How to Spot a Scam
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We like to think that con artists only prey upon the weak, or gullible. But psychologist Dan Simons says all of us can fall victim to scams, because the best scammers know how to take advantage of our biases and blindspots.
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This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Nearly half a century ago, volunteers in a psychological experiment were shown a slight show of a small red car getting into a crash. Some volunteers were asked, "How fast was the car travelling when it passed the yield sign?" There was a catch. The original slides showed the car passing a stop sign, not a yield sign. Just Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues later asked volunteers to identify images they had seen before. Some volunteers were shown the earlier slide with a stop sign. Others saw an edited slide where the stop sign was replaced by a yield sign. Volunteers who had been asked the question about the yield sign mistakenly remembered seeing the picture with the yield sign. In the intervening decades, hundreds of experiments have shown that what we think we see is really an amalgam of what is out there, how we feel about what we see, our conversations with others about what we see, and so on. Attention, memory, and emotion all play a role in shaping what we notice and what we fail to observe. In the late 1990s, the psychologist Dan Simons and Christopher Shabri devised an experiment that produced a nearly unbelievable result. They had volunteers watch a group of people passing basketballs. Volunteers were told to count how many times the ball was passed between members of a group. It was tricky, but if you focused you could do it. But the researchers were after something more interesting than counting basketball passes in a video. A person wearing a full gorilla suit walks into the middle of the video, turns to face the camera, thumps its chest, and then walks off the other side about nine seconds later. The gorilla seems impossible to miss. It's a gorilla. But as psychologist Dan Simons points out, the volunteers were not looking for gorillas. They were intently counting basketball passes. What we find is about half the people who view this video didn't notice the gorilla, and when you ask them about it, they're shocked that they could have possibly missed something so obvious. This week on Hidden Brain, why we miss things hiding in plain sight, and how grifters and cheats take advantage of our blind spots. We'll also explore how to keep from falling prey to scams. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France business cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. On board, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines, and champagne selected by Assamelier and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable, life-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated, because Air France business cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. If a Hidden Brain comes from Land Rover, even the boldest journey starts small with a single decision to go somewhere new. Purpose-built and courage-driven, the Defender 110 combines on-road presence with off-road capability.
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We like to think that con artists only prey upon the weak, or gullible. But psychologist Dan Simons says all of us can fall victim to scams, because the best scammers know how to take advantage of our biases and blindspots.