Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
It's a pleasure to welcome Stephen Greenspan to the Inkwell to discuss
his new book "Annals of Gullibility."

Stephen Greenspan (www.stephen-greenspan.com) is a developmental
psychologist who lives in the Denver area. He has a long-standing
interest in the problem of social incompetence, especially in at-risk
populations. In recent years, he has become interested in an
under-studied aspect of incompetence: “gullibility” (a tendency to be
duped or manipulated).

His new book on this topic -- "Annals of Gullibility" (Praeger) was
published the same week that he learned that he been gulled out of a
chunk of his retirement funds by Bernard Madoff. His article “Fooled by
Ponzi (and Madoff): How Bernard Madoff Made Off With My Money” was
published in e-Skeptic:
 
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-12-23.html

and later reprinted in the Wall Street Journal. This has caused a
tremendous explosion of interest in Greenspan’s book and his ideas
about gullibility, as reflected in a segment on “The Science of
Gullibility” on last week’s edition of “NPR Science Friday”. 

Leading the conversation with Stephen is Phillip Guddemi.

Phillip is a longtime member of the WELL (since 1995) with
wide-ranging interests.  As a cultural anthropologist he lived among a
people in lowland Papua New Guinea, studying their art, ritual, and
ecology.  With his wife Gail Kara, he did fieldwork in the Republic of
Macedonia during the Kosovo conflict. His inspiration in both
anthropology and environment was anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer
Gregory Bateson, his instructor at the University of California at
Santa Cruz. Dr. Guddemi has also worked and taught in the field of
environmental studies and management.

Today Dr. Guddemi is managing editor of the journal Cybernetics and
Human Knowing, as well as Vice President for Membership of the American
Society for Cybernetics.  He has a shelf in his library containing an
almost complete collection of the Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole
Earth Review.  He has been friends with Stephen Greenspan for about
twenty years.
  

    
Hello and welcome, Stephen.  It seems like gullibility should be the
issue of the hour.  The Madoff scandal is just one example.  We've
just experienced the second economic boom and bust cycle in little more
than a decade, and at the end of each cycle millions of people wonder
why they could be so gullible.  We've just handed the banks hundreds of
billions of dollars so they would grease the wheels of finance, and
the banks are sitting on the money -- were we gullible?  

So to begin with, Steve, what is gullibility, as a psychological
phenomenon?  Is there any way to prevent it short of the "school of
hard knocks?"  Or, and I'm thinking here of an example you made much
of in the book, the original Italian version of Pinocchio, do we have
to just get gulled over and over until eventually we "get it"?
  

    
The spurt of interest in my book ANNALS OF GULLIBILITY was triggered
by my  January 3 piece “Me, Madoff and the Mind” which appeared in the
Wall Street Journal. It tickled the public’s imagination by dint of the
irony (which I would also consider funny if it didn’t involve me)of my
getting gulled by Bernard Madoff right around the time my book on
gullibility came out.
 
In fact, I devote maybe 6 or 7 (out of 220) pages in the book to the
topic of financial gullibility. My focus is really much broader than
Madoff and financial gullibility, although in hindsight maybe I should
have paid more attention to that particular topic. (Trying to make some
of my losses back, you can be sure that my second book will focus on
financial gullibility in relation to the Madoff fiasco)

To answer your question, Phillip, I see gullibility as an aspect of
“foolish action”. A foolish act is one that fails to take into account
some risk that is foreseeable to some or most people. There are three
kinds of foolish acts: “practical”, “social non-induced”, and
“social-induced”. 

A practically foolish act is one where the ignored risk is physical.
An example involves my friend’s daughter-in-law (an eye surgeon) who
put her finger in a blender while pureeing baby food and had to have
two operations to save her finger and career. A very practically
foolish act by a very academically brilliant person.

A non-induced socially foolish act is one where one does or says
something disastrous for career or well-being, but for reasons that
come from within rather than from some external social pressure.
Inappropriate humor is a good example of this, as when first president
Bush blew his reelection chances by responding “read my hips” (while
pointing to his ass) in response to a reporter’s asking him why he had
reneged on his “No New Taxes” pledge. The ignored risk here was that
many voters would be dissuaded from voting to reelect a president who
would joke so disrespectfully about his backtracking on a solemnly-made
pledge.  

