How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons

I barely have time to write all the cool science-related stories. So this year again, from December 25th until January 5th, he will be posting a special 12 Days of Christmas series where he will feature one science story that went wrong in 2023 every day. Today: In conversation with psychologist Daniel Simmons, Christopher Chabris discusses important habits of thinking and reasoning. These may help us most of the time, but they can also make us more gullible.

This is one of the. most famous experiment in psychology. In 1999, Daniel Simmons and Christopher Chablis conducted the following experiment. blindness due to inattention. They asked the subjects: watch short video There, six people were wearing white T-shirts, half wearing black T-shirts, and passing basketballs around. Subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by people wearing white shirts. In the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla costume walks into the middle of the players, bangs his chest at the camera, and then runs off-screen. To the researchers’ surprise, half of the participants were busy counting basketball passes and had never seen a gorilla.

The experiment became a viral sensation, helped by the amusing paper title.There’s a gorilla among us“And Simmons and Chablis won the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology. This research was also the basis of a best-selling book in 2010. Invisible Gorilla: How our intuition deceives us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists have published their latest book, “ Nobody’s fool: why we get caught up and what we can do about it. Simmons and Chablis have written an interesting study of important thinking habits that benefit us, but also leave us vulnerable to shortcomings and deception. We also provide some practical tools based on cognitive science to help you spot deception before you fall for it.

“People like to read about cons, but cons still keep happening,” Simmons told Ars. “Why do they keep happening? What are those bad guys taking advantage of? Why aren’t we reading and learning about Theranos? We realized that there was a set of cognitive principles that seemed to apply to all areas, from cheating in sports to cheating in finance and biotech. That became our organizing theme. I did.”

Ars spoke with Simmons and Chablis to learn more.

Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that people still fall for these basic scams: nigerian prince scam.Reminds me of the Fox Mulder poster X files: “I want to believe.”

Daniel Simmons: The Nigerian prince scam is interesting because it has been around for a long time. Its original form was letters. Most people won’t be fooled by such things. The majority of people will look at this and say this is written with terrible grammar. It’s a mess. And why would anyone believe that they are the ones who can get this huge fortune back? That’s why some people fall for it, but that’s just a few people. This obviously sounds too good to be true for most people, but I think it’s still illustrative because for some people it’s enough. It’s attractive enough to make you want to say, “Oh yeah, maybe I can get rich.”

There was a profile in the New Yorker of a clinical psychologist who was obsessed with this. For some reason, some people feel desperate or think they are entitled to inherit a large amount of property. However, there are many scams that are much more subtle than this and are picking on the most naive. I think the key insight here is that we tend to assume that only gullible people would fall for something like this. That’s fundamentally wrong. If assembled correctly, everyone will fall in love with this piece.

Christopher Chabris: I don’t think they’re necessarily the people you want to believe all the time. I think it really depends on the situation. Some people may want to believe that they can make a lot of money with cryptocurrencies, but they will never be fooled by an email from Nigeria, and for that matter, they don’t believe in cryptocurrencies, so traditional You may not be fooled by a typical Ponzi scheme. fiat money Or the stock market. Back to the topic, invisible gorillaSo, one of the things we noticed was that a lot of people asked, “What’s the difference between people who noticed gorillas and people who didn’t?” The answer is that some people happened to notice it, and some people didn’t. It’s not an IQ or personality test. So, in the case of a Nigerian email, something may have been going on in that guy’s life at the very moment he received that email, and he knew that even though it seemed strange. However, it may have led you to accept that premise as true in the first place. And once he started interacting with these people, he became passionate about the idea.

So one of our principles is commitment. The idea is that if you accept something as true and don’t question it any further, all sorts of bad decisions and bad outcomes can come from it. So if we were somehow actually convinced that they were real in Nigeria, that could explain some of the bad decisions we subsequently make. I think there are many unexpected aspects. We all need to understand how these things work. We may think it sounds crazy and we’ll never be fooled, but if it’s a different scam at a different time, we might be fooled.