Everybody plays the fool
A Q&A with Dr. Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, Professor of Law and Psychology at Penn Carey Law at the University of Pennsylvania
Few things are worse than the feeling of being had. Feeling like a sucker, a fool, a dupe, a mark.
The fear of being played likely shapes your behavior in ways that you have never considered.
When consumers hesitate to adopt a breakthrough technology, or when they fail to plan for their financial future, or when they are bound by any kind of inertia, it is possible that at the root of their behavior is a fear of being taken for a sucker.
Dr. Tess Wilkinson-Ryan explores this topic in her new book, Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order — and What We Can Do About It.
In our Q&A, we discuss the psychology of feeling like a sucker, how humans apply these rules rather haphazardly across different situations, and the deeper reasons why consumers are often skeptical of the influence of corporate marketing — even though we all use some of the same tactics to market ourselves to employers, clients, and colleagues.
(The responses below are lightly edited for brevity.)
JF: I was thinking of your book last weekend when I was on the highway. I’m in the left lane. And there’s a road sign, “Left lane closed one mile ahead.” I did what most other people on the road do, the socially acceptable thing, which is to merge into the right lane as quickly as possible.
So we’re all puttering along in the right lane for a few seconds. And then, inevitably, here’s one or two people in the left lane, flying by at, like, 80 miles an hour. And they’re actually doing the right thing because that’s how you’re supposed to drive, to merge to a point. So why does it piss me off so much when they do that?
TWR: I’ll speak generally, not to your particular psychological makeup, but it’s part of a very familiar phenomenon to most people, which is the feeling that you are playing by the rules, but other people are getting ahead by breaking them, and that when they do that, it reflects something about you, which is that you are a sucker. It’s not just that you’re being harmed, it’s also that the harm reflects poorly on your character or your savviness.
What does it say to me, unconsciously, about my character when I feel like a sucker — not just in this situation, but generally speaking?
It says that you’re not savvy enough to navigate the world competently — something like that. It says that you’re a little bit foolish, a little bit weak. That is the inference that people draw. I think that’s the reason that you see these outsized reactions in cases of road rage, for example — a need to show that, in fact, I’m so dominant that I’m going to rear-end your car or threaten you to a fistfight.
Any loss feels worse when there’s an element of self recrimination, “I could have avoided this if I hadn’t done X.” I think also there’s a there’s an implicit status inference. When someone looks like a fool it’s an implicit social demotion. The fool is never the person in charge. In a hierarchy, the fool is at the bottom. And so I think there’s an element of social embarrassment or humiliation.
There is a name for this.
Three psychologists coined a term. They termed this idea sugrophobia, which in Latin, I think, literally means “the fear of sucking.” The insight is that this human experience is common enough that it deserves to be named.
Is this particularly common in Western culture or is it a human universal?
My informal sense is that it is very common across cultures, and that it plays out differently depending on the cultural context and other cultural factors. I have yet to speak to someone who doesn’t have an example of how this phenomenon plays out in their culture or home country.
“One of the patterns is a particular vigilance for small-scale scams and less vigilance for more systemic or institutional scams.”
In your book you discuss how we apply this fear of being a sucker very inconsistently. For example, someone might go bonkers if they get beef on their burrito instead of the chicken that they ordered because they feel like they have been had. But that same person then might go to the convenience store and spend $50 on Powerball tickets, for example. What’s the difference?
One difference has to do with whether or not an individual has imposed a transactional sucker-like framing onto the particular situation. So, if you think about your traffic example, there are two ways of understanding what the people zooming up are doing. One is that they’re just doing the sensible thing. And another is, these people are taking advantage of the fact that everybody else doesn’t really know what to do. You can bring a different frame to the same exact situation, and that can depend on a whole host of cues and internal preferences.
The other way of talking about this is that there are patterns in where people find sucker threats. One of the patterns is a particular vigilance for small-scale scams and less vigilance for more systemic or institutional scams.
I view a lot of lotteries as basically exploitative. But those are states that are making money off lotteries. Whereas the small-scale scams where the cashier refuses your coupon or gives you the wrong thing — people are much more likely to be vigilant about those kinds of scams, I think in part because of the status implications of being fooled by someone who you thought was, like, working for you. People feel like being suckered is a put-down, so it feels worse to get fooled by someone that you thought you were above in some implicit hierarchy.
There’s a racial and gender component to all of this that you discuss in detail in the book that we won’t have time to do justice to here. But I’ve always been intrigued by college admissions. People raise all kinds of objections about affirmative action — across political ideologies it’s not very popular. Yet, at many universities, there are legacy admissions, which is kind of the same thing just for a different set of people. And nobody objects much to that. Why? (Note: This interview was conducted shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.)
There are a lot of familiar tropes in the United States about how people of color, in general, are scamming to try to get stuff from a white majority. The stereotype is that they claim to want equality, but in fact they want special favors. The affirmative action debates feel familiar in that way. There is an instinctive urge to blame the beneficiaries of affirmative action rather than the long-standing, traditional beneficiaries of favoritism.
We both work in fields that have bad reputations for honesty, law and marketing. I assume most lawyers are not crooks. I know most marketers are not crooks. Why do these fields have such bad reputations for being filled with scammers?
