Brooke Harrington

Collection of not all that well connected essays about deception. Most interesting bits: (1) The few people who are good at detecting deception (and don’t just think they’re good, as most cops/lawyers/judges do and are totally wrong) are more vulnerable to being fooled when the deceiver looks like someone they know and love. (2) The Inca/Inka kept records in knotted strings, khipu/quipu, that moderns can’t fully translate, and for a while they convinced the Spanish that the khipu keepers were incapable of deception; even when the trust broke down, the Spanish still couldn’t read them and had to rely on the records anyway. (3) Victims of financial fraud in the “legitimate” economy—e.g., Enron, compared to penny stock fraud—don’t behave by withdrawing and licking their wounds, as sociologist Erving Goffman reported with other fraud victims. Instead, many victims refused to acknowledge that they’ve been conned—they either frame themselves as willing accomplices or deny that any con took place, instead “framing losses as a temporary setback in a fundamentally sound endeavor.” They say they won’t reduce involvement in investing because they have no choice—they can’t just keep the money under the mattress (though safer vehicles like CDs are in fact available to them, they reason that they need more money in retirement, and Harrington notes that retirement in the US is indeed very underfunded). It’s another troubling application of the just world hypothesis. When the game is rigged and people think they have no choice but to play anyway, can we ever get the game un-rigged?… (meer)