Charles Ponzi, the creator of the Ponzi scheme, smiles at you
Of course, the matter of deceiving people must start from the deception of money.
The first recorded financial bubble of humanity may have occurred in the mid-16th century. At that time, tulips were introduced to Western Europe, and people began to have a fever about this plant. By the early 17th century, tulips had become synonymous with luxury, and some treasures were sold at unusually high prices.
In the early 1630s, a speculative frenzy for tulips began. People frantically buy and sell tulip bulbs at high prices, hoping that this small flower seedling will bring them rich benefits. In April 1637, the Dutch government finally halted the tulip trade, and the Netherlands was rumored to have fallen into an economic depression.
This is the famous "tulip bubble" legend.
This is also the essence of the success of many later Ponzi schemes: to create investor expectations, in fact, to deceive investors.
This so-called "investment" is very similar to the mentality of many people buying bags and watching, always saying that packages and watches can "preserve value", in fact, they are expecting the next fool to pay for this scam.
So, why are people so easily deceived? Conversely, why is lying so simple?
In the 21st century,
Charles Ponzi's biography is still being reprinted
There's a theory called truth-default theory, which gets its name from its core concept — that people always default to the truth of the information they receive when communicating. That is, we always tend to believe what others say, and when information is ambiguous, we are more inclined to use that information to prove that the other person is honest.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, mutual trust between people is the basis for the development of social culture. Relying on trust, we have built civilization and built an industrial system. From the perspective of the entire human society, trust has brought us too many benefits, compared to the loss caused by occasional deception, it is not worth mentioning.
Therefore, lying is very simple because people naturally trust.
But again, it is also a bad thing to lie because of this. A successful lie, it must have taken advantage of something from the deceived. Today we will talk about the 5 "uses" of lies, to help you understand what principles scammers use to deceive, and how to identify lies.
When you were still in school, there were always one or two naughty classmates in the class. On this day you were bored walking in the hallway of the classroom, thinking about your own business, and this classmate suddenly tapped you on the shoulder and said, "Hey, your shoelaces are open." ”
Your first instinct must be to look down at your shoes, and then you'll hear the laughter of your classmate. Ah, you see, it's another boring little joke of his.
But the moment you bow your head, you are really deceived, and what he wants to play with is your trust in that moment. It is easy to understand from this little lie that every successful lie has one of the most basic operations, which is to exploit the asymmetry of information.
"Shoelace open" is the missing information when you walk, and your first reaction is of course to believe, or at least to confirm. Reaching this point, the classmate's joke succeeded.
The same lies include "I have a way to make money" that pulls you along with bad luck, "I heard this person is very unruly" and so on who want to smear someone. The liar poses as an insider, giving you the illusion that there is a difference in information between you, and you will naturally be curious, curious to rip open the mouth of trust, which is the first step in your deception.
The more authoritative the source of information, the easier it is to play with poor information,
The BBC aired this on April Fools' Day in 1957
"Spaghetti tree harvest" news,
Hundreds of spectators called to inquire about how to grow
Therefore, to prevent scams, the first step must be to confirm the source of information. When faced with information related to investment and financial management, if we do not confirm and study it well, the loss will be greater.
When people are emotionally surging, their intellect is very fragile, because people's attention span and channels for processing information are limited. Imagine that when you are emotional, is it sometimes impossible to even speak well? This is because emotions occupy our cognitive pathways.
Therefore, on the basis of using poor information, it is also a common scenario to use strong emotions to deceive.
In "JP: Romance" starring Masami Nagasawa,
"Using emotions" is everywhere
An emotion that can be harnessed is joy.
Earlier, telecommunications fraud had a routine, that is, to use a phone call or text message to tell the victim, "You won the lottery", "You were selected by a certain program group to participate in the program". People are always more receptive to joyful news, and our brains naturally welcome it, and we even hope that the news is true. This opens the door for scammers.
However, the emotion most often used by scammers is fear.
Imagine parents who are scammed, and they are very panicked when they receive a scam call and hear that "your child has been in a car accident" or "your child has been detained by the police." Especially when they don't have this information, such as when they happen to be unable to contact the child, they can easily transfer money according to the scammer's statement, and so on.
There are also many people who should have received a call like this:
"Hello, are you Lady/Sir?" - Say your name accurately;
"We found that you registered for a student account while you were at so-and-so school." — Say exactly what your school is, and something you seem to have actually done. As I said before, when information is ambiguous, we usually think it's true;
"Now you need to close the account, otherwise it will affect your credit report." Use something you really care about to cause you to panic.
When people are panicking, the most important thing they want to do is to solve this "problem". With panic and an incentive to solve the "problem," it's easy to act in the way the person providing the information says.
Therefore, what you have to do at this time is to become aware of your emotions. Emotions are a good thing, but at this time, they can only affect your judgment.
Don't be in a hurry to rejoice or panic, calm down, and then go to the source of information and make judgments. Of course, if you can't get out to confirm the information at this time, then you can play around with the scammer for a while to get more information and then judge.
When I asked my friends "what is the easiest to be deceived", more than half of them said "gentle big sister", and added a crying emoji to appear to hate themselves.
