Everybody loves a great scam, a hoax, a con. We love to ask, how could someone fall for that? It's the irresistible premise behind a glut of popular podcasts, bestselling books and docuseries. Whether it's Bernie Madoff or a Nigerian prince, we're drawn to the cat and mouse drama of humans trying to get over on other humans. It makes for "great storytelling," as author Daniel Simons observes. It's also an experience almost everyone can relate to — the stranger's sob story that doesn't quite check out, the email that looks almost exactly like it came from your credit card company.
As Simons and his coauthor Christopher Chabris write in "Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It," we're designed to be relatively trusting creatures. And for the most part, it serves us well to assume our pharmacist is giving us our real medication and that the voice on the other end of the phone is truly our best friend. How then do we balance our social need for a certain degree of mutually presumed integrity with a self-preserving requirement for some street smart skepticism of Greeks bearing gifts?