An induced socially foolish act is one which a person enters into
because of pressure—typically involving deception--from one or more
other people, where the action is portrayed as beneficial but in fact
could have very serious negative consequences. Gullibility is basically
another name for socially-induced foolish action. Ignoring social risk
induced by others could be a problem for one’s survival (as in being
gullible enough to confess to a murder one didn’t commit), and could
also be a problem for society (if, for example, the electorate had been
gullible enough to make Sarah Palin vice president. 

Gullibility can manifest itself in any number of forms: political
believing there were WMD’s in Iraq); sexual (getting seduced or
molested); ,recreational (wasting one’s money to go to Disneyworld);
military (the Trojan war); religious (snake handling cults); etc. While
financial gullibility is of obvious interest, especially given current
financial conditions, I would hope that we can talk about gullibility
more broadly and not just in relation to Madoff or Wall Street. 

With respect to if and how we can become less gullible, the book’s
last chapter addresses this issue under the rubric of wisdom and the
fact that we can grow in our ability to recognize risk (i.e., become
less gullible). Thus, I now will probably be more careful and
knowledgeable about investment dangers as a result of experience. 

Wisdom is a very muddled construct (if you read an edited book on the
topic you will see 20 different definitions) but I define it as the
flip side of gullibility. If you define gullibility as action that
fails to take into account relatively forseeable risk, then you can
define wisdom as the ability  (mediated by experience) to take into
account relatively subtle and hidden risk.

This definition is not as simplistic as it might seem. Even Eastern
religious notions of wisdom can be shown to involve a "brake" mechanism
in the face of attractive opportunities, as for fame and fortune. The
risk there is to one's soul and long-term happinesss.

While wisdom often involves choosing the best positive course of
action, more often than not it involves rejecting a superficially
attractive course of action that contains hidden dangers (such as this
writer with modest assets investing in a hedge fund let alone one run
by Bernard Madoff). The wise advice there would have been "don't
seduced by greed". One can become less gullible with age, but that
doesn't mean I won’t be fooled again. 

As for Pinnochio, he goes through a long series of foolish acts, all
of them induced (i.e., gullible) until he finally develops the ability
to see through deception and fakers. In fact, one of these involves a
Ponzi scheme, where the fox and the cat trick him into planting five
gold coins in the "Field of Wonders", with the lure of it turning
overnight to 2,000 coins (even madoff or Warren Buffet couldn't produce
such a return). It is only after many such episodes that Pinocchio
starts developing an ability to see through deception and in the
process becomes fully human (i.e., competent to survive in a world full
of fakers). A good metaphor for all of us. 
  

    
Well, this may be enough to chew on for the moment.  Looking forward
to hearing from the gullible, the ex-gullible, and the never-gullible
(you think?).
  

    
Hi Stephen.  Are there any people that are immune to gullibility?
Personally, I know I am not.  I haven't been gulled into anything
life/financial threatening (to date), but I am sure I could be.
  

    
Well, Lisa, I think everyone has been gulled on occasion, usually in a
minor way (practical jokes for example). Being trusting (which most of
us are, and which is a good way to be) means that one will be fooled
on occasion. I am mainly concerned with avoiding being gullible in a
life-altering, or very damaging, way. 

The heart of my theory of gullible (and, by extension, foolish) action
is a four-part explanation, of which the four factors are: situations
(how compelling is the external pull?), cognition (how able are you to
assess the risks?), personality (how trusting or socially needy are
you?) and emotion (how strong is the motivating internal push?)

In certain situations (for example, a very clever confidence scheme
such as Madoff's) the pull is so compelling that most people would have
succumbed if they had been unlucky enough to have been drawn into his
web. In my case, all four factors fell into alingment to create a
"perfect storm" condition for gullible behavior. So the answer is that
anyone can be gulled, even someone who has managed to avoid it, and to
survive and be happy it is essential that one keep one's gullibility
monitor always (or almost always) running, especially when making the
most serious kinds of decisons.  
   