This type of "pretty big sister" is probably the most dangerous. You may have heard the story of Elizabeth Holmes, the "beauty con man." She single-handedly founded Theranos, a blood testing company that claims to require only a small amount of blood to perform blood testing. Of course, this is a scam. At one point, the company's market capitalization reached $9 billion under her lobbying, and she appeared in Fortune People magazine to talk and laugh with the president. The technology was questioned in 2018 and she was sentenced for fraud.
Love to wear black turtleneck knitwear,
Elizabeth Holmes, known as the female version of Jobs
Among our many indisputable mindsets is called the "halo effect," which means that we always have a preliminary impression of other people's perceptions, and then speculate on their other qualities based on this impression.
That is, we will predict that gentle and beautiful people are all good people. When a person leaves a gentle and beautiful impression on us, we will speculate to ourselves that she also has other good qualities. Therefore, when this person needs help with something difficult, we will be more inclined to help her. And you who are deceived are like a spring breeze in the halo effect.
In classic scam movies, this kind of role is always essential,
For example, the stripper heroine invited to join in "American Hoax"
To break the mindset, we must first be alert to the mindset. When we know that we have such a mindset as the halo effect, we have to interrupt the thinking clue that we see such a person, the prejudgment of ta, and keep the information at the level of known and confirmable, and do not extend it too much.
Some time ago, there was a deception that has been mentioned, called "pig killing plate". Scammers generally steal beautiful photos of other men, post them on their own dating accounts, and then frantically "right- and right" all female users, waiting for the girls to take the bait.
Once there is an opportunity to talk to the girl, they will be very enthusiastic, will say a lot of sweet words to make the girls feel that they are special, and will also softly care for her, so that she feels loved and needed. They will even spend a week, a month to gain the love and trust of girls, establish a "romantic relationship" with them, and finally throw out some gambling sites to trick them into investing.
This deception is to take advantage of the emotional needs of the girls. Everyone has a variety of needs, some people want love, some people want sex, some people want to get rich overnight. Some would argue that we have weaknesses when we have desires, and while this statement doesn't make people fully agree, our needs do become our weaknesses in the face of scams, especially such elaborate scams.
April Fool's Day in 1994, artist Joey Skas
Just grasp the need for people to worship the psychic medium at that time,
Filmed a TV commercial pretending to be a "master"
Utilizing need is very similar to harnessing joy. Because when a person or something can provide what we really want, our brain's automatic first response is to accept. We wish it were real, and the brain would even help the crooks to look around for evidence that it was true.
This is also true of the fact that many illegitimate gambling industries can cheat money. When a cheater gives a false hope to a person who has a strong need for money, especially in the beginning, he gives him some small profits, and the person will let go of all sanity and rush to it.
Cracking this scam is more difficult because it's hard to tell if we're dealing with an "opportunity" or a scam. Usually taking advantage of the scammers we need will also take a long time to gain our trust. This puts forward a relatively high demand for us: when the situation is getting better, we still maintain the screening and judgment of information.
There are also some deceptions, which are based on the relationship between the cheater and the deceived.
For example, parents are the best people to cheat on. They love us and naturally believe everything we say. Even sometimes, they feel happy about what they want from you, even if it is a lie.
This is also one reason why the MLM team was able to cheat money. The people who are trapped in the MLM team are the first to be asked to persecute their relatives. People tend to think that people close to them will not deceive themselves, so when relatives talk about an investment project, a certain financial management method, we always tend to believe them.
In the Japanese drama "My Dangerous Wife",
The deception between husband and wife is constantly reversed,
This made the show's ratings reach 10% at one point.
There is also a relationship-based deception, which is based on power relations. When a person is in the ascendant of power, what he says comes with a sense of authority, and the sense of authority gives people the feeling that they are trustworthy. For example, when the boss draws a big pie for the newcomers who have just entered the society, the new people are based on the boss's sense of authority and their own lack of information about the industry and the company, which is easy to be fooled by the boss.
Power, in itself, refers to the ability to influence others. Even if you are not in a high position, when your Weibo has enough followers, or you have enough followers in person, your influence is greater, your power is greater, and your statements will be believed by more people. This is also why people with social influence need to be cautious in their speech.
In fact, it is relatively simple to crack this kind of scam, and when we jump out of this relationship to think about this matter and this information, the situation is relatively clear. You can think about it, if a stranger had given you this information, would you have believed it? If there is no such relationship, this identity, is what he says still credible? With such a shift in thinking, the lie may not be self-defeating.
In addition to people, authority may also come from big brands and big companies.
The picture shows Tencent's "goose face recognition" launched on April Fool's Day in 2018
In short, to crack the scam, we need to maintain a state of awareness at all times. Because of our natural default true state, everyone is in a very easy situation to be deceived.
People often question "human nature" after being deceived, but in fact, the people who deceive us are also in a very uncomfortable state. In addition to the default true state, we also have a default honest state. Brain imaging studies have found that when we tell the truth, no area of the brain is more active than when we lie. To tell the truth, it is our first reaction, and the liar must act against this natural law.
Therefore, honesty and trust are the most natural and comfortable state, and they are our "human nature". This makes April Fool's Day a holiday very rebellious and playful, and on this day we can stir up the heavy weight of trust within the scope of jokes. Having fun on this day can also be regarded as a kind of self-amusement for people's nature.
bibliography:
1/ Levine,T. R. (2014). Truth-default theory (TDT) a theory of human deception anddeception detection. Journal of Language and Social Psycho
2/ Verschuere,B., Spruyt, A., Meