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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're flying solo again, which means we hopefully won't crash this joint, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
That's right. That's right.
How are you, man? You're still sick, huh?
Yeah, I mean, this is kind of—I mean, I don't like playing it this close, but it's kind of fun to be a little more current with, like, listener mails and updates and stuff.
Yeah. It keeps us on the edge where we need to be.
Yeah. So this will be out on Tuesday, I guess.
And in real time, this is the day after the Automat Oyster Stew debacle.
I don't know if it was a debacle.
That turned out to be a pretty good app.
And Aaron Cooper already came through.
Oh, good. I haven't seen it yet.
Yeah, it's funny. I'm okay.
You know, things subside in the early afternoon, so I'm actually feeling a little better than it was like 20 minutes ago even.
Man, that's crazy. Yeah, I got to go to the doctor and just get it over with.
You do? I heard that there's a really bad norovirus going around, and that's got to be what you got, man.
Going around Mexico City?
Going around the world.
Oh, really? Yeah, Mexico City's included.
This feels bacterial diureticulitis -related.
Oh, that's true. I forgot you got that.
Well, there's still a norovirus going around, so don't catch that, too.
I'll try. But I'm hanging in there.
I am working on less than 300 calories a day for five days now.
So I am a shell of a human.
You're going to look lean and mean, buddy.
Have you been doing push -ups?
I can't do one push -up right now.
There's no way. Well, Chuck, I guess it's entirely possible.
since I haven't seen you, I've just, you know, been talking to you while we record, I have no idea whether you're actually sick or not.
And it's entirely possible that you're fooling me right now.
And if you are, I would argue that doesn't make me gullible because I generally believe you're trustworthy.
There's no reason to believe that you're not sick.
So really, you'd just be a shameful, dirty liar, and I would be the hero in this situation.
That's right. This is on gullibility.
We were just talking offline that there are, I think, 100 different ways to approach this kind of topic, and sometimes that's freeing, and sometimes that's really frustrating.
And I think this one is a little frustrating.
Olivia put together a great article, I think, but it's just a hard one.
When I pitched it to her, I was like, you know what, I feel like, especially here in America, we're at peak gullibility as a nation.
And, like, I just wondered, like, is there any science to that?
Like, are people more gullible than others?
And can science be gullible?
And this is what we came up with.
Yeah, interestingly, yes, science can be gullible.
On the other hand, you could argue that Americans aren't more gullible than usual, that there's actually just different factors involved that make people want to believe things.
It's weird. I think one of the reasons why it's so hard to wrap our head around is social psychologists are still trying to wrap their head around it.
And you know what happens when social psychologists get a hold of something.
Oh, yeah. It's an oyster stew party.
It's a little unsteady as they figure it out.
That's right. It's an oyster stew party.
So I think it's not us is what I'm trying to say.
And you, dear listener, if you're like, what is going on?
It's not you either.
It's social psychology.
That's right. I guess we can start by talking about – I mean, we're going to talk about a lot of different people, a lot of different people that study this kind of stuff.
A lot of different studies, some of which make more sense than others.
But this guy, Stephen Greenspan, is an author.
He wrote a book. He wrote the book on it, Annals of Gullibility, colon, Why We Are Duped and How to Avoid It.
And one sort of important thing he does up front is say, hey, there's a difference between credulity and gullibility.
Credulity is if, you know, you'll believe something just without looking at all the evidence.
And gullibility means you're you have an active response to perhaps being conned.
I take issue with this right out of the gate.
I kind of did, too.
I think that's a terrible distinction because I think you can totally fall for something and be duped.
Yeah. And you be the only person who knew that, who knows it.
You know, somebody could say something that duped you and they don't stop and focus to get like that question of whether they duped you or not answered.
They just keep going on.
But you know you've been duped.
You don't have to respond to a Nigerian prince email or send somebody a bunch of Walmart cards to get out of some random federal case that's against you to have been gullible.
You just have to believe it.
And usually in the absence of any kind of supporting evidence and sometimes in the presence of contradictory evidence, that's gullibility in my understanding.
That's you're believing something without bothering to go check it out.
And that to me is the baseline of gullibility.
I totally agree. I thought that definition was really weird.
And I'm glad both are in here, though, because sometimes it's a nice contrast.
But along the lines of what you were saying, there's a group of researchers, social psychologists from Macquarie University.
There can be a lot of Aussies in this.
You can say that name better than that.
Macquarie? Oh, like Aussie style?
Yeah. Macquarie? Although any time you do that, you sound like Murray from Flight of the Concords to me.
Murray in prison. Alessandra K.
