The Gullibility Episode

24:21Right. So overall, if you think about people who might be gullible, 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 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 more protected because they're constantly have their children and everyone else saying like, no, no, no, watch out for scams.

25:09They're trying to scam you. Everyone's trying to scam you. 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. Yeah. So there was this one study that kind of backed all this up from the University of Piranha. And they found they looked at adults 60 to 90 who handled their own finances. They didn't have any diagnosed cognitive issues. And they found that people who had reported being victims of a fraud, there was nothing that really happened or there was no characteristic demographically, anything like that, that made them different from anybody else.

25:53The only thing that seemed to really kind of stick out was that the people who had been scammed before had low conscientiousness, one of the big five. They were less honest, humble, which is another kind of personality trait from a different scale. Yeah. 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 quick or something like that. You're more willing to take a shortcut, say, than somebody who would score higher on honesty, which put you at greater risk.

26:40But 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 experience cognitive decline do tend to get taken advantage of more, which is really messed up and 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 as an older person and the early, early developments of cognitive decline.

27:25Yeah, I 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? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thankfully, nothing like that's ever happened to my parents. But you hear the stories all the time, and it's just tragic and shameful. For sure. There was a study in 2018 that I thought was pretty interesting, a woman named Monica T. Whitty, another Aussie. When we talk about being catfished, which is, I guess I threw that word out, assuming everyone knows it. 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 generally.

28:07We should do an episode on that sometime 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. Yeah. Let's put that down. That would be super interesting. Okay. Do you remember the Notre Dame football player? Yeah. I thought he was, isn't he like the Dolphins quarterback now or? No, he, 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 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.

28:40Have you heard about the lonesome loser? He still keeps on trying. Oh, man. Little River Man. So good. 2018, Monica Witte 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 stories and these big travels, it's never just like, well, I just kind of sit around at home. 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.

29:20and Livia, I think, is on the money, kind of speculates that could be, and I think it's true when we did 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 catfishing. I know all about that and this is not that. Right. Overconfidence, right? And then you're on that hook. And then another thing about being online to the Better Business Bureau back in 2015, I think they looked at a I guess a bunch of their like scam complaints that came in to see who reported them.

30:00And they found that people between 25 and 35 were more likely to lose money on a scam than older people, which is totally contrary to what people think of when they think of people who get scammed. And one of the 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 go for a scam than, say, people who are online less. Right. 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.

30:40Oh, really? Oh, man. You don't hang around 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. I thought they all had flip phones that only dial numbers. No, no, no. They want to show you all the information in the moment. I got you. Right in the middle of dinner at a nice restaurant even. I guess I've not experienced that. But I do think that that generally is true. Okay. Fair enough. I just want to take a shot at boomers. Well, then that makes it even less understandable that 25 to 35-year-olds would be more likely to be scammed.

31:25I don't know. Maybe that generation is just more trusting these days or something like that. Actually, I got to take that back because as we'll see, being trusting is not necessarily correlated with being gullible. 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 Libby the idea, I was like, I think I'd 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 well versed in a field, you might kind of think you know it all.

32:07And 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. Yeah, another aspect is, like you said, 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 that 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 anybody else. And, you know, I don't remember what episode we did this in.

32:48I think it was about the just reproducibility crisis in science papers, if I remember correctly. But just how, like, scientists don't set up experiments to disprove their hypothesis. They set them up to prove 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 part of it as well, just wanting to be right. So if somebody comes along and is like, yep, you're right, let's use that to explain this other thing that's actually not true, The scientists might go along with it because if it is true, then it will prove their hypothesis and make them very famous.

33:32And they'll probably end up having an HBO movie made about them. Well, that was probably a scientific method, huh? 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. Yeah. Or like the little student in Rushmore. that faked the results. I don't remember that part. 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 he's like, why?

34:08She said, I faked the results. It didn't work, so I faked it. I thought that was so her line where she tells Bill Murray that she won't dance with him. It was a little out of nowhere. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I get that. A little harsh, I think, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Who doesn't want to dance with Bill Murray? I do. You and Lucy Liu. All right. Wait, Lucy Liu doesn't or does want to dance with Bill Murray? No, I don't think she does. They were on Charlie's Angels together and had some words. Oh, that's right. I remember that. Yeah. So I doubt she's dancing with Bill. Okay. All right. Should we take a break?

34:46Wait, 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. Yeah, I was being sort of opposite with my Lucy Liu joke. Gotcha. Okay. You know, I'm not firing on all cylinders. I'm doing my best. I'm not either, apparently. All right. We'll be right back. And Josh will lead off with a little bit on trust.

35:25Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

36:00I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:36Okay, 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. You know, you can trust people and think the best of people and still not be gullible. 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 gullible. And in fact, It seems that if you are a higher trusting person, you're actually less likely to be gullible compared to, say, like the cynic.

