Not only that, it might even be reasonable, or adaptive, to experience outsized self-recrimination. Even if the bank resolves the issue and blocks the charge, even if the only cost to me is a little bit of hassle on the phone, I know that I would feel worse than the hassle alone would suggest I should. To my chagrin, I discover that I have given my credit card number to a scammer, not a volunteer from a charity. Soon, I get a fraud alert from my bank telling me that the charge to my card is from a suspect source. Imagine that I agree to donate to a charitable cause.
To get inside the sucker fear, let’s engage in a brief thought experiment. Deployed at scale, sucker tropes help to perpetuate group stereotypes – about who can be trusted and who should be policed – and reinforce traditional class, race and gender hierarchies in ways that we scarcely appreciate. The fear of being a sucker can become an excuse to reject solidarity, to hold people under suspicion. At the systemic level, the stakes of distrust are even higher. On a personal level, the fear of being suckered can encourage someone to be risk averse, to avoid the kind of cooperation that is essential to any new venture. A diverse body of evidence from psychology and behavioural economics can help us understand those costs. But there are costs to excessive scepticism, too, for both the self and the social order. It makes sense to be wary of scams: you should not reply to your spam emails, no matter how much you’d like to help a prince retrieve millions from his trust fund.
#Another word for loser driver#
When your lunch costs more than you expected, when your co-worker calls in sick for the third time this month, when you let the insistent driver in the breakdown lane nose in front of you: for many people, these little interactions come with a special sting of self-recrimination: Wait, am I the fool here? The fear of being duped can be so aversive that it transcends rational prudence and becomes something more automatic and more intense – a true phobia. Yet the feeling of being a sucker – and the fear of that feeling – is much more commonplace. There are only so many Ponzi schemes or Enrons to get embroiled in, and most people will never find themselves in the thick of a high-stakes fraud. But as the above examples show, sugrophobia is more than just a fear of being caught in a con. When I describe my interest in the subject, people often infer that I study scams. I have been thinking about the psychology of being a sucker for 15 years.
Will ChatGPT help students cheat unwitting teachers? Is remote work popular since the COVID-19 pandemic because employees can slack off more easily? Does forgiving student-loan debt let ‘slacker baristas’ exploit hardworking taxpayers, as one US politician suggested? Public debates about a wide range of social policies and technological advances feature inchoate fears about who’s going to be swindled next. The number of ‘sucker’ synonyms alone suggests a cultural obsession: pawn, dupe, chump, fool, stooge, loser, mark, and so on. Its influence extends from the choices we make as individuals to the society-wide narratives that sow distrust and discrimination. But, once you start to look for it, it becomes clear that sugrophobia is not only real, it is a veritable epidemic. The idea that psychologists would study suckers academically seems almost ridiculous at first. The researchers – Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister and Jason Chin – were looking to name the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the inkling that they’re ‘being a sucker’ – that someone is taking advantage of them, partly thanks to their own decisions. In 2007, three experimental psychologists, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, coined the word ‘sugrophobia’, which would translate to something like a ‘fear of sucking’.
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