  

    
Stephen, how do you relate gullibility to social skills and social
intelligence?  

And I encourage people to share their gullibility stories (but
remember, this conference is readable by the Internet at large, not
merely the WELL, so don't go beyond your comfort level for
self-disclosure to the planet.  If you have already posted compromising
pictures of yourself on Facebook, never mind.)
  

    
That's a good question, Phillip. However, I do want to hear some of
the gullibility stories that readers might wish to tell, and I don't
want to hog the platform, so I'll be brief. 

Social intelligence is an aspect of cognition, which is the second of
the four factors in my explanatory model. In the case of a scam (and I
know I said I wanted to move into other areas, but that seems to be all
I am thinking about these days), social intelligence would involve
such things as:

--knowing that hedge funds are inherently risky

--knowing that a twelve percent annual return on top of hefty fund and
adviser fees, year after year, is essentially impossible

--being able to recognize clues that an adviser is unprofessional (not
encouraging diversification) or a risk-taker (such as putting all his
own assets in an investment)

--recognizing typical con artist tricks (such as pressure to move
quickly), etc.

Social skills really have less to do with understanding than with
particular micro behaviors that one engages in (e.g., smiling, making
positive comments) that could cause one to be liked. That domain is
irrelevant in explaining victimization, although it may help explain
the victimizer's success--con men by definition have good social
skills). But there are verbal components to social skill that can
protect one from being gulled, and that is the possession of verbal
heuristics that enable one to escape a risky situation when one feels
oneself being sucked in. For example, if one feels the need for more
time, one could practice some escape lines such as "I am really
interested, but I need another day or two to think about it. Goodbye".
 
Social competence is another term, and that mainly refers to outcomes,
such as not being (or being) gulled. So someone who is gulled
significantly is exhibiting a form of social incompetence. (if it
happened all the time, then one might be justified in cncluding that 
"John is a socially incompetent person, who needs a conservator, etc")

 
  

    <scribbled by gail Wed 14 Jan 09 16:22>
  

    
Sorry, I want to repost that without key typos:

Hi Stephen!  I've read most of the book, and I have a lot of thoughts,
but I'll start with a somewhat famous story that has been published
before.

It's a tale of betrayal here on The WELL.  I'll quote Leslie Shade's
recap,since it is out there, at

<http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/Computing/Articles+ResearchPapers/gender-issues-networking>


" Both _Time_ magazine
and _The Washington Post_ covered "The Case of the Cybercad", or
the "on-line Lothario" on the WELL (a private conferencing system
running out of the Bay Area).    This case involved a
WELLbeing--dubbed Mr. X-- who was romancing several different
WELLbeing women at the same time; the women involved found out; and
through the WELL's private women-only conference space, WOW (Women
on the WELL), decided to "out" the man in a more public conference
area on the WELL (although not revealing his name).  Unfortunately,
the _Time_ article erroneously dismissed the WELL as a sort of
"single's bar scene"; the more perceptive _Washington Post_ article
by John Schwartz analyzed the incident as a test case for the new
online terrain of social interactions: "Anthropologists and
sociologists too, still are wondering what the lowly modem has
wrought. The ability to use our computers to reach out around the
world hasn't just revolutionized computing--it's creating new forms
of social interaction that appear and evolve before the academics
can get their pipes lit". [Schwartz]  "

This event, back in the stone ages of 1993, was astonishing here
because of the range of interpretations.  There was anger on all sided.
 Women and friends were angry that a man who declare love, swearing a
woman to secrecy then going and collecting yet another secret lover and
eventually discarding a few for no good reason. (That's how he was
found out. Unhappy jilted woman seeks solace and comfort after a
breakup, and the old secrecy request is not important any more compared
to the need to tell about it.)   

It sure seemed like this was a kind of fraud. Not a legal fraud, but 
a heartless decepetion of six or seven people, made worse because 
it was a matter of the heart.

