Lab 014: Art of Con

It's hard to know who to trust these days. Man.

Listen, I'm sticking with my A one day ones.

No one is out here telling the truth. I feel like, no matter what, it could even be something as honest looking as a charity, and you have to start questioning, well, where is this money going?

Who's really going to be held accountable. There's been some conversation at least on my timeline recently, yes, about people raising money, what happens to it? And you know, I love a good juicy political thriller, So whether it's real life or it's something i'm watching on Netflix, I'm like, follow the money, what happens.

He's a kid a real life House of Cards over here. She loves that stuff. Yes, she's an investigator.

I know we've talked about robo calls in the past. We have now there is the GoFundMe. You got to double check and check and make sure you know someone who knows the creator of the gofund me to make sure it's real.

Right. Fishing scams like where It'll be You'll see an email and it'll look like it's from Apple because they're like, oh, confirm your email address here, which is a normal email that all of us get from all types of places, right, and then next thing you know, everything is hacked. Like, next thing you know, like your own mama gonna show up to your door talk about something. Can I borrow fifty dollars? The next thing you know, it's not her, it's a hologram.

It's a hologram. Hologram. Spam is next.

I'm t T and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify Studios. This is dope.

Last, it feels like every where you look there's a scam, or there's a you know, or somebody's trying to catch you up in something and you gotta have your guard up.

We could talk about a lot of things. Actually we can talk about Takashi six y nine. Yeah, tee it up for the people as a kid, tell them what's going on with Takashi.

Listen, Takashi is out here dry snitching. Okay. I got nervous. I was like, is he gonna say something about me that I.

Feel like is a huge scam because before he became a rapper, he was just a normal kid.

He was a regular guy. Then he puts on this other persona that lends him some credibility, and then he starts calling out Jim Jones and Cardi B. And Cardi B, and I know they have to feel like they've been wrapped up in a scam exactly. You imagine minding your business and then all of a sudden, somebody's bringing your name up in front of a judge and to be snitched on by somebody like Takashi six ' nine with

It's crazy. You know who I think is the biggest scammer right now? All of these TV moms like Aunt Becky and Felicity Huffman who are out here scam the college admissions process to get their kids into the college of their choice. And Becky was out here staging crew photos.

If you need a set designer for your college application, you got to ask yourself some questions.

Maybe that isn't the college for you.

So I feel like we've touched on this a little bit before.

Yeah, in Lab three lighting me with our guest, Yamaday House, but we kind of talked more about why people lie and why people scam Today, we're flipping it on its head and we're saying, why do.

You keep getting calm? Why do you keep going for these same scams?

Exactly? And I think this is important for everyone. So pull up a chair, turn the volume all the.

Way up, and dive in with us. Let's get into the recitation. So this really got us thinking, right, we started talking about scams and spam and catfishing.

Catfishing is another huge thing, these romantic scams.

Yes, and when you really think about it, I try to distill it down to like, what's the motivating factor here? What's driving the person that's doing the scamming, and what drives us to fall for the scam?

Right? Is it like a specific type of person that falls for these scams or a specific type of person that is doing the scamming?

How do you tell if something is a scam or not? Who falls for scam A but not scam B. Who's gonna fall for in person scam versus an online scam? I'm not falling for an in person scam.

I feel like I would never fall for an in person scam. I'm too, You're skeptical of every exactly I'm like I wake up in the morning, I roll over look at my husband. I'm like, is that you for real?

And like for us, I think I'm savvy on the internet, but I also know that I was on AOL chat rooms like age Sex Language. Anybody want to meet me at the carnival?

Yeah, I was definitely. I was what I probably like eleven and saying I was like fifteen or sixteen.

So you have been a scammer for a while? Yes, wow, do you didn't even hesitate?

Yeah? I mean because if you ever scammed me never, I could never you would tell it if.

You did, and you bet not let me out.

Episode.

Oh my god, it'll be the last episode. Lord, No, wun't.

She would never let me live that down. Okay, so let's get into the dissection. Our guest today is doctor Losana Harris.

I'm a social neuroscientist, which means I study social behavior and brain.

