Stop Being a Chump Once and For All
What is the best way to prevent deceptive messages from getting by your internal security system? You might be surprised at the answer. Noah Goldstein, Ph. D. writes, in his article,
How To Protect Others From Devious Persuaders
Clearly, the most important aspect of being vulnerable to such deceptive messages is being able to identify which messages might be harmful in the first place. But a second aspect is that we often perceive ourselves to be relatively invulnerable to such threats. Let’s move to a different domain for a moment — the domain of television ads.In a set of surveys conducted by Brad Sagarin, Robert Cialdini, William Rice, and Sherman Serna (2002), 888 undergraduates were asked how much they thought they were influenced by advertisements, and a separate group of 900 undergraduates was asked how much they thought the average undergraduate at their university was influenced by advertisements. The results of the survey clearly showed that people think others are a lot more vulnerable to being persuaded than they think they are. In essence, they think they’re hardly influenced by other people’s persuasion attempts.
The study is an interesting read. In summary, Sagarin et. al. test some inoculation or preventative strategies against dishonest or deceptive advertising. The dishonest advertising they were concerned with was the use of a illegitimate authority figures in television ads: a) either an actor pretending in a role, or b) a real authority figure but who had no special expertise in the area he or she was talking about.
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that by simply giving the students a simple two part diagnostic test allowed the students to identify the illegitimate ads. The two part test or treatment consisted of the following: identify whether "the authority is a real authority and not just someone dressed up to look like an authority. Second, the authority must be an expert on the product he or she is trying to sell."
This test or treatment did prove effective, in that students several days after being given this inoculation were able to identify misleading or illegitimate ads: but, and here is the kicker, they also found the very ads that they had identified as misleading as also persuasive! They knew that they were being mislead and were persuaded nonetheless.
Now that it is David Hume's rationality or reason in action: reason is slave to the passions.
So if reason won't screen out misleading or illegitimate advertising, what will? We know that "unrealistic optimism may lead people to ignore legitimate risks in their environment and fail to take measures to offset those risks."
You identify a misleading ad, don't attach a warning label to it because you think, with no warrant at all, that you wouldn't have fallen for the unethical ad. That is why you are a chump
Remember, you are a chump -that is why you are reading this article. We are all chumps. That is why I am writing this article.
Ironically, the study showed that people believe most others, but not themselves, to be chumps. This "illusion of invulnerability manifested itself in the relatively meager resistance displayed by participants who vulnerabilities had merely been asserted. Far from being an effective shield, the illusion of invulnerability undermined the very response that would have supplied genuine protection."
If you don't know the patsy in a poker game, it is you.
You don't want to be chump -then act as if you are the chump.
Dispel the illusion that you could never be a mark by recalling the last time you were the mark.
You don't want to be a fool- admit that you could be fooled.