Tunis, maybe? That's what I'm going with.
Defined it much in the way you would and I would and I think a lot of people would, which is simply the propensity to accept a false premise in the presence of untrustworthy clues.
That's it. That's it.
You don't have to act on it.
No. You can just believe.
What's up with Greenspan?
And no one in the world could know besides you that you believed and you're still gullible in that sense.
The thing that really stood out to me that we'll talk about a lot more, though, is you can make a really good case that people aren't as gullible as other people think they are.
And I found that kind of reassuring.
We'll talk about that later, but I don't want anybody to get the impression that we're just like, yep, people are generally stupid.
And here's how they fall for stupid stuff.
And you're probably stupid, too.
That's not actually what the science of gullibility has turned up.
No, and there's a lot of factors.
And this is where I think Greenspan did kind of hit on something is four factors of gullibility situational.
Like if there's a lot of if everyone else is doing it and there's a lot of social pressure, like all the bros are investing in the same cryptocurrency.
And it's at a great price.
And you're like, oh, man, I got to get in there.
All the guys are right.
You know, everyone's in on that.
So there's social pressure where you can fall for something.
cognitive issues like well as we'll get to later with you know our senior friends sometimes there's like legit brain cognitive issues that's a different thing than this but this is just lacking expertise and you know you can't evaluate what you're being told because you're just not I don't want to say
smart enough you're just not an expert in whatever that is yeah you're not informed enough in that particular thing yeah what else personality is another one And if you're impulsive.
This is a big one, yeah.
It's a big one. If you're low in curiosity, you're like, I don't care.
Just tell me what to think.
I'm too lazy to go figure it out myself.
I got better things to do than think.
Or if you have a high need for independence.
This struck me quite a bit because if you're independence minded, you don't need smarty pants, pencil neck, college boys telling you what's right or what's wrong or what's true or what's false.
You can figure it out yourself.
Yeah. And those people are actually at high risk of being duped, which is really surprising.
But if you stop and think about it, it makes total sense.
They're overconfident.
And that's a huge factor in being gullible.
Yeah, I totally think it makes sense, you know, because it happened to his cousin.
That's right. Emotion can play a big factor in a lot of ways.
And we'll talk about some of those with some studies later on.
But one way is like if if let's say we're specifically talking about being kind, if it gives you a positive feeling, whether it's a somebody catfishing you and making you feel loved or, you know, some sort of financial thing that you think might provide for your long term security or like, oh, man,
I know one else knows about this deal.
But me, I'm so smart for getting in on the ground floor here, that kind of thing.
Right. And strangely, ironically, almost as if he did it on purpose.
because it supports everything he wrote about.
Stephen Greenspan, the author of that book about gullibility, he finished his book and shortly afterward, he was informed by, I guess, his stockbroker that he had lost a bunch of money by investing in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
With the ironies, huh?
So he was like, even the guy that researched this and wrote the book on gullibility can fall for it.
That's a really great little tidbit.
But I think it also goes to show just how specific gullibility is.
Because I don't get the impression that Stephen Greenspan was like, this Madoff guy is making a lot of really great points, and this is incredibly high risk.
But I'm going to go along with it anyway.
Like he went through a stockbroker and everything.
So there's only a certain amount of gullibility.
It's just Bernie Madoff is like shorthand for fooling people.
You know what I mean?
Not to pick on Stephen Greenspan or anything like that.
No, I feel very bad for him, despite his poor definition.
Right. So some other people have said, well, we really want to show off as social psychologists.
We're going to create a gullibility scale.
And in fact, Alessandra Tunis from Macquarie University, I'm not even going to try that one, but it's Australian for university.
Sorry Australians There's this beer called Foster's That here in America We think you drink a lot of And in America The ad campaign says Foster's It's Australian for beer I love that you barely use an accent You just say it seriously And that gets the point across Right It makes people pay attention Australian for beer
Got it That's the best I can do That's how I think Australians talk uh yeah so this gullibility scale was self -reported uh basically like do you self -reported meaning um do you think others do you perceive yourself as gullible and do you think others perceive you as gullible uh and then they you know
they filled in with some other questions like how persuadable are you and stuff like that and it actually for a self -reported study which you know a lot of those can be tough.
This seemed to work out pretty good for them, don't you think?
It did because they backed it up.
They, I can't remember what it's called, but they tested the validity.
They tested the validity of the self -reporting panel and found that the people who reported themselves or scored the highest on gullibility on this test were more likely to click a link on a phishing email than people who scored low.
So it seems like a invalid test.
And one of the things I went and looked it up, Chuck, and one of the questions wasn't even a question.
It was, you are very persuadable.