Doctor Harris is an Associate Professor of Experimental psychology at University College in London.

His work focuses on what's called person perception or social perception, which is all about how humans process each other. And this is really important to understand, right because when it comes to scams. We need to know how we decide to trust somebody or not.

You look at things like audios, so how do people's voices sound, things like smiles, the sort of chemical communication that happens between people, and measure people's responses in terms of their physiologies.

And by physiology, he means things like facial muscle movements, sweat, heart rate, hormones, or brain activity. Measuring those things can indicate whether someone is anxious or nervous, for example.

But doctor Harris isn't just studying how people process each other. He's also interested in how person perception affects the decisions we make.

Until we look at things like moral decision making, legal decision making, financial decision making. And then the majority of those studies we use sort of classic economic games where we put people in competitive or cooperative situations with others and just look at the kinds of decisions they need.

And you're probably wondering, how can we relate this back to con artists? Right, So, as we're talking about con artists and those that are being con there are some interesting context here because in essence, a con artist is using these ideas of person perception to basically con their victim.

They know that their victim will be processing them and making decison visions based on that processing, and then they use that to manipulate the victim. But I don't really understand how.

This brings us to social cognition, which doctor Harris studies is something you and I do every single day, and it basically allows us to interact with each other. Is the process of figuring out what's in someone else's head.

I don't know if I want to be in your head. There's a lot of tabs open man, fifty tabs and fifty windows, and all those tabs represent my thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals or desires.

Now, if you think about it, that's a very difficult thing to do, because I could never see your mind, right, I could never see your thoughts. I have to infer them from your behaviors. And in order to do that, I have to crunch a lot of information. I have to crunch a lot of numbers. I have to put together lots of statistical information. And that leads me to make a guess about your internal state, your mind, what's on your mind.

And this idea of so cognition really shifted how scientists thought about decision making. Historically, economists thought that people just made decisions based off of their own self interest, so basically what they could do to get themselves ahead. So it's a situation that involves money, then you're just going to do whatever yields the most profit, and that was considered the rational line of thinking. But if the decision involves another person, it's not that straightforward.

And lots of psychological and behavioral economic research has shown that people aren't rational in their decision making and social factors. And when I say social factors, I mean other people or the different motivations or goals people have really biased their decision making and directions where it appears not to be rational.

That's interesting, right, because I think when I think of cons, I think of them always being about money. And when you think about cons that are about money, if it's just like are you going to pick up this extra dollar on the ground, that feels easy, Like the rational decision is yes, I'm gonna pick it up, and I'm gonna have some more money in my pocket. Right, But if I have to pull the dollar out of somebody's pocket, ooh man, that's a little different.

It's a little different.

Right.

And so what you've seen a lot of financial decision making involving other people or Wendy social factors are relevant is that people will often for goal money in order to do things that are consistent with social and moral rules, goals and values.

My league had a podcast recently about getting your finances in order and all this stuff, and she talks about people that feel peer pressure to spend money because other people are spending money even if they know they don't have it.

I don't know that emotion.

No, So, like if you're all out and everybody's like, well we're gonna go out, We're gonna do rounds with drinks. And she was saying, you should just say I only have fifty dollars a night. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have additional rounds, but that's all I'm going to be spending, right, even that, right, the people you're around, like, you find what are the social norms around the situation? Right, So people may be like I'm having the lobster.

You know, you're like, I'll have the chicken tenders, but now you can't. You feel like you can't get chicken tenders because if so and so is getting the lobster, and you're like, okay, so is that kind of nice? Is that that's what we're doing? Okay, I guess I'm having the lobster too.

And what we and others have been arguing is that while those social decisions are actually rational, it's just that you care about something else. You don't care about maximizing financial profit. You care about things like maintaining social relationships, for instance, or you care things that you care about, things like your reputation.

So our behaviors can be based on self interest, but if another person is involved, our decisions may be a little more socially minded. Why is that?

What we learned from doctor Harris is that our decision making is really dependent on our motivations.

Our motivations are the things that drive us to do what we do, and they're not always the same.

