Why Some [Even Very Bright] People will Always Get Conned
"I can admit it freely now. All my life I've been a patsy." And with that remarkable introduction, so begins Robert Cialdini's sophisticated journey into understanding how fraud works, in his book "Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion."
Demonstrating his flair for the finding the peculiar in the ordinary example, Cialdini begins the journey by discussing the M.W. Foxe's description of an experiment with mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. The polecat is the natural enemy of the turkey and even a stuffed polecat will draw an attack. But when that same stuff polecat is rigged to play the cheep cheep sounds of a baby turkey, not only will the mother turkey not attack the stuffed animal, it will be actually protective of the polecat!
Stupid turkeys, eh. Well, not so fast. "Before we enjoy too smugly the ease with which lower animals can be tricked by trigger features into reacting in ways wholly inappropriate to the situation, ..., we, too, have hour preprogrammed tapes; and although they usually work to our advantage; the trigger features that activate them can be used to dupe us into playing them at the wrong times." Cialdini calls this the human automatic action system, Click Whirr. A trigger will appear and an action will be taken - automatically, and without cognitive awareness. Indeed, I suspect cognition is just along for the ride for many of these actions.
Why is this finding important to the prevention of fraud?
The standard fraud prevention model uses a model of human decision making, which although it has venerable roots in Plato, is simply outdated.
The standard fraud prevention model treats fraud as a surfeit or lack of reliable information. It doesn't model fraud as an deliberate illusion. With illusions, even though you know that the effect in an illusion, it doesn't mean that you know how to battle or see through the illusion.
Recently, Mind Hacks had a neat demonstration of the cognitive impenetrability of illusions. These beans are moving. Wanna bet?
Well, it certainly doesn't look like the beans are moving does it? Until you go to this full effect illusion site. Mind Hack explains
"With many of these sorts of illusory motion images, you can 'stop' the motion by simplying viewing them through a very small aperture. Putting a pin through a piece of paper and viewing it through the hole does the trick, but so does making a small viewing hole with your fingers. As you can see yourself, the picture stops 'moving' when viewed like this, but starts again as soon as you view it normally."
It is critical but obvious to understand that although cognition alerts us as to the impossibility of motion, it does not allow us to penetrate the fraud on our senses committed by our automatic systems.
When we are entertained by a magician, even a magic in a movie, we know that what we just saw was an illusion. We were tricked. And knew that we were tricked. Although we cannot figure out the trick, we don't make any bets, bets with real economic significance, that half dressed women can be safely sawn in half.
With fraud it is different: we do bet on the reality of the illusion. Its a sucker bet. We fail to heed Sky Masterdon's wisdom.
"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider."