And the only option to check was yes.
Ah, what? No, I'm kidding.
Oh, man. This is so upsetting.
It's all right. You're not at 100 % at all.
I didn't think you would take advantage of this today.
It was more of the joke.
I wasn't trying to take advantage of you, although I realize now that I did.
It's okay, buddy. All for the show.
On that scale, they found some traits that were common among those that scored high in gullibility.
Social intelligence was one of them.
That'll keep coming back over and over.
Vulnerability, emotionality, which we've talked about a little bit.
Weak sense of self, which also comes up in different ways.
I think you found an article about how parents can wreck kids by not giving them self -confidence, right?
And they'll end up gullible.
Yeah, pretty much. And depending And it doesn't even have to be like you're such a stupid kid every day.
It can just be things like where your opinion is not really heard or validated or just all sorts of little missteps that parents can make that make parenting a living nightmare.
You can carry on as an adult, and it can make you doubt your own opinion so you're not going to speak up.
It can make you be afraid of looking stupid so you don't ask questions because you don't want to seem like I didn't immediately get it, so I'm going to look dumb if I ask these questions.
There's like it just sets you up for being more likely to be a victim of being duped than somebody who has a lot of confidence.
Yeah. I have a good friend who had a pretty bad stepfather and the abuse in this situation was exclusively he made him feel stupid at every opportunity.
That is so wrong. Like I should be in jail.
He's passed on now, but I can't think of any.
I mean, there are all kinds of things that are worse, obviously, but something so damaging for such a small person to do that to a child.
Yeah. And literally like, oh, you think so?
Like, you know, just that's how he was talked to his whole life growing up.
It's awful. Man, that is rough.
And he's super gullible.
Oh, is he really? No, actually, I don't think so.
Oh, you got me back.
There you go. We should just do that to one another, like every minute or two.
One thing we should mention, though, because this pops up a couple of times, and I think it's super fascinating, is another trait they found on the gullibility scale, if you're very gullible, was belief in paranormal activity.
Yeah. Just park it right there.
But I guess that depends on whether paranormal activity is real or not, you know?
Well, I guess so. I mean, that's described from a point of view where you're just like, that's all fake anyway, so.
Yeah. Duh. One of the things about social intelligence that's worth pointing out, so that's basically a package that you can have.
Some people are much better at it than others, but basically everyone alive in a society has some degree or other of this package of skills that form social intelligence, like whether or not you're good at conversation, whether you are good at effective listening, what your knowledge of social roles
and social scripts are, and then awareness of like what make other people tick and then what people think of you.
And you put all this together and if you have like high emotional or social intelligence, you're going to be able to navigate interactions with other people much better than somebody with low intelligence.
Part of that is not getting scammed by somebody by being able to be like, you're a scammer and I'm not going to send you a Walmart gift card now.
Yeah. And it's a trait I think that you can't necessarily teach, but is really beneficial to have as a human.
Yeah, I admire people with high social intelligence because it's not just, you know, being able to spot a scammer.
It's being able to see the best in other people and I think to bring out the best in other people and let them bring out the best in you.
That's just it's maybe in another life, maybe the next lifetime.
Oh, buddy, I think you're great.
They did another study at the University of Leicester, where they found that childhood traumas can really affect you later in life in terms of gullibility, like any kind of bullying, a death of a family member or something like that.
It leads you more susceptible to fall for tricks later in life.
And apparently they say it could be because that kind of trauma just makes it hard to trust your own judgments.
And, you know, I guess everyone else's intent.
For sure. And then some people, because it's actually kind of counterintuitive, you think if you've gone through the school of hard knocks, I think is the way that the study put it.
Yeah, yeah. You would think that they'd come out like much more world wary and like suspicious of people.
And so they'd be less likely to fall for a scam.
But no, instead, like you said, they just they question their own judgment for having gone through what they went through.
That's terrible. It is.
It is very terrible.
Childhood is just fraught, you know?
It really is. It's a wonder any of us can function in any, like, real way.
Oh, I know. I mean, we're pretty good parents, but I often think, like, how are we messing her up?
Because I know we are in some way.
Yep. I mean, I can't imagine.
Like, that's got to just keep you up at night sometimes if you think about it too much, you know?
I sleep pretty good.
Good. You just wake up to throw up every hour.
Uh, yeah, I think just try to limit that stuff as a parent.
Like there's, you can't be perfect.
Uh, I mean, my brother's a perfect parent, but there's only, there's only one.
Scott. Another thing I thought was interesting, and this makes total sense, is if you rely on your intuition a lot, um, you're a lot more vulnerable, uh, vulnerable to being duped by something just like, you know, some people have a good gut and some people think they have a good gut, but do not.
