I guess.
And in real time, this is the day after the
automat Oyster stewed debacle.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I don't know if it was a debacle that turned
out to be a pretty good.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
App and Aaron Cooper already came through.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Oh good, I haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah, it's funny. I'm okay. You know, things subside in
the early afternoon, so I'm actually feeling a little better
than it was like twenty minutes ago even.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
But yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, I just I gotta go to the doctor and
just get it over with, you do.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I heard that there's a really bad neurovirus going around,
and that's gotta be what you got man going around
Mexico City, going around the world.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Oh really, yeah, Mexico City is included. This feels bacterial
diverticulitis related.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh that's true. I forgot you got that. Yeah, well,
there's still a neurovirus going around, so don't catch that too.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I'll try, but I'm hanging in there. I am working
on less than three hundred calories a day for five
days now, so I am a shell of a human.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
You're gonna look lean and mean, have you been doing
push ups?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
I can't do one push up right now, there's no way.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Well, Chuck, I guess it's entirely possible since I haven't
seen you, I've just you know, been talking to you. Yeah,
while we record, I have no idea whether you're actually
sick or not. And it's entirely possible that you're fooling
me right now. Oh and if you are, I would
argue that doesn't make me gullible because I generally believe
(02:05):
you're trustworthy. There's no reason to believe that you're not sick.
So really, you'd just be a shameful, dirty liar, and
I would be the hero in this situation.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
That's right. This is on gullibility and this you know,
we were just talking offline that there are I think
a hundred different ways to approach this kind of topic,
and sometimes that's like freeing, and sometimes that's really frustrating,
and I think this one was a little frustrating. Lvia
put together a great article, I think, but it's just
(02:38):
a hard one. When I pitched it to her, I
was like, you know what I feel like, especially here
in America, we're at peak gullibility as a nation, and
like I just wondered, like, is there any science of that,
or like there are people more gullible than others? And
can science be gullible? And this is what we came
up with.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, Interestingly, yes, science can be gullible. On the other hand,
you could argue that Americans aren't more gullible than usual,
that there's actually just different factors involved that make people
want to believe things. Maybe it's a it's it's weird.
I think one of the reasons why it's so hard
to wrap our head around is social psychologists are still
(03:18):
trying to wrap their head around it.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
And and you know what happens when social psychologists get
a hold of something.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Oh yeah, it's an oyster stew party.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
It's a little unsteady as they figure it out. That's right,
it's an oyster stew party. So I think it's not
it's not us, as what I'm trying to say. And you,
dear listener, if you're like, what is going on, it's
not you either. It's social psychology.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
That's right. I guess we can start by talking about
I mean, we're going to talk about a different a
lot of different people, a lot of different people that
study this kind of stuff, a lot of different studies,
some of which make more sense than others. But this guy,
Stephen green Span, is an author. He wrote a book.
He wrote the book on it, Annals of Gullibility Colon
(04:00):
Why we are duped and how to avoid it. And
one sort of important thing he does upfront is say, hey,
there's a difference between credulity and gullibility. Credulity is if
you know you'll believe something just without looking at all
the evidence, and gullibility means you have an active response
to perhaps being conn.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I take issue with us right out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I kind of think too.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I think that's a terrible distinction because I think you
can totally fall for something and be duped. Yeah, and
you be the only person who knew that. Who knows it.
You know, somebody could say something that duped you, and
they don't stop and focus to get like that that
that question of whether they duped you or not answered.
They just keep going on. But you know you've been duped.