37:17Right. Like there's this researcher named Toshio Yamagishi, who's considered one of the most prominent researchers in gullibility and trust out of Hokkaido 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 1990s was to tell 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. Yeah, I kind of understand this, but not 100 percent. But I think I get it. So what he would say is Bill, your friend Bill, stayed at a hotel for a week.

37:58He 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 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. He also makes his stepson feel stupid. He also makes his stepson feel stupid. But if they if they 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 in trustworthiness.

38:48Right. But the bottom line was even with positive information like Bill littered, but he also cut in line. If you took all of the 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 Yamagishi and others shows that you can trust other people and it doesn't open you up to being taken advantage of. 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, And really the idea of gullibility is trusting what somebody says because 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.

39:46And 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. 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 arm's length. You don't really trust them. Whereas if you are high trusting, you are better at discerning.

40:24And 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 else you're going to be taken advantage of. Either way, high discernment and high trust go hand in hand. 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 may just be stuck in a place because why hire a different person to do it because they're just going to be a scammer too.

41:11And 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. 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 same age that you would have had you trusted people. But 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.

41:50And you're just not 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. It's understandable. And I'm not I'm not sure if that's something that you can learn to break out of, although I sincerely hope it is. Yeah, for sure. There are people that think we are actually not as gullible as everyone thinks.

42:27There's this writer, Hugo Mercier, who wrote a book in 2020 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 use to work out 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, has logic 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.

43:22He argues that people are less like that than they say. 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 group, as a species, not all that gullible. What appears to be gullibility is actually just somebody not caring enough to argue a point. 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 is nothing like what a baby peacock really looks like.

44:06If you're not like a peacock researcher or 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 or, oh, it got me 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 then.

44:46Yeah, 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. And 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 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. 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.

45:26Yeah. Yeah. And also, similarly, political ads don't don't really work. That's what they say. Yeah. And that makes me wonder, though, if that's just being suspicious of the messenger because of polarization that you're not going to be like, hmm, let's hear what this opposing political party has to say about Medicare. I'm really interested. I'm going to keep an open mind. No, it's like this message is from the opposing party. I'm just going to laugh at it because it's just so full of it. Yeah. I mean, I think political ads are terrible and ridiculous and so overvalued. But I feel like these days it's less like it's more just beating that drum of like, aren't you mad?

46:05Aren't you mad? Go vote. Go vote. I know, man. Yeah. The thing is, though, is this none of this is to say that they're like people don't get scammed. And there's a group called the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, which sounds like a scam itself. They came up with a report that found that worldwide, people lose a trillion dollars to scams every year. 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. Let's hear it.

46:48Do you have a list? Yeah. One of them is the first step is to admit that you're as susceptible to being scammed as anybody else. OK. Yeah. Just a reality check. Yeah, well, it also puts the kibosh on being overconfident, which again can increase your chance of being duped. Yeah, yeah. 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 stay cool and level-headed.

47:24Another one is ask questions, ask for more information. Don't be afraid to look dumb. 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 this together, you are probably going to come up with a good decision or understanding. And if you're being gulled by somebody, that's a real word, you are probably going to say, I don't believe what you're saying. You, sir, are a cat and a scoundrel. Right. Please get out of my face before I smack you with my glove. And we have to duel. We get it. I'm sure anyone who works for big companies get these and maybe even small companies do this.

48:04But when they send out 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? Right. 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.gold.au. Right. It's usually there in the email address, you know. 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 pictures of all the people who did fall for it. They should do that. Just pictures of everyone. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I think, you know, we did a pretty good job on this one.

48:42I 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. This is a great current listener mail from yesterday's, I'm sorry, Thursday's rather episode, yesterday to us on Automats. Right. Hey, guys, two friends and I gave each other a graduation present from high school in 1970 and spent a week by ourselves in New York where we went to the Automat, and it was still great in 70. Four years later, this gets so good. Four years later, as a senior in college, a group of us did an independent study in humor and music as an excuse to do a concert of Bach stuff.

49:28I 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 sounded like a hoot and really it was great. But I wanted to see everything because here's what they did. 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 mother, along with trying to master the rather challenging music.

50:05It involved me running around Gettysburg with a pitch pipe, trying to find bells, pots, auga 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 listener ever since. Nice. And that is from the Reverend Dr. Mark Oldenburg, Steckmiller Professor Emeritus of the Art of Worship and the Music Chair at Gettysburg United Lutheran Cemetery. Pronouns he him. Wow. Also the most interesting person we know now. Totally. Reverend Mark, write in more.

50:46please. The Dr. Reverend Mark. The Dr. Reverend. Esquire. The Reverend Doctor. Sorry. Either way. Yeah. Pretty impressive. Thanks a lot, Mark. I'm just going to call you Mark for now because I feel like we're on a first name basis. That was a great 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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

51:13Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

51:29Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with a basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.