Yes. Another one that really stood out to me, though, that this this I would not have predicted is the more cynical you are.
Studies have found that the likelier you are to be gullible or duped.
And the reason why actually makes tons of sense.
Again, if you're cynical, you think you've got everything figured out.
Like you're just you think the world sucks and everybody's trying to take advantage of you and the government's constantly screwing you over.
and everyone's going to try to get an angle on you.
That's cynicism, right?
At least in the modern sense.
And it's actually a lazy shortcut to experiencing reality because on the one hand, you lose out an opportunity cost.
You miss a lot of great stuff.
Like you might not make friends that you could have made because you were suspicious of this stranger chatting you up at the outset or something like that.
But as far as gullibility goes, If somebody comes along and talks to you in your language, they can pull one over on you much more easily because they are tapping into your cynicism, which again is just lazy shorthand for experiencing reality.
It's based largely on intuition and supposition and not necessarily taking each experience and looking at it based on the facts as a unique thing.
It all has this one cast to it that's the same and that's just not how the world actually works.
Yeah. And I think, you know, that kind of suggests that if there's like a country with an authoritarian leader in place, like the simple sort of easy to understand radical solutions that are pitched out oftentimes in those situations are very easy to fall for if you're a gullible person, because that itself
is a mental shortcut.
Well, we just got we just got to do this.
for sure and then conversely to not being cynical requires way more brain power and thought and just participation than being cynical does like you have to actually like ask yourself like is this true what kind of source is this coming from i might need to go do some research i might need to ask people
it's just so much easier to be like nope they're screwing me over i don't even need to bother to look into that because you're also defending yourself at the same time from getting taken advantage of again until somebody comes along and is talking your language and then you will um oftentimes fall for whatever
they're saying yeah uh should we take a break yeah all right we'll take a break and uh talk about um mood right after this La -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da Stuff you should know You're a details person, checking reviews, reading nutritional info, even terms and conditions.
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Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.
With hundreds of showcasing artists performing across six days in over 50 venues, Discovery is right around the corner at South by Southwest.
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All right, we're back.
We promised to talk a little bit about mood because the fact is you are not always gullible or always not gullible.
Everybody could get duped at any time from, you know, that changes from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, depending on a lot of factors like mood.
If you're really, really tired, if you're super distracted, if you're upset, you may not notice something that can, you know, make you fall for a scam.
Also, the same holds if you're in a really good mood.
You know, if you're just feeling great about everything, you're like, yeah, yes to life.
Yes to everything. There was a study in 1938 by a researcher named Gregory Razran who found that giving a free lunch made people more receptive to a political message.
And apparently that is sort of where like the sales lunch started, taking people out to sell them something and feeding them.
You were more likely to close a deal.
And I'm sure the same thing, like golf course sales things like the salesperson's not there beating the person in golf that they're selling to.
I guarantee it. I don't know how that works, but I imagine you're letting them win and feel good about stuff.
Yeah. Think about how good you have to be to purposefully lose at golf.
Oh, I could play bad golf on purpose and I'm not really.
Yeah. OK, well, I take that one back.
And on accident. So, yes, but on the contrary, if you are upset, if you're sad, if you're depressed, you're mad, if you're in a low mood.
you are actually more likely to pay attention to granular things.
I think it actually kind of ties into rumination.
You're just thinking about stuff.
You're turned inward.
So if somebody comes along and tries to sell you something, it's going to be harder to slip it past you because you're paying attention more than somebody who's like, yeah, whatever, let's have another round.
So overall, if you think about people who might be gullible, You might think, you know, if you're going to stereotype it, like people like kids, very young people, very old people and people that aren't very well educated.
Obviously. But it's not necessarily true.
What? There is a lot of factors, one of which I mentioned earlier.
You can get, you know, a lot of skewed studies about the gullibility of someone who's older, because if you're older, you're more likely to have a cognitive ability that's literally keeping you from being able to determine whether something is true.
But they've also conversely found that sometimes they're a little more protected because they're constantly have their children and everyone else saying like, no, no, no, watch out for scams.
They're trying to scam you.
Everyone's trying to scam you.
Right. Yeah. So it's like a self -fulfilling prophecy that they are less likely to be scammed because they're so vigilant.
That's amazing to me.
So there was this one study that kind of backed all this up from the University of Tirana.
And they found they looked at adults 60 to 90 who handled their own finances.
They didn't have any diagnosed cognitive issues.
And they found that people who had reported being victims of a fraud, there was nothing that really happened or there was no characteristic demographically, anything like that, that made them different from anybody else.