(04:46):
You don't have to respond to a Nigerian prints email
or send somebody a bunch of Walmart cards to get
out of some random federal case that's against you. To
have been gullible, you just have to believe, and usually
in the absence of any kind of supporting evidence, and
sometimes in the presence of contradictory evidence. That's gollibility in
(05:11):
my in my understanding. Thanks You're you're believing something without
bothering to go check it out, and that to me
is the baseline of gollibility.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
I totally agree. I thought that definition was really weird,
and I'm glad both are in here though, because sometimes
it's a nice contrast. But along the lines of what
you were saying, there's a group of researchers social psychologists
from McQuary University. There can be a lot of Aussie's
in this.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
You can say that name better than that McQuary.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Oh like Ausie style, Yeah, McQuary.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Although anytime you do that you sound like Murray from
Flight to the Concord.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Murray present Alessandra k Tenise.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Maybe that's what I'm going to find it.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Much in the way you and I would, and I
think a lot of people would, which is simply the
propensity to accept a false premise in the presence of
un trustworthy clues. That's it. That's it. You don't have
to act on it.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
No, you could just believe and no one in the
world could know besides you that you believed, and you're
still gulible in that sense. The thing that I really
stood out to me that we'll talk about a lot more, though,
is you could make a really good case that people
aren't as gullible as other people think they are. And
I found that kind of reassuring. We'll talk about that later,
(06:34):
but I don't want anybody to get the impression that
we're just like, Yep, people are generally stupid, yeah, and
here's how they fall for stupid stuff now and you're
probably stupid too. That's not actually what the science of
gollibility is turned up.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
No, And there's a lot of factors, And this is
where I think Greenspan did kind of hit on something
his four factors of gullibility. Situational like if there's a
lot of if everyone else is doing it, and there's
a lot of social pre sure, like all the bros
are investing in the same cryptocurrency and it's at a
great price, and you're like, oh man, I got to
get in there. All the guys are right, you know,
everyone's in on that. So there's social pressure where you
(07:10):
can fall for something. Cognitive issues like well, as we'll
get to later with you know, our senior friends. Sometimes
there's like legit brain cognitive issues that's a different thing
than this. But this is just lacking expertise, and you know,
you can't evaluate what you're being told because you're just
not I don't want to say smart enough, you're just
(07:32):
not an expert in whatever that is.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, you're not informed enough in that particular thing.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, what else.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Personality is another one. If you're impulsive, this is a
big one, big one. If you're lowing curiosity and you're like,
I don't care, Just tell me what difference. I'm too
lazy to go figure it out myself. Uh huh, I
got better things to do than think. Or if you
have a high need for independence, And this struck me
quite a bit because if you were, if you're independence minded,
(07:59):
you don't need smarty pants, pencil neck college boys telling
you what's right or what's wrong, or what's true or
what's false. You can figure it out yourself. And those
people are actually a high risk of being duped, which
is really surprising, but if you stop and think about it,
it makes total sense. They're overconfident and that's a huge
(08:21):
factor in being gullible.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah, I totally think it makes sense, you know, because
it happened to his cousin.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Emotion can play a big factor in a lot of ways,
and we'll talk about some of those with some studies
later on, but one way is, like, let's say we're
specifically talking about being conned. If it gives you a
positive feeling, whether it's a somebody catfishing you and making
you feel loved, or you know, some sort of financial
thing that you think might provide for your long term
(08:52):
security or like, man, no one else knows about the
steal but me, I'm so smart for getting in on
the ground floor here that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Right, and as strangely ironically, almost as if he did
it on purpose, because it supports everything he wrote about.
Stephen Greenspan, the author of that book about golibility, he
finished his book and shortly afterward he was informed by
I guess his stockbroker that he had lost a bunch
of a bunch of money by investing in Bernie Madoff's contest.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Scheme with the ironies. Huh.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
So he was like, even the guy that researched this
and wrote the book on golibility can fall for it.
That's a really great little tidbit. Yeah, but I think
it also goes to show just how specific golibility is,
because I don't get the impression that Stephen Greenspan was like,
this madeoff guy is making a lot of really great
(09:44):
points and this is incredibly high risk, but I'm going
to go along with it anyway, Like he went through
a stockbroker and everything. So, yeah, there's only a certain
amount of golibility.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
It's just.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Bernie Madoff is like shorthand for fooling people, you know
what I mean, not to pick on Stephen green Span
or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Now I feel very bad for him despite his poor definition.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Right. So some other people have said, well, we really
want to show off as social psychologists, we're going to
create a gibility scale, and in fact, Alessandra to Nie
from Macquarie University, I'm not even gonna try that one.
But it's Australian for university. Sorry, Australians. There's this beer
(10:30):
called Fosters that here in America we think you drink
a lot of. And in America the ad campaign says Fosters,
it's Australian for beer.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
I love that you barely use an accent. You just
say it seriously and that gets the point across.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
It makes people pay attention.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Australian for beer.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
That's the best I can do. That's how I think
Australians talk.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Uh yeah. So this gullibility scale was self report did
basically like do you self reported, meaning do you think
others do you perceive yourself as gullible? And do you
think others perceive you as gullible? And then they you know,
they filled in with some other questions like how persuadable
are you? And stuff like that, and it actually for
(11:16):
a self reported study, which you know a lot of
those can be tough. This seemed to work out pretty
good for them, don't you think it did?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Because they backed it up. They I can't remember what
it's called, but they tested the validity. They tested the
validity of this self reporting panel and found that the
people who reported themselves or scored the highest on gullibility
on this test were more likely to click a link
(11:45):
on a phishing email than people who scored low. Right,
So it seems like a valid test. And one of
the things I went and looked at up Chuck, and
one of the questions wasn't even a question. It was
you are very persuadable, And the only option to check
was yes, Ah, what I'm kidding?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Oh man, this is so upciting.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
That's all right, You're not at one hundred percent at all.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I didn't think you would take advantage of this today.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
It was more of the joke. I wasn't trying to
take advantage of you, although I realize now that I didn't.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
It's okay. All for the show. On that scale, they
found some traits that were common among those that scored
high in gullibility. Social intelligence was one of them that'll
keep coming back over and over. Vulnerability, emotionality, which we've
talked about a little bit, a weak sense of self
which also comes up in different ways. I think you
(12:40):
found an article about how parents can wreck kids by
not giving them self confidence, right, and they'll end up gible.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, pretty much, and depending on And it doesn't even
have to be like you're such a stupid kid every day.