And so what could be happening is that those motives become dominant or salient in those situations because those motives are primary. Right as we evolved as a species, those were the things that basically drove our evolution. So our evolution was driven because human beings are what we call a hypersocial species more than almost any other species. We depend on other people.

In general, there is a range of motives about three to ten that drive human behavior, but doctor Harris uses one set of theory that talks about five of them.

Belonging, understanding human beings, like to know why particular things happen. Control, You want to feel like you're not just sort of randomly going through life, but you're making decisions and you have some type of agency in your decision making what is called self enhancement. So we're motivated to feel good in general, to have this sort of positive feeling about ourselves. Right, we want to feel valued and loved and respected. And then trustworthiness is the fifth one.

Let's kind of just hone in on two motives.

Yeah, so for this episode, we're going to focus on the need to belong and the need to trust.

And so I think when you have these types of cons they usually take advantage of these motives that people have. They tap into these deficits of particular pasts might have in terms of belonging or trusting, for instance, and they exploit that for financial benefit.

I thought one that doctor Harris hit on that was most interesting to me was trustworthiness, and he explained that as our need to trust others.

And I feel like that falls directly in line with the GoFundMe stuff. So when we think about go fund me, it's not just oh, I'm giving money to just anybody, somebody that I don't know. The people who are putting out these gofundmes they really put like a real personal touch on it where you feel really connected to them. So then you're more likely to give because it kind of tugs at your heart's You don't want them to

When you go to a restaurant, you don't worry that they're putting poison in your food, right, the thought never crosses your mind because of that motivation to trust people. And so that's how we typically function.

That's why I could never do that, like dining in the dark stuff, I just don't trust it. I need to be able to see who.

Is dining in the dark.

What is that get heard of that no.

People are going to restaurants and these restaurants are like specialty restaurants and everything is pitch black. No, they tell you what's on the menu, and you order, they bring it out in front of you, and you eat in the dark.

First of all, the visual component.

We've already talked about this dining in the Cookout episode.

Yes, I don't want to lose that.

I'm not eating it just because I just don't trust it. I need to be able to see. What if there's a hair in my food? What if there's a fingernail, what if there's a fly like I need.

Be able to nail.

You never know, You never know.

The other dominant motive that's relevant to con artists is belonging. Our family, friends, relationships, clubs, churches, even Twitter and Facebook. All of these foster our inherent need to belong to something bigger than ourselves.

And so if, for instance, someone isn't having their belonging need match right, they're going to be highly motivated to find another person to connect to. Even if I've never met this person face to face and it's just been an online interaction, they're still fulfilling my need to belong right.

So, if you want to be a part of a group, you pay this certain amount of money, or if you make friends with someone online or something, they say, well, I would love to keep talking to you, but in order for me to keep my phone on, I need thirty dollars my phone.

We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we'll get into how these motivations make us vulnerable to scammers and who gets targeted the most. One of the times that I feel like I'm being scammed the most is during the election seasons.

Yes, like I don't.

There's just so much going on and I don't know who to believe. They're saying all these numbers, and they're saying all these things, and I'm like, are you lying just so that I can vote for you?

Or how many people did you poll? How did you phrase the question? Was it leading? Is this a real poll? When you call me on the phone? Are you a telemarketer? Are you really with somebody's campaign? What is going on? And who is knocking at the door?

Right, We've got a lot of questions, and I'm sure you do too, So if you have questions about this, make sure that you send us an email at contact at Dope Black podcast dot com or give us a call at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight, or y'all can slide into our DM on Instagram or Twitter at dope last podcasts.

All right, let's get back to the lab. So are all these scams we're reading about and hearing about online happening because people are more susceptible? Or is it because con artists are just really good at taking advantage of these deficits in our motivations.

I think what happens in these calms is a bit of both. You get the people who are more susceptible and you get colms developed by people who are insightful in terms of the kinds of deficits. Humans may have interims of their needs for belonging, so, for instance, the elderly get targeteds a lot, usually because their belongingness is a lot lower than the general population. We tend to isolate the elderly in Western societies.

The elderly are one of the most targeted groups by con artists, and it's not just because of their need to belong and to trust. There are also neurobiological reasons why they are more susceptible.