The only thing that seemed to really kind of stick out was that the people who had been scammed before had low conscientiousness, one of the big five.
They were less honest, humble, which is another kind of personality trait from a different scale.
Yeah. And that from what I could see, the honesty thing means they explained it like you're if you are low on honesty, you're more likely to try something that might be a scam because you might get rich quick or something like that.
You're more willing to take a shortcut, say, than somebody who would score higher on honesty, which you put you at greater risk.
Yeah. But that was about it.
There wasn't like, you know, the older you get or the less educated you are in this group, you're more likely to get scammed.
It was some other stuff entirely.
But they found also that people who do experience cognitive decline do tend to get taken advantage of more, which is really messed up and sad, but it's true.
And as a matter of fact, they've started to some people have started to push this idea.
Like if you fall for a scam, you should immediately be tested for Alzheimer's or dementia because there's a high correlation with getting scammed as an older person.
And the early, early developments of cognitive decline.
Yeah, it's got to feel terrible.
I mean, it's bad enough to feel like you're getting scammed, but then to stop and be like, well, is this it for me in my mind?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thankfully, nothing like that's ever happened to my parents.
But you hear the stories all the time, and it's just tragic and shameful.
For sure. There was a study in 2018 that I thought was pretty interesting, a woman named Monica T.
Whitty, another Aussie.
When you talk about being catfished, which is, I guess I threw that word out, assuming everyone knows it.
That's like when you get scammed in a sort of a romantic thing online by someone who's pretending to be someone they're not generally.
We should do an episode on that sometime because I just don't – I mean, I get it, but I don't understand like where it started or anything like that.
Yeah, let's put that down.
That would be super interesting.
Okay. Do you remember the Notre Dame football player?
Yeah, I thought he was – isn't he like the Dolphins quarterback now or – No, I don't think he's in the league anymore.
He played the NFL for a little while, but he was a linebacker for Notre Dame that was famously catfished and like, you know, smart, handsome, young athlete guy.
So it's not like just, you know, the lonely loser in the basement that falls for stuff like that.
Have you heard about the lonesome loser?
He still keeps on trying.
Oh, man. Little River man.
So good. 2018, Monica Witte did one on sort of catfishing, but really just romance scams is what they called it.
And she said, if you fall for something like that, you obviously will be a little more impulsive in sensation seeking.
Right. And so if someone's building up about all these great stories and these big travels and, you know, it's always it's never just like, well, I just kind of sit around at home like they always present themselves as offering some new exciting life, it seems like.
Right. But she also found that they were more highly educated than average.
And Livia, I think, is on the money, kind of speculates that could be – and I think it's true when we did our thing on online dating.
It's generally people that are college educated that participate in online dating a little more.
Right. Statistically, but also maybe that if you're more educated, you just think like, I'm not going to fall for catfishing.
I know all about that, and this is not that.
Right. Overconfidence, right?
And then you're on that hook.
And then another thing about being online, too, the Better Business Bureau back in 2015, I think, they looked at, I guess, a bunch of their, like, scam complaints that came in just to see who reported them.
And they found that people between 25 and 35 were more likely to lose money on a scam than older people, which is totally contrary to what people think of when they think of people who get scammed.
And one of the one of the explanations that they came up with is in part younger people are just online more.
So they're just more likely by the numbers to have scams presented to them, which means that they're more likely to probably go for a scam than, say, people who are online less.
Right. I agree with that in the old days.
I think that's changing because I've never seen a generation as phone addicted as boomers are.
Oh, really? Oh, man.
You don't hang around a lot of boomers, do you?
They have Gen Z beat?
Every boomer I know just obsessively stares at their phone and looks things up.
I thought they all had flip phones that only dial numbers.
No, no, no. They want to show you all the information in the moment.
I got you. Right in the middle of dinner at a nice restaurant even.
I guess I've not experienced that.
But I do think that that generally is true.
Okay. Fair enough. I just want to take a shot at boomers.
Well, then that makes it even less understandable that 25 to 35 -year -olds would be more likely to be scammed.
I don't know. Maybe that generation is just more trusting these days or something like that.
Actually, I got to take that back because, as we'll see, trusting, being trusting is not necessarily correlated with being gullible.
Yeah, which I think we'll get to in a minute before or after the next break.
But can we talk about science?
Because this is one thing when I sent Livia the idea, I was like, I think I'd read an article about scientists being gullible.
And I was like, no, not scientists.
But it turns out they very much can be because a lot of times when you are that well versed in a field, you might kind of think you know it all.
And like, oh, no, I know what I'm doing.