It can just be things like where your opinion is
not really heard or validated, or just all sorts of
little missteps that parents can make that make parenting a
lit nightmare you can carry on as an adult. And
it can make you doubt your own opinion, so you're
(13:06):
not gonna speak up. It can make you be afraid
of looking stupid, so you don't ask questions because you
don't want to seem like I don't I didn't immediately
get it, so I'm gonna look dumb if I ask
these questions. There's like it just sets you up for
being more likely to be a victim of being duped
than somebody who has a lot of confidence.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, I have a good friend who had a pretty
bad stepfather, and the abuse in this situation was exclusively
he made him feel stupid at every opportunity.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
That is so wrong, Like I should be in jail.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
He's passed on now. But it's I can't think of
any I mean, there are all kinds of things that
are worse, obviously, but something so damaging for such a
small person to do that to a child. Yeah, and
literally like oh you think so, like you know, just
that's how he was talked to it his whole life
growing up. It's awful. That is rough and he's super gullible.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Oh is he really?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
No? Actually, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Oh, you got me back there. You should just do
that to one another, like every d or too.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
One thing we should mention though, because this pops up
a couple of times and I think it's super fascinating.
Is another trait they found on the gullibility scale if
you're very gullible, was belief in paranormal activity. Yeah, just
park it right there.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
But I guess that depends on whether paranormal activity is
real or not.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
You know, well, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I mean that's described from a point of view where
you're just like that's all fake anyway. So yeah, duh.
One of the things about social intelligence that's worth pointing out.
So that's basically a package that you can have. Some
people are much better at it than others, but basically
everyone alive in a society has some degree or other
(14:51):
of this package of skills that forms social intelligence, Like
whether or not you're good at conversation, whether you are
good at effective listening, what your knowledge of like social
roles and social scripts are, and then awareness of like
what make other people tick, and then what people think
of you. And you put all this together, and if
you have like high emotional or social intelligence, you're going
(15:14):
to be able to navigate interactions with other people much
better than somebody with low intelligence. Part of that is
not getting scanned by somebody by being able to be like,
you're a scammer and I'm not going to send you
a Walmart gift card now.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, And it's a trade I think that you can't
necessarily teach, but is really beneficial to have as a human.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah. I admire people with high social intelligence because it's
not just you know, being able to spot a scammer,
it's being able to see the best in other people,
and I think to bring out the best in other
people and let them bring out the best in you.
And that's just it's maybe in another life, maybe in
the next lifetime.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Oh buddy, I think you're great. They did another study
at the University of Leicester where they found that childhood
traumas can really affect you later in life in terms
of gullibility, like any kind of bullying, death of a
family member or something like that. It leads you more
susceptible to fall for tricks later in life. And apparently
(16:16):
they say it could be because that kind of trauma
just makes it hard to trust your own judgments and
you know, I guess everyone else's intent.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
For sure, and then some people because it's actually kind
of counterintuitive if you think if you've gone through the
school of hard knocks, I think is the way that
the study put it. Yeah, you could think that they'd
come out like much more world wary and like suspicious
of people, and so they'd be less likely to fall
first game. But no, instead, like you said, they just
they question their own judgment for having gone through what
(16:47):
they went through.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
So that's terrible.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
It is, It is very terrible. Childhood is just fraught.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
You know, it really is.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
It's a wonder any of us can function in any
like real way.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Oh I know. I mean we're pretty good parents, but
I often think like, how are we messing her up?
Because I know we are in some way.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yep, I mean I can't I can't imagine, Like that's
got to just keep you up at nights sometimes if
you think about it too much. You know, I sleep
pretty good good you just wake up to throw up
every hour.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, I think, just try to limit that stuff as
a parent, Like, there's you can't be perfect. I mean,
my brother is a perfect parent, but there's only there's
only one.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Scott.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Another thing I thought was interesting, and this makes total sense,
is if you rely on your intuition a lot, you're
a lot more vulnerable, vulnerable to being duped by something,
just like you know, some people have a good gut,
and some people think they have a good gut but
do not.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yes. Another one that really stood out to me though
that this this I would not have predicted, is the
more cynical you are. Studies have found like this that
the likelier you are to be gullible or duped. And
the reason why actually makes time sense. Again, if you're cynical,
you think you've got everything figured out, like you're just
(18:05):
you think the world sucks and everybody's trying to take
advantage of you, and the government's constantly screwing you over,
and everyone's going to try to get an angle on you.