Most people think of the brain as something that's like a computer machine where it's sort of hardwired. But that's absolutely not true. The brain is very what we call elastic. It's flexible, it can adopt quite easily. As you get older, the rate of change slows quite dramatically, which is why elderly people tend to be stuck in their ways, as we see, because the brain isn't being as flexible.

So as you get older, there's sort of a cocktail of factors that make you more susceptible.

A greater motivation to belong and the inability to easily adapt to new social contexts, which might lead to you trusting people that others may be a little bit wary of.

If someone is reaching out to you on the internet or the phone, and it's consistent with how you've always interacted with friendly, trustworthy people, your brain's going to say, yes, you can trust this person, and it fits right because for your whole life you've learned that when people approach you in a certain way, there are usually a certain type of people, which means you can trust them.

But now things have changed completely on Your brain isn't catching up as quickly because it's not as elastic, and so you're still going to make decisions based on not myself learning history you've had, so.

Your beliefs are set, but you're in a totally different social context. And technology has really shifted that context dramatically in the last decade. But it's not just elderly people who are the target. Technology has made us all more trusting. Think about how much you trust the internet.

I really trust the Internet. I remember being so nervous the first time I entered my debit card info online girl. I got an American Express, and I was like, nervous, no more. Okay. The other day I was at work and I was typing something in and I said, why isn't my address coming up like I wanted it to auto populate save all my info.

If it's an online story and it doesn't have Apple pay where I can't just put my thumb down. I'm very frustrated, and as skeptical as I feel about other things, it's so interesting, right what we decide to trust. I mean, even on Instagram. I feel like now a lot of y'all gonna try and be out here lying but buying stuff off of Instagram, honey, and sometimes that stuff don't show up the way you thought, which has happened to me a number of times.

I've always been skeptical of Instagram. I was skeptical of Asos and everybody was buying stuff and loving it, and so no, that's real. Yeah, it's real, but I know. And the same thing with Fashionova, only Instagram people were wearing it. It was like Instagram clothes. I just bought. I think my first thing off of Instagram recently, I

You didn't have a choice.

And I think now you have a generation of people who aren't suspicious of technology at all, right, because they feel like they have a sit in mastery over the technology. So I think because of the diminished suspicion people, in some ways, they're going to be more susceptible to these cons in these kinds.

That's a really good point. But why is that?

What's happened with technologies, Most of the interactions aren't face to face anymore, And I say, huge change for human beings. So think about it. For our entire evolutionary history, every time we've communicated with other people, we've sat next to them, we've stood next to them, we've seen them. So in addition to sort of making inferences about what they're thinking based on what they're seeing, we can look at their

And that blew my mind because as a fan of FaceTime and all the video chats, I'm like, I'm getting way more information than if I talk on the phone with someone. But also, anybody can have any prop behind them and say they are XYZ whoever, whoever.

I mean, look at catfish. There are people who steal whole videos of other people and pretend to be that person.

There's a lot of information we're not getting when we engage with people online. Do you remember all those measurements doctor Harris mentioned when he does the study he's on people processing. We're not getting any of that and it's actually affecting our decision.

And not only that, but the Internet has made it possible for us to engage with way more people and on a daily basis, So we're getting less information but interacting with way more people.

I talk about this all the time with my friends on the apps. Right when I say the apps, I mean bumble, okaycupe it hinge, all of that, right, And I say, they're like, oh my goodness, swipe, but these people are crazy this, this is this oh my gosh blah blah blah. And I'm like, you're just interacting with way more people than you ever would. If you were walking down the street and you passed fifty people, You're not going to talk to all fifty of those people.

Yeah.

It also makes me think about texting.

A lot could be lost in a text message, yes night. I think we've all been guilty of that when somebody like you send a text message or you receive a text message and you're like, what's that supposed to me? You're missing out on all of these other real person to person interactions that give you all the contexts that you need to really know what's being said.

But if you look at millennials now, right, all of their interactions are happening on the internet. I mean it's fascinating. I look at teenagers and they're standing in a group and they're talking to each other sort of, but they're also talking on their devices, and so the way they're interacting has changed completely. And that's just the way of human beings. Right. We are continually evolving and changing.