And so you might be more apt to believe a result that isn't accurate because you think you did it the right way.
Like, that's just one aspect of it.
Yeah, another aspect is, like you said, people in science typically know a tremendous amount about their field.
But they can make a mistake and think that that understanding, that depth of understanding will just apply to other fields as well that they just don't know as much about.
And that's another way they can fall prey to it.
But also scientists like to be right as much as anybody else.
And I don't remember what episode we did this in.
I think it was about the reproducibility crisis in science papers, if I remember correctly.
But just how, like, scientists don't set up experiments to disprove their hypothesis.
They set them up to prove their hypothesis.
That's how you get published.
That's how you get celebrated.
Like, nobody wants to hear about you failing, even though that's what science is meant to be.
That's a part of it as well, just wanting to be right.
So if somebody comes along and is like, yep, you're right.
Let's use that to explain this other thing that's actually not true.
the scientists might go along with it because if it is true then it will prove their their hypothesis and make them very famous and they'll probably end up having an hbo movie made about them well that was probably a scientific method huh maybe maybe but i mean we definitely talked about papers just
being yeah some of them just being outright fraudulent because their experiments are set up incorrectly it could have been scientific method yeah or like the the little student in Rushmore that faked the results I don't remember that part you know Max has his sort of little budding girlfriend at the end
and she's he says something about she won some science award and I think she had to give it back or something and she said he's like why she said I faked the results it didn't work so I faked it yeah I thought that was so her line where she tells Bill Murray that she won't dance with him it was a little
out of nowhere oh interesting yeah Yeah, I get that.
A little harsh, I think, is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, who doesn't want to dance with Bill Murray?
I do. You and Lucy Liu.
All right. Wait, Lucy Liu doesn't or does want to dance with Bill Murray?
No, I don't think she does.
They were on Charlie's Angels together and had some words.
Oh, that's right. I remember that.
Yeah, so I doubt she's dancing with Bill.
Okay. All right, should we take a break?
Wait, before we go to a break, I was saying I would like to dance with Bill Murray.
Oh, yeah. Okay. I just want to make sure that no one walks away to this ad break thinking that I don't want to dance with Bill Murray.
Yeah, I was being sort of opposite with my Lucy Liu joke.
Gotcha. Okay. You know, I'm not firing on all cylinders.
I'm doing my best. I'm not either, apparently.
All right. We'll be right back.
And Josh will lead off with a little bit on Trust.
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Okay. We're back, everybody.
And I mentioned before that trust is not necessarily correlated with gullibility.
And I love that. That just makes me feel good about the world again.
You can trust people and think the best of people and still not be gullible.
Yeah. And so we'll kind of explain why.
But there have been study after study after study that basically say, yeah, that's actually true.
Like you can have a high level of trust, be tested for that kind of thing, and you are not more likely to be gullible.
And in fact, it seems that if you are a higher trusting person, you're actually less likely to be gullible compared to, say, like the cynic.
Like there's this researcher named Toshio Yamagishi, who's considered one of the most prominent researchers in gullibility and trust.
out of Hokkaido University.
I know how to say Hokkaido.
I don't know why I had trouble with that at first.
But one of the things that Yamagishi did in the 1990s was to tell people who scored high in trusting this and other people who scored low about the story of Bill.
And Chuck, I think you should take it because Bill's got a great story.
Yeah, I kind of understand this, but not 100%.
But I think I get it.
So what he would say is, Bill, your friend Bill, stayed at a hotel for a week.
He was only charged one day.
Do you think he would tell the cashier about this, even though there's like no chance?
Let's say there's no chance of him getting caught later on.
Do you think he would do that?
And people who scored high on their trustworthy score, like people who were trustworthy, they were more likely to say that Bill would do the honest thing.
But when he added in a twist here, which is to tell them some negative things about Bill, like, by the way, just want to let you know, Bill also cut in line the other day.
He also makes his stepson feel stupid.
He also makes his stepson feel stupid.
But if they added in a couple of nuggets like that, negative things about Bill, the people who had high trust in people generally put a lot more weight on that additional information than the other people did.
the people that were low in trustworthiness.
Right. But the bottom line was even with positive information like Bill littered, but he also cut in line.
If you took all of the tallies, you would see that people who were low in trusting others and people who are high in trusting others, they had about the same scores.
So this research from Yamagishi and others shows that like you can trust other people and it doesn't open you up to being taken advantage of.
And that just doesn't make any sense because just the idea of being gullible means that you're trusting what somebody else is saying.
That's the popular conception of it.