That's cynicism, right, at least in the modern sense. And
it's actually a lazy shortcut to experiencing reality because on
the one hand, you lose out an opportunity costs you
(18:27):
miss a lot of great stuff, Like you might not
make friends that you could have made because you were
suspicious of this stranger chatting you up at the outset
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, But as far.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
As gullibility goes, if somebody comes along and talks to
you in your language, they can pull one over on
you much more easily because they are tapping into your cynicism,
which again is just lazy shorthand for experiencing reality. It's
based largely on intuition and supposition and not necessarily taking
(18:58):
each experience and looking at it based on the facts.
Is a unique thing. It all has this one cast
to it that's the same, and that's just not how
the world actually works.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, and I think you know, that kind of suggests
that if there's like a country with an authoritarian leader
in place, like the simple sort of easy to understand
radical solutions that are pitched out oftentimes in those situations
are very easy to fall for if you're a gullible person,
because that itself is a mental shortcut. Well, we we
(19:32):
just got to do.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
This for sure. And then conversely too, not being cynical
requires way more brain power and thought and just participation
than being cynical does. Like you have to actually like
ask yourself like, is this true? What kind of source
(19:53):
is this coming from? I might need to go do
some research. I might need to ask people. It's just
so much easier to be like, nope, there's screw me over.
I don't even need to bother to look into that,
because you're also defending yourself at the same time from
getting taken advantage of again until somebody comes along and
is talking your language, and then you will oftentimes fall
for whatever they're saying.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, should we take a break, Yeah, all right, we'll
take a break and talk about mood right after this.
(20:47):
All right, we're back. We promise to talk a little
bit about mood because The fact is you are not
always gullible or always not gullible. Everybody could get due
to that anytime from you know, that changes from day
to day, sometimes from hour to hour, depending on a
lot of factors, like mood. If you're really really tired,
if you're super distracted, if you're upset, you may not
(21:11):
notice something that can, you know, make you fall for
a scam. Also, the same holds if you're in a
really good mood. You know, if you're just feeling great
about everything, you're like, yeah, yes to life, Yes to everything.
There was a study in nineteen thirty eight by a
researcher named Gregory Razran who found that giving a free
(21:31):
lunch made people more receptive to a political message. And
apparently that is sort of where like the sales lunch started.
Taking people out to sell them something and feeding them
you're more likely to close a deal. And I'm sure
the same thing like golf course sales. Things like the
salesperson's not out, they're beating the person in golf that
(21:52):
they're selling to. I guarantee it. I don't know how
that works, but I imagine you're letting them win and feel
good about stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, think about how good you have to be to
purposely lose at golf.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Oh, I could play bad golf on purpose and I'm not.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Really Yeah, okay, well I take that one back and
on accident. So yes. But on the contrary, if you
are an upset, if you're sad, if you're depressed, if
you're mad, if you're in a low mood, you are
actually more likely to pay attention to granular things. I
(22:28):
think it actually kind of ties into rumination. You're just
thinking about stuff. You're turned inwards. So if somebody comes
along and tries to sell you something, yeah, that makes sense,
it's going to be harder to slip it past you
because you're paying attention more than somebody who's like, yeah, whatever,
let's have another round.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Right. So overall, if you think about people who might
be goable, you might think, and you know, if you're
going to stereotype it, like people like kids, very young people,
very old people, and people that aren't very well educated obviously,
but it's not necessarily true. What There is a lot
(23:08):
of factors, one of which I mentioned earlier. You can
get you know, a lot of skewed studies about the
gullibility of someone who's older, because if you're older, you're
more likely to have a cognitive ability that's literally keeping
you from being able to determine whether something is true.
But they've also conversely found that sometimes they're a little
(23:28):
more protected because they're constantly have their children and everyone
else saying like, no, no, no, watch out for scams. They're
trying to scam you. Everyone's trying to scam you.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Right, Yeah, so it's like a self fulfilling prophecy that
they are less likely to be scammed because they're so vigilant.
