Fear of being the dupe can set off complex and damaging overreactions among victims. In a world filled with scams, being wary makes perfect sense. But health, trust and decision-making can suffer when the fear of getting conned goes too far.
Which would make you feel worse — losing $100 to a pickpocket on a busy street or donating $100 to charity, only to find out it was a scam? For many people, it’s the latter. Being cheated by someone you decided to trust is distinctly infuriating.
Getting suckered triggers strong emotions — and not only fury. Researchers studying cybercrimes have been documenting an array of effects on the mental and physical health of victims of scams. But while it clearly pays to be skeptical, especially as online scams proliferate and grow increasingly sophisticated, research suggests there’s also a price to pay for being too wary.
When the fear of getting suckered looms too large, it changes people’s decision-making and behavior in potentially harmful ways, with underappreciated implications for the law, public policy and society as a whole. When you extend trust to someone and they reciprocate, you both stand to gain, De Dreu says. But when people are overly afraid of being suckered, “they may not come forward, they may not start to cooperate, and hence this whole positive cycle of reciprocation and mutual benefit cannot evolve.” Feeling suckered doesn’t just result from money-losing scams.
Everyday experiences can evoke the same emotions. You might feel it on your daily commute after tapping the brakes to let some jerk cut in front of you. Or after you do the hardest part of a work project and your slacker colleagues get an equal share of the credit.
There’s a reason for that extra bit of irritation. For many decades, social psychologists and behavioral economists have been investigating the mechanics of human cooperation with games of trust. In a typical setup, people have a choice between cooperating with a group of other participants to evenly share a monetary payoff or defecting.
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