But as we've seen, really, the idea of gullibility is trusting what somebody says because you either don't care enough to go figure it out yourself because you don't feel like thinking for yourself because what they're saying confirms your biased beliefs, not that you just trust people in general.
And the explanation that I saw that really kind of drives it home for me, Chuck, is that people who have high trust are also more discerning so they would have probably a better social intelligence than people who don't trust as much.
And that makes sense because if you don't trust people like the cynic, you're actually protecting yourself.
You're guarding yourself.
You know that you are probably not as discerning as other people.
And so rather than get yourself into trouble time and time again, you just keep people at arm's length.
You don't really trust them.
Whereas if you are high trusting, you are better at discerning.
And that either means that because you're good at discerning, you have the freedom to trust other people because you can be confident in your judgment of other people and you're probably not going to be taken advantage of.
Or if you are just a trusting person by nature, you have to have a higher discernment or else you're going to be taken advantage of.
Either way, high discernment and high trust go hand in hand.
Yeah, and that can be a very freeing thing.
And that's how Yamagishi sort of thought about it when he talked about his emancipation theory, which is if you're trusting you're kind of or if you're untrusting, I guess you're kind of shackled in a way because you'll, you may just be stuck in a place because why, um, why hire a different person to
do it? Cause they're just going to be a scammer too.
Um, and so you can get stuck in this cycle.
Um, but if you free yourself from that, uh, with his emancipation theory and you break those shackles and you start trusting people, it makes you much more apt to, to make a positive change in life because you trust somebody or something or some situation.
Yeah, because at base, you can go through life not trusting other people and you can make it all the way to old age and die at pretty much the same age that you would have had you trusted people.
But again, you're missing out.
There's opportunity costs to not trusting other people that people who do trust other people are not missing out on.
And you're just not connected as socially and research after research after research shows that social connections are like the number one predictor of living to a healthy older age.
So you're actually robbing yourself by just not trusting other people.
But again, it's kind of understandable if you were taught that your judgment is questionable, either through trauma, through a jerk stepdad or whatever.
It's understandable.
And I'm not I'm not sure if that's something that you can learn to break out of.
although I sincerely hope it is yeah for sure um there are people that think we are actually not as gullible as everyone thinks uh there's this writer Hugo uh Mercier who wrote a book in 2020 called not born yesterday great title for a book like that and he's like people are less gullible than we we
think um and there are a lot of like criteria people use to to work out if they're if they believe something or not and we're better at it, then then we all think we are like a lot.
Most people or I guess in his idea, most people are actually looking for well -informed or well -intentioned information or if it has logic to it, if it's logically strong or, you know, maybe people are less like this, which is I'm just going to accept something or I'm sorry, I'm not going to accept something
as a new piece of information because it's not something that I have found to be true.
He argues that people are less like that than they say.
And people also judge other people to be more likely to be duped than they are, more gullible than they are.
But yeah, his whole message is like, no, we're actually as a group, as a species, not all that gullible.
What appears to be gullibility is actually just somebody not caring enough to argue a point, or they're accepting information, but they're hanging on to it loosely.
Olivia, I thought this is awesome.
She pointed out that if you are shown like an AI -generated baby peacock that looks super cute and has huge eyes and is colorful and is nothing like what a baby peacock really looks like, if you're not like a peacock researcher or your job doesn't depend on positively identifying baby peacocks, it doesn't
really matter if you think that that's what they look like because you're holding on to it loosely enough that if somebody comes along and it says, that's not what baby peacocks actually look like, you're not going to like, that's not the hill you're going to die on.
You're going to be like, oh, that's crazy what AI can do or, oh, it got me.
Or just be like, great, I now know what baby peacocks look like.
And that's his point is that's not gullibility.
That's just not stopping to analyze, you know, whether it's true or not, because it just isn't that important right then.
Yeah, exactly. He also points out in the book when it comes to like propaganda that propaganda isn't something that can usually really completely change someone's mind.
What propaganda is good at is taking someone who already has those beliefs and putting them on turbo speed and reinforcing them.
Even like the Nazi propaganda machine, you know, he contends probably wasn't making someone anti -Semitic.
But if you were anti -Semitic, then it really drove you down that road at a pretty fast pace.
Yeah, because it came at your beliefs and said, yep, go for it.
Like, that's what that's the official line now is anti -Semitism.
Yeah. Yeah. And also, similarly, political ads don't don't really work.
That's what they say.
Right. Yeah. And that makes me wonder, though, if that's just being suspicious of the messenger because of polarization that you're not going to be like, hmm, let's hear what this opposing political party has to say about Medicare.
I'm really interested.
I'm going to keep an open mind.
No, it's like this message is from the opposing party.