That's amazing to me.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So there was this one study that kind of backed
all this up from the University of Tirana, and they
found they looked at adults sixty to ninety who handled
their own finances. They didn't have any diagnosed cognitive issues
use and they found that people who had reported being
victims of a fraud, there was nothing that really happened,
(24:10):
or there was no characteristic demographically anything like that that
made them different from anybody else. The only thing that
seemed to really kind of stick out was that they
the people who had been scammed before were low had
low conscientiousness one of the big five. They were less honest, humble,
(24:35):
which is another another kind of personality trait from a
different scale, and that from what I could see, the
honesty thing means. They explained it like, you're if you
are low on honesty, you're more likely to try something
that might be a scam because you might get rich
(24:56):
quick or something like that. You're more willing to take
a shortcut, say, than somebody who would score higher on honesty,
which you put you at greater risk. But that was
about it. There wasn't like, you know, the older you
get or the less educated you are in this group,
you're more likely to get scammed. It was some other
stuff entirely. But they found also that people who do
(25:20):
experience cognitive decline do tend to get taken advantage of more,
which is really messed up, sad, but it's true. And
as a matter of fact, they've started to some people
have started to push this idea like, if you fall
for a scam, you should immediately be tested for Alzheimer's
or dementia because there's a high correlation with getting scammed
(25:44):
as an older person and the early early developments of
cognitive decline. Yes, you got to feel terrible. I mean,
it's bad enough to feel like you're getting scammed, but
then to stop and be like, well, is this it
for me in my mind?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Yeah? Absolutely, I mean thankfully, nothing like that's ever happened
to my parents. But it's you hear the stories all
the time, and it's just you know, it's tragic and
shameful for sure. There was a study in twenty eighteen
that I thought was pretty interesting a woman named Monica
t Witty, another Aussie when we talk about like being catfish,
(26:20):
which is if I guess I threw that word out,
assuming everyone knows that that's like when you get scammed
in a sort of a romantic thing online by someone
who's pretending to be someone they're not.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Generally, we should do an episode on that sometimes because
I just don't I don't. I mean I get it,
but I don't understand like where it started or anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Yeah, let's put that down. That would be super interesting. Okay,
do you remember the Notre Dame football player?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah? I thought he was. Isn't he like the Dolphins quarterback.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Now or no?
Speaker 2 (26:48):
He?
Speaker 1 (26:49):
I don't think he's in the league anymore. He played
the NFL for a little while, but he was a
linebacker for Notre Dame that oh gotcha was famously catfished
and like, you know, smart, handsome, young athlete guy. So
it's not like just you know, the lonely loser in
the basement that falls for stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Have you heard about the lonesome loser?
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, he still keeps on trying, man, little riverman so good.
At twenty eighteen, Monica Whitty did one on sort of
catfishing but really just romance scams is what they called it,
and she said, if you fall for something like that,
you obviously will be a little more impulsive in sensation seeking.
And so if someone's building up about all these great
(27:28):
stories and these big travels, and you know, it's always
it's never just like wow, I just kind of sent
around at home like they always present themselves as offering
some new, exciting life, it seems like. But she also
found that they were more highly educated than average, and Lvia,
I think is on the money, kind of speculates that
could be, and I think it's true. When we did
(27:50):
our thing on online dating, it's generally people that are
college educated that participate in online dating a little more statistically,
But also maybe that if you're more educated. You just
think like, I'm not going to fall for countfishing. I
know all about that, and this is not that right,
over confidence, right, and then you're on that hook.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
And then another thing about being online too. The Better
Business Bureau back in twoy fifteen, I think they looked
at a I guess a bunch of their like scam
complaints that came in just to see who reported them,
and they found that people between twenty five and thirty
five were more likely to lose money on a scam
(28:31):
than older people, which is totally contrary to what people
think of when they think of people who get scammed.
And one of the explanations that they came up with is,
in part, younger people are just online more so they're
just more likely by the numbers, to have scams presented
to them, which means that they're more likely to probably
(28:52):
go for a scam than say, people who are online
less right.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
I agree with that in the old days. I think
that's changing because I've never seen a generation as phone
addicted as boomers are smart.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Oh really good?
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Oh man, they have a lot of boomers, do you
They have gen Z beat every boomer I know, just
obsessively stares at their phone and looks things up and.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, I thought they all had like flip phones that
only dial numbers.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
No, no, no, they want to show you all the
information in the moment.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, I got in the middle of dinner at a
nice restaurant. Even.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I guess I've not experienced.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
That, but I do think that that generally is true. Okay,
I just want to take a shot at boomers.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Well, then that makes it, That makes it even less
understandable that twenty five to thirty five year olds would
be more likely to be scammed. I don't know, maybe
that generation is just more trusting these days or something
like that, or I actually I got to take that back, because,
as we'll see, trusting, being trusting is not necessarily corely
with being gullible.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, which I think we'll get to in a minute
before or after the next break. But can we talk
about science, because this is one thing. When I sent
Livit the idea, I was like, I think I read
an article about scientists being gullible, and I was like, no,
not scientists. But it turns out they very much can
be because a lot of times when you are that's
(30:25):
well versed in a field, you might you might kind
of think you know it all and like, oh, no,
I know what I'm doing, and so you might be
more apt to believe a result that isn't accurate because
you think you did it the right way. Like that's
just one aspect of it.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, Another aspect is, like you said, people people in
science typically know a tremendous amount about their field, but
they can make a mistake and think that that understanding,
that depth of understanding will just apply to other fields
as well if they just don't know as much about Yeah,
and that's another way they can fall prey to it.