Probably for different reasons. I think that the concern is that marketers want to sell you something, and they’re going to do so by getting around your actual preferences. Rather than, in a perfect world, where advertising and marketing gives consumers information about things that would vindicate their actual preferences. And there are the classic bad actors putting cartoon characters on cigarettes and things like that.
My sense is the concern about lawyers is because their job is to argue for one side zealously, even if their beliefs don’t align with the cause they are arguing for. I don’t think that is the right way of thinking about what lawyers do, but I think that is the popular perception.
With marketing, it is almost a reversal of what you were talking about regarding individual vs. institutional. People seem to be on very high alert for scams from large corporations in a marketing and advertising context. Which is a little weird because if McDonald’s runs an ad, they’re not trying to trick you. They’re trying to influence you because they want you to buy a Big Mac, but they’re not tricking you.
How is that different from a resume? You probably have all your publications on your CV, but I doubt you list all your papers that were rejected — nor would anyone expect you to — because, after all, you are trying to favorably influence a potential employer.
“One of the concerns people have about marketing is they don’t understand it. They don’t know what the tricks are, which makes you hyper-vigilant.”
Let’s say I give my resume and I order my publications in a way that makes it look like my productivity has been a little higher than it has been. I think we worry less about that kind of influence because it is easier to resist — a recruiter has seen a lot of resumes and knows the tricks. Whereas one of the concerns people have about marketing is they don’t understand it. They worry because they don’t know what the tricks are, which makes you hyper-vigilant. That is my guess. It’s funny because marketing is one of those cases where people are skeptical about it but are, in fact, influenced by it every day.
Your book sparked a theory for me. Let me tell you a story. Many years ago I was interviewing doctors about why they prescribe a certain medication. One doctor was going on for 90 minutes about how this treatment had been so helpful for his patients. He’s getting really emotional talking about all his success stories with this medication. And then at the end of the interview we’re walking out of the room and he says, “That was all bullshit. I don’t prescribe this treatment for any emotional reason. I just go by the clinical evidence and what I read in medical journals.” This after he had spent 90 minutes talking all about the emotional attachment he has to the medication.
Here’s my theory. In our culture, we inaccurately perceive a split between the rational mind and the emotional mind. We believe that if we make emotional decisions, that’s bad. And if we make rational decisions, that’s good. And if we are influenced by our emotions, it’s almost like our emotional mind is scamming our rational mind. Therefore, we tend to dismiss, or struggle to consciously admit, any kind of emotional influence on our behavior.
That’s really interesting. The idea is if you appeal to something about myself that I think of as irrational, then what you’re trying to do is take advantage of me.
What’s interesting with the story you just told is that the presumably the doctor was talking to you in a capacity in which he was hoping that people would take the treatment for what he viewed as the legitimate reasons. But he was trying convince them via the “illegitimate” reasons, by the more emotional appeal.
I used to do these studies where I’d ask people about breach of contract. I would ask people, “Why would you choose to breach or not breach a contract?” And a lot of people would say, “I wouldn’t breach a contract because it’s the wrong thing to do.” And then I asked a bunch of law students the same question. I got like multiple students who said, “I wouldn’t breach the contract, but it’s not because of my moral compunction. It’s because I would get a bad reputation because of other people’s moral compunctions.” And I sort of didn’t believe them, sort of like I don’t believe your doctor.
Everyone prefers to believe their choice is entirely rational, but I don’t think most people even know what it means to be entirely rational. Nor do they take seriously that for humans to be able to reason emotionally is good for decision making. Research suggests that when people are experiencing a suppression of their natural affective responses, that they make worse decisions that are less rational.
Final question. If we could somehow eliminate this fear of being a sucker, how would the world be different?
I should start by saying it would probably be a worse world. The fear of being a sucker is doing a lot of good work. It is helping me think about whether I want to vote for someone who has a history of corruption or not. It is making me think twice before I respond to my spam emails. If you have a romantic partner who has betrayed your trust, the sensible thing is not to keep doing the same thing expecting different results. That’s good. I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, but I believe this is basically an adaptive instinct.
But a world in which it’s harder to weaponize the fear of being a sucker, in order to warn people away from each other, would be a better world. One of the things that I worry about the most with this fear of being a sucker is that it makes it easy to be really cynical about important human relationships. To say, “That’s not love, they’re just using you.” Or, “That’s not a genuine cry for help, that’s just a cry for attention.” It is a way of disconnecting humans from each other in ways that are bad for humanity.
There was this humanist psychologist, Carl Rogers, who had the idea that you should treat clients with unconditional positive regard. One of the components of this was what he described as a gullible caring. You so rarely hear the word gullible as something that’s positively valenced. But what he said was, I walk into this therapeutic relationship gullible on purpose. I want to hear what they want to tell me. I want to let them tell it to me, in their words. I want to see what I can learn from caring about them on their terms.
I find that to be kind of revolutionary, a really surprising idea that I find really helpful. What’s so bad about a gullible caring approach? Not when I’m going to buy a used car. That’s not the time for that. But with my students, with my colleagues, with my kids. Times when I think the thing for me to do is to set aside my vain worry that I’m gonna look a little foolish, and to focus on what the core of this relationship is about.
James Forr is Head of Insights at Olson Zaltman