I'm just going to laugh at it because it's just so full of it.
Yeah. I mean, I think political ads are terrible and ridiculous and so overvalued.
But I feel like these days it's less like it's more just beating that drum of like, aren't you mad?
Aren't you mad? Go vote.
Go vote. I know, man.
Yeah. The thing is, though, is this none of this is to say that they're like people don't get scammed.
There is a there's a group called the Global Anti -Scam Alliance, which sounds like a scam itself.
They came up with a report.
They came up with a report that found that worldwide people lose a trillion dollars to scams every year.
Man. That's a lot of money, but some of these same researchers are like, hey, there's actually some short, like easy stuff you can walk around in your head with to use to apply to new information to protect from being gold, which is actually a word.
Let's hear it. Do you have a list?
Yeah. One of them is the first step is to admit that you're as susceptible to being scammed as anybody else.
Okay. Yeah. Just a reality check.
Yeah. Well, it also puts the kibosh on being overconfident, which again can increase your chance of being duped.
Yeah. Yeah. Don't make emotional decisions like we talked about.
Keep a lid on impulsivity.
Don't respond to like act now.
Supplies are running out kind of like come ons.
Don't respond to false scarcity like remember people hoarding toilet paper.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Those are emotional decisions.
You want to just say cool and level headed.
Another one is ask questions, ask for more information.
Don't be afraid to look dumb.
That's a big one. And then consider the source.
Is there any supporting information?
And when you put all this together, you are probably going to come up with a good decision or understanding.
And if you're being gulled by somebody, that's a real word, you are probably going to say, I don't believe what you're saying.
You, sir, are a cad and a scoundrel.
Right. Please get out of my face before I smack you with my glove.
And we have to duel.
We get – I'm sure anyone who works for big companies get these, and maybe even small companies do this.
But when they send out the test, like the test phishing emails, and then, like, the next day, you'll get an email that's like, did you fall for it?
Right. It's always – I'm always nervous.
I'm like, oh, God, did I click on that thing that, you know, from, you know, Facebook .gold .au?
Right. It's usually there in the email address, you know?
Well, at least the next day when they send out the email, they ask if you fell for it.
They don't show, like, a list with pictures of all the people who did fall for it.
They should do that, just pictures of everyone.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
I think, you know, we did a pretty good job on this one.
I agree. And that is no fooling.
And if you want to know more about gullibility, go do some research yourself on it.
That's kind of the point of not being gold, which is a real word.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.
This is a great current listener mail from yesterday's, I'm sorry, Thursday's rather episode yesterday to us on automats.
Right. Hey, guys, two friends and I gave each other a graduation present from high school in 1970 and spent a week by ourselves in New York where we went to the automat and it was still great in 70.
four years later this gets so good four years later as a senior in college a group of us did an independent study in humor and music as an excuse to do a concert of Bach stuff I got to be the soloist in the concerto for horn and hard art nice and he sent a video unfortunately it was just audio I mean it
sounded like a hoot and really it was great but I wanted to see everything because here's what they did this piece is for orchestra and also a table filled with various household items to play Ideally, they should have been picked out of an automat on stage in order to play them.
However, this is beyond our set construction abilities.
We did at least have the recommended banner overhead reading, in Latin, less work for mother, along with trying to master the rather challenging music.
It involved me running around Gettysburg with a pitch pipe, trying to find bells, pots, aúga horns, and lots of other items that played specific notes.
This is so great. Thanks for speaking those wonderful, sparking those wonderful memories.
I discovered you during COVID and have been an extremely faithful listener ever since.
Nice. And that is from the Reverend Dr.
Mark Oldenburg, Steckmiller Professor Emeritus of the Art of Worship and the Music Chair at Gettysburg United Lutheran Cemetery.
Pronouns he him. How?
Also the most interesting person we know now.
Totally. Reverend Mark, write in more.
please. The Dr. Reverend Mark.
The Dr. Reverend. Esquire.
The Reverend Doctor.
Sorry. Either way. Yeah.
Pretty impressive. Thanks a lot, Mark.
I'm just going to call you Mark for now because I feel like we're on a first name basis.
That was a great email.
Great story. And if you want to see if you can top Mark, you can send us an email to send it off to stuff podcast at iheartradio .com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio For more podcasts from iHeartRadio Visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows Ready to celebrate the magic of live music?
South by Southwest Music Festival Returns to Austin, Texas This March 10th through the 15th With a fresh lineup of legendary and rising talent Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.
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The Unshakeables podcast is kicking off Season 2 with an episode you won't want to miss.
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Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the uh -oh moments Jamie has overcome.
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