But also scientists like to be right as much as
(31:07):
anybody else. And you know, I don't remember what episode
we did this, and I think it was about the
the just reproducibility crisis in science papers if I remember correctly.
But just how like the scientists don't set up experiments
to disprove their hypothesis. They set them up to prove
(31:28):
their hypothesis. That's how you get published, that's how you
get celebrated. Like nobody wants to hear about you failing,
even though that's what science is meant to be. That's
a that's a part of it as well, just wanting
to be right. So if somebody comes along, it's like, yep,
you're right, let's let's uh, let's use that to explain
this other thing that's actually not true. The scientists might
(31:50):
go along with it because if it is true, then
it will prove their their hypothesis and make them very famous,
and they'll probably end up having an HBO movie made.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Well, that was probably a scientific method. Huh.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Maybe maybe, but I mean we definitely talked about papers
just being some of them just being outright fraudulent because
their experiments are set up incorrectly. It could have been
scientific method.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, or like the little student in Rushmore that faked
the results.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
I remember that part.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
You know, Max has his sort of little budding girlfriend
at the end and he says something about she won
some science award and I think she had to give
it back or something, and she said, He's like why,
she said, I faked the results. It didn't work, so
I faked it.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah. I thought that was so her line where she
tells Bill Murray that she won't dance with them, it
was a little out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Oh interesting, Yeah, I get that.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
A little harsh. I think is what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, who didn't want to dance with Bill Murray?
Speaker 2 (32:52):
I do.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
You? And Lucy Lou?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
All right, wait, Lucy Lou doesn't or does want to
dance with Bill Murray.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
No, I don't think she does. They were on Charlie's
Angels together and had some words.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Oh that's right, I remember that.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, so I doubt she's dancing with Bill. Okay, all right,
should we take a break? Wait?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I just before we go to a break, I was
saying I would like to dance with Bill Murray. Oh yeah, okay,
I just want to make sure that no one walks
away to this ad break thinking that I don't want
to dance with Bill Murray.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Yeah. I was being sort of a opposite with my
Lucy lu joke. Okay, this, you know I'm not firing
on all cylinders. I'm doing my best.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I'm not either, apparently.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
All right, we'll be right back and Josh will lead
off with a little bit on trust.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Okay, we're back, everybody. And I mentioned before that trust
is not necessarily correlated with gullibility, and I love that.
That just makes me feel good about the world again.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
You know, you can trust people and think the best
of people and still not be gullible.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah, and so we'll kind of explain why. But there
have been study after study after study that basically say, yeah,
that's actually true, Like you can have a high level
of trust, be tested for that kind of thing, and
you are not more likely to be gible. And in fact,
it seems that if you are a higher trusting person,
you're actually less likely to be gible compared to say,
(34:39):
like the cynic right, Like, there's this researcher named Toshio
Yamagishi who's considered one of the most prominent researchers in
glibility and trust out of Kaido University. I know how
to say, Hokkaido. I don't know why I had trouble
with that at first, but one of the things that
Yamagishi did in the nineteen nineth these was to tell
(35:02):
people who scored high in trusting this and other people
who scored low about the story of Bill and Chuck.
I think you should take it because Bill's got a
great story.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah. I kind of understand this, but not one hundred percent,
but I think I get it. So what he would
say is Bill, your friend. Bill stated at a hotel
for a week, he was only charged one day. Do
you think he would tell the cashier about this even
though there's like no chance, let's say there's no chance
of him getting caught later on, do you think he
would do that? And people who scored high on their
(35:34):
trustworthy score, like people who were trustworthy, they were more
likely to say that Bill would do the honest thing.
But when he added in a twist here, which is
to tell them some negative things about Bill, like by
the way, just want to let you know, Bill also
cut in line. The other day.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
He also makes his steps on feel stupid.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
He also makes his steps on feel stupid. But if
the added in a couple of nuggets like that negative
things about Bill, the people who had high trust in
people generally put a lot more weight on that additional
information than the other people did the people that were
low and trustworthiness.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Right, But the bottom line was even with positive information
like Bill litard, but he also cut in line. If
you took all of the tallies, you would see that
people who are low in trusting others and people who
are high in trusting others they had about the same scores.