But some men were angry that this behavior would be outed, and called 
the discussion of such behavior (without using the name of the
smooth-talking man) a "lynching." 

Most who wrote about it were thinking there are new electronic codes
of conduct, and I just thought this was as old as the hills.  Lying to
get sex. Not novel, but bad behavior.  If it were about money it would
be criminal. 

But being about time, love, loyalty and priorities can be even more
hurtful than a money con job.  How interesting that people seldom
complain about systematic seduction under false premises as being
antisocial behavior.  The "all's fair in love and war" dictum still
seems to have some clout. 

On the gullibility side, I know some of the women felt chagrined, 
though others seemed just to be angry at the lies.

What's your take on this side of the gullibility/manipulation game?

Are the rules changing in sex and love?
  

    
Eek, sorry.  Didn't fix "on all sided" to "on all sides" nor "angry
that a man who declare love" to be "angry about a man who declared
love."
  

    
Is any that still available in the archives?  I have heard of it but
not seen any of the posts.
  

    
WELL members can see it here:  <archives.205>
  

    
Thanks (autumn)!
  

    
The theme of women taking revenge on a womanizing man was a recurring
one for DH Lawrence. In "Tickets, Please", a short story published in
1922, a railway inspector seduces all the conductresses on a train line
(it was set during WWI when the only young men left in England were
those unfit to fight). 

The women compare notes and beat the crap out of him, leaving him a
bloody mess. So far so good, but then Lawrence showed his anti-feminist
side by having the women force the man to decide which of them he will
marry.  

Lawrence makes allusion to some Greek myth where a similar thing
happened, except there the guy is torn to pieces. So your guy got off
easy just being outed. Anyway, it shows that the problem of men lying
and being cunning in order to bed women whom they later dump is hardly
a new phenomenon. 

In my book, I quote some passages from "The Machiavellian Guide to
Womanizing" by "Nick Casanova". Basically, he advises men to say any
lie necessary to get a woman in the sack.   

So the question is "why does it often work"? In the case of Lawrence's
story, I assume supply and demand played a role: there were just so
few guys around (or alive) during WWI. Why does it happen today?
Probably a combination of situations (these predators are very
skilled), cognition ( people are very bad at detecting skilled liars),
personality (a tendency to fall for romantic mush) and emotion ( a
strong desire to get into a romantic relationship). 

Interesting that these guys often get exposed because they go back to
the same well (no pun intended) too many times. Like the original
confidence man, William Thompson, who tried his scam "do you have the
confidence to lend me your watch?" once too often in the same small
area of Wall Street and got spotted by a former victim

 
  

    
>women taking revenge

Carrie Underwood, also.
  

    
Looking through this before-my-time Well incident, which was also
written about by Susie Bright in _The Sexual State of the Union_
(1997), I notice that one common comment people made on that old thread
was something to the effect of "If you assume you are one of the
people who cannot be gullible, you are yourself a prime candidate to be
a con artist's victim."  The idea is that some people are just so
"good" at the con artist game, that just about anyone can be their
victim.  And maybe that there is a special joy for con artists in
gulling those who feel themselves to be immune.

On the other hand, predators are well known to go after the clueless
or vulnerable, or people with some sort of known or sensed lack of
experience, competence, or self-assurance.  

In high school a drug dealer who was among my circle of "friends" used
to say, "I'd never burn anybody but an unsuspecting idiot."  I
immediately assumed I was in the unsuspecting idiot category, to him,
and decided neither to trust him nor dope dealers as a class, at least
in matters of "business."  It does strike me as a great American con
artist's slogan, with the automatic and tautological corollary, "If I
burn you, you ARE an unsuspecting idiot." 

From the victim's point of view, though -- If I admit I've been gulled
then I admit I'm an idiot.  But I am NOT an idiot, dammit!  Therefore,
I'll refuse to admit to myself I'm being gulled, because otherwise, I
would have to have the pain of feeling myself to be one-down, and I
can't bear to think of the con artist's pleasure in conning me. 
  