So we're less suspicious, but maybe we're also developing more rigorous detectors to compensate for that loss of information.

Yeah, if we've evolved to this point, maybe we can keep evolving.

I think we're developing all these tools right to know what's a real email, you know, all those some of the websites will say, have a question click here. I can tell that's a bot or a real person.

Me too.

First thing I do when they say how are you today? I say terrible? Now what are you gonna say? Bot? Will you show some empathy?

Right? If it's about it's not, it's gonna say what can I help you with today?

We're getting better at it. I think we're getting better at it. To bake up for that missing information online.

For people in my generation, I think we're always going to be suspicious because the Internet came when we knew there was no such internet, and we had a lot of those early teething experiences that really solidified how we think about this technology. So even though we mean you that as much as the millennials do, maybe not as much, we have a different relationship to it.

So as humans evolved, can the con artists evolve too?

And are we going to go backwards where everybody's so comfortable with technology that now we're all going to fall for like Frank abagneil catch me if you can type scams frite, somebody's gonna send you a piece of mail. Yes, you're going to sign away your whole life exactly.

Artists can take advantage of that by targeting specific demographics of people, people who have more or less experience with the Internet, people who use the Internet in particular ways. And I think that's where you see it.

But that might not actually be a bad thing. Doctor Harris told us about this theory that links back to humans being hypersocial. Remember we were talking about that earlier in the different human motivations.

In the seventies, there was a theory that said, well, the reason we got this additional intelligence is because we're hyper social, and solving social problems is the hardest kind of problem you can solve, because you have to solve things like deception where somebody is telling you something about how they feel, but there's no way of verifying that information at all. And so the idea is that things

So solving social problems like deception has helped us evolve. So when you think about it this way, cons and scams are kind of cyclical. Yeah, we get deceived, we learn and adapt, social context changes, the deception becomes something else, we learn and adapt, and the cycle continues. And this theory says that's what's driven our evolution.

I guess we're developing a new set of skills that we're adding to our interpersonal decepticon type toolbox. Right, but then I just like, what is it going to look like later?

Right?

Is there going to be a special shimmer to holograms so we can know your bootleg hologram this is a real hologram?

Like is the next step like voice simulation? So like if you've ever recorded a video of yourself like they have that now on a Snapchat or on Instagram, then somebody can take your voice and make it sound like you.

I mean, they're clipping up, you know, for in the public eye. They're clipping up people's speeches from various different events and making it seem like they're saying something else.

And we already know that all of the stuff that we put on social media is kept and archived, and so essentially somebody could take all those things and string a sentence together.

That's like something you never said, Hey Zekiah.

I need your help, can you please send me one hundred dollars?

I would send it. I know you would, Yeah, right, I would be like, hey, gird I want to help you.

But that's it for Lab fourteen.

Don't forget to check out our website for the cheat sheet on today's episode.

You can find it and sign up for our newsletter at Dope Labs podcast dot com.

Also, we love hearing from you. What do you think about today's lab? What are your ideas for labs? Our number is two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.

You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast. T T is on Twitter at d R Underscore t Sho.

And you can find Zakia at z said So.

Follow us on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Special thanks to our guest doctor Losana Harris. He has a beautiful website, go check it out at ltdash Harris dot info. We'll also link to some of his other work in our show notes.

Our producer is Jimmy Radlet Mass of Wave Runner Studios. Mixing and sound design by Hanns Brown and special thanks to Tyler Adams.

Original theme music is by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura, with additional music by Elijah Lex Harvey. Dope Labs is a production of Spotify Studios and Mega Owned Media Group and is executive.

Produced by US T. T. Shadia and Zakiah Wattley. I'm motivated to trust other people.

I know you are. My friend's a kid talks to all the strangers and I'm like, hey, hey, we don't know them. They're like, oh no, they're great. They're going to another they're going to another establishment to continue their night. We should go with them. And I'm like, we don't know these clowns.

But that also is because I don't have any deficits in control. I feel like, I, if this goes lift, I'm getting ready to turn turn this night very differently for these folks.

Right.

Sorry to that man, sorry to this man.

I don't know