So this research from yam Magishi and others shows that
(36:33):
you can trust other people and it doesn't open you
up to being taken advantage of. And that just doesn't
make any sense because just the idea of being gullible
means that you're trusting what somebody else is saying. That's
the popular conception of it. But as we've seen, really
the idea of gullibility is trusting what somebody says because
(36:55):
you either don't care enough to go figure it out yourself,
because you don't feel like thinking for yourself, because what
they're saying confirms your biased beliefs, not that you just
trust people in general. And the explanation that I saw
that really kind of drives it home for me, Chuck,
is that people who have high trust are also more discerning,
(37:21):
so they would have probably a better social intelligence than
people who don't trust as much. And that makes sense
because if you don't trust people like the cynic, you're
actually protecting yourself. You're guarding yourself. You know that you
are probably not as discerning as other people, and so
rather than get yourself into trouble time and time again,
you just keep people at arms length, you don't really
(37:42):
trust them, whereas if you are high trusting you are
better at discerning, And that either means that because you're
good at discerning, you have the freedom to trust other
people because you can be confident in your judgment of
other people and you're probably not going to be taken
advantage of. Or if you are just a trusting person
by nature, you have to have a higher discernment or
(38:05):
else you're going to be taken advantage of. Either way,
high discernment and high trust go hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, and that can be a very freeing thing. And
that's how Yamagishi sort of thought about it when he
talked about his emancipation theory, which is, if you're trusting,
you're kind of or if you're untrusting, I guess you're
kind of shackled in a way because you'll you may
just be stuck in a place because why why hire
(38:31):
a different person to do it, because they're just going
to be a scammer two and so you can get
stuck in this cycle. But if you free yourself from
that with his emancipation theory, and you break those shackles
and you start trusting people, it makes you much more
apt to make a positive change in life because you
trust somebody or something or some situation.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Yeah, because at base, you can go through life not
trusting other people, and you can make it all the
way to old age and die at pretty much the
the same age that you would have had you trusted people.
But you're again, you're missing out. There's opportunity costs to
not trusting other people that people who do trust other
people are not missing out on, and you're just not
(39:15):
connected as socially, and research after research after research shows
that social connections are like the number one predictor of
living to a healthy older age. So you're actually robbing
yourself by just not trusting other people. But again, it's
kind of understandable if you were taught that your judgment
is questionable, either through trauma, through a jerk stepdad, or whatever,
(39:37):
it's understandable. And I'm not sure if that's something that
you can learn to break out of, although I sincerely
hope it is.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Yeah, for sure, there are people that think we are
actually not as gullible as everyone thinks. There's this writer,
Hugo Mercier, who wrote a book in twenty twenty called
Not Born Yesterday. Great title for a book like that,
and he's like people are less gullible than we think,
and there are a lot of like criteria people used
(40:07):
to work out if they're if they believe something or not,
and we're better at it than we all think. We
are like a lot most people, or I guess in
his idea, most people are actually looking for well informed
or well intentioned information, or if it's a has logic
(40:28):
to it, if it's logically strong, or you know. Maybe
people are less like this, which is I'm just going
to accept something or I'm sorry, I'm not going to
accept something as a new piece of information because it's
not something that I have found to be true. He
argues that people are less like that than they say.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, and people also judge other people to be more
likely to be duped than they are more gullible than
they are. But yeah, his whole message is like, no,
we're actually as a as a group, as a species,
not all that gulible. What appears to be gullibility is
actually just somebody not caring enough to argue a point,
(41:09):
or they're accepting information but they're hanging on to it loosely. Olivia,
I thought this is awesome. She pointed out that if
you are shown like an AI generated baby peacock that
looks super cute and has huge eyes and is colorful,
and it is nothing like what a baby peacock really
looks like. If you're not like a peacock researcher or
(41:32):
your job doesn't depend on positively identifying baby peacocks, it
doesn't really matter if you think that that's what they
look like, because you're holding onto it loosely enough that
if somebody comes along and it says that's not what
baby peacocks actually look like, you're not going to like,
that's not the hill you're going to die on. You're
going to be like, oh, that's crazy what AI can do?
(41:53):
Or oh it got me, or or just be like, great,
I now know what baby peacocks look like. And that's
his point is that's not gullibility. That's just not stopping
to analyze, you know, whether it's true or not, because
it just isn't that important, right.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Then, Yeah, exactly. He also points out in the book
when it comes to like propaganda, that propaganda isn't something
that can usually really completely change someone's mind. What propaganda
is good at is taking someone who already has those
beliefs and putting them on turbo speed and reinforcing them
even like the Nazi propaganda machine. You know, he contends,
(42:31):
probably wasn't making someone anti semitic, but if you were
anti Semitic, then it really drove you down that road
at a pretty fast pace.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, because it came at your beliefs and said, yep,
go for it. Like that's what that's the official line now,
is anti semitism.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah. And also similarly, political ads don't really work.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
That's what they say.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, And that makes me wonder though, if that's just
being suspicious of the messenger because of polarization, that you're
not gonna be like, hmmm, let's hear what this opposing
political party has to say about medicare I'm really interested.
I'm gonna keep an open mind. No, it's like this
message is from the opposing party. I'm just gonna laugh
at it because it's just so full of it.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah. I mean, I think political ads are terrible and
ridiculous and so over valued, but I feel like these
days it's less like it's more just beating that drum
of like aren't you mad? Aren't you mad? Go vote?
Go vote?
Speaker 2 (43:30):
I know, man.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
The thing is, though, is this. None of this is
to say that they're like, people don't get scammed. There's
a group called the Global Anti Scam Alliance, which sounds
like a scam itself. They came up with the report,
doesn't it. They came up with a report that found
that worldwide, people lose a trillion dollars to scams every year. Man,
(43:54):
that's a lot of money. But some of these same
researchers are like, hey, there's actually some short like easy
stuff you can walk around in your head with to
use to apply to new information to protect from being
gold which is actually a word.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Let's hear it. Do you have a list?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Yeah, one of them is. The first step is to
admit that you're as susceptible to being scammed as anybody else.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Okay, yeah, just a reality check. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Well, it also puts the kibosh on being overconfident, which
again can increase your chance of being duped.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Don't make emotional decisions like we talked about, keep a
lid on impulsivity. Don't respond to like act now supplies
are running out kind of like come ons. Don't respond
to false scarcity, like remember people hoarding toilet paper. Yeah, oh, Yeah,
those are emotional decisions. You want to just say cool
and level headed. Another one is asked questions, ask for
(44:49):
more information, don't be afraid to look dumb. That's a
that's a big one. Yeah, that's a big one. And
then consider the source. Is there any supporting information? And
when you put all together, you are probably going to
come up with a good decision or understanding. And if
you're being gold by somebody that's a real word, you
(45:11):
are probably going to say, I don't believe what you're saying. You, sir,
are a cad and a scoundrel. Right, please get out
of my face before I smack you with my glove
and we.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
Have to duel. We get I'm sure anyone who works
where big companies get these, and maybe even small companies
do this. But when they send out the the test,
like the test phishing emails, and then like the next day,
you'll get an email that's like did you fall for it?
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Right?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
It's always I'm always nervous. I'm like, oh God, did
I click on that thing that you know from you know,
Facebook dot gold dot au. It's usually there in the
email address, you know.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Well, at least the next day when they send out
the email. They ask if you fell for it. They
don't show like a list with.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
Prices of all the people who did command for it.
They should do that, just pictures of everyone.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:02):
I got nothing else. I think you know we did
a pretty good job on this one.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
I agree, and that is no fooling. And if you
want to know more about gullibility, go do some research
yourself on it. That's kind of the point of not
being gold, which is a real word. And since I
said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
This is a great current listener mail from yesterday's I'm
Sorry Thursday is rather episode yesterday to us on automats right, Hey, guys,
two friends and I gave each other a graduation present
from high school in nineteen seventy and spent a week
by ourselves in New York where we went to the Automat.
And it was still great in seventy four years later.
This gets so good. Four years later, as a senior
(46:44):
in college, a group of us did an independent study
in humor and music as an excuse to do a
concert of Bach stuff. I got to be the soloist
in the Concerto for horn and hard art nice and
he sent a video. Unfortunately it was just audio. I
mean it sound like a hoot, and really it was great,
but I wanted to see everything because here's what they did.
(47:04):
This piece is for orchestra and also a table filled
with various household items to play. Ideally they should have
been picked out of an automat on stage in order
to play them. However, this is beyond our set construction abilities.
We did have the recommended We did at least have
the recommended banner overhead reading in Latin, less work for
(47:25):
mother along with trying to master the rather challenging music.
It involved me running around Gettysburg with a pitch pipe,
trying to find bell's pots, uga horns, and lots of
other items that played specific notes. This is so great.
Thanks for speaking those wonder sparking those wonderful memories. I
discovered you during COVID and have been an extremely faithful
(47:47):
listener ever since. And that is from the Reverend doctor
Mark Oldenburg steck Miller, Professor Emeritus of the Art of
Worship and the music chair at Getty's United Lutheran Semmetary.
Pronounce him wow.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Also the most interesting person we know.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Now totally Reverend Mark. Write in more please the doctor,
Reverend Mark, the doctor Reverend esquire the Reverend doctor.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Sorry either way.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Thanks a lot, Mark. I'm just gonna call you Mark
for now because I feel like we're on a first
name basis. That was a train email. Great story and
if you want to see if you can top Mark,
you can send us an email too. Send it off
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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Hosts And Creators
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Josh Clark
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