    
But what that young drug dealer was doing was making his victim into
the other.  The perpetrators of painful acts often put distance between
themselves and the people they hurt by putting them in categories that
justify the harm.
  

    
Yes!  But it's even more insidious than that.  Because the othering is
based on the victim's very vulnerability to harm.  
  

    
To me there's an obvious two reasons why we're most of us open to
gullibility, aside the talent of the con artists.  The first is that we
have an overwhelming body of evidence that most people are enough of
what they claim to be that we're safe around them.  The second is that
we're very social creatures who live in astonishing interdependence
wherein we need one another for a thousand different things in everyday
life.

A few days ago, a man came to my door.  He announced that he was from
the electric company, that he was here to change our metre, and needed
access to the utility room.  "Sure--I'll open the back door.  This way
to the utility room."  I didn't ask for ID, or to see a work order.  I
didn't look to see if he had an official-looking van.  

And sure enough, I was right to trust him.  He did his work quickly;
he complimented something about the utility room; he asked if he should
clean up a shoe print he left on the floor; he smiled.  A nice guy. I
smiled back.  

It's not as though I haven't heard plenty of stories of people
insinuating their way into homes for nefarious reasons, but 1) I need
electricity, 2) I don't have time for how exhausting it is to be
suspicious and 3) I wish him well as a fellow human being and generally
wish to treat him the way I would want to be treated.  

And so to me, most of our vulnerability to gullibility is part of
health, foremost by normalising our experiences, and by putting us in a
position to live comfortably in society, and contributing to general
wellbeing.  Anything else is accepting a certain level of paranoia
which is uncomfortable to most of us, and certainly so to the people
who have to live with us.
  

    
I would imagine that the person who is successful at gulling others
would feel a strong sense of power, at least for the moment.  Is this a
case of dependency and co-dependency, perhaps?
  

    
You make a good point, Tori, about what philosopher Jonathan Adler, in
his book BELIEF'S OWN ETHICS, called the default trust rule, which is
that in the vast majority of cases we are safe in trusting other
people. Obviously there are a small number of cases (which of course
get emphasized in the media) where such trust gets someone killed or
raped. But one should not go through life fearing and distrusting
everyone.

Being trusting actually can make us less gullible, according to
Hokkaido University social psychologist Toshio Yamagishi. That is
because the way to become more socially intelligent (a key to
recognizing social danger) is through experience, and if one withdraws
from ever exposing oneself from potential danger then one: (a) will not
learn what the warning signs (and your own vulnerabilities) are, and
(b) one will not live a very satisfying life. 

However, it is important to recognize danger signs. Probably through
what Malcolm Gladwell calls "blink" (intuitive) processing, you
determined that this particular electric meter guy was a decent human
being. Hopefully, if you felt uneasy around him you might have acted
differently
  

    
It would be great to think our way around this issue of intuition.  It
seems that some intuitions are based on experience of the kind that
Yamagishi is talking about.  Something like "blink" summaries of our
unconscious learning.  But other intuitions are based on little more
than overconfidence and bravado.  Sometimes we have a long run of
feeling our intuitions are right and then something in life slams us in
an unexpected way.  

Do we have to develop intuitions about whether to trust particular
intuitions?  Can we learn to feel the difference between valid "blink"
experience and the kind of gut pseudo-certainty that gets us in
trouble?
  

    
the most important intuition to learn to trust is one's own
especially early in the morning 
when I wake up often problems are magically solved

Living in a high rise
I trust no strangers at the door
  

    
The mention of Yamagishi makes me think of something: There are many
reasons one might guess that certain people with borderline personality
disorder have a tendency to paranoid thinking.  There's indisputable
merit to the belief that it's a projection of their own aggression onto
the other, which aggression they then imagine will be played out
against them as punishment for the aggression.  But it's also occurred
to me that there may be an instinctual sense that their so-called blink
wisdom is weak, and that they therefore best be careful.
  

    
In my experience, which is both professional and personal,
borderline-type people are pretty accurate when it comes to detecting
dislike for them in others. ANd they are also really good at getting
people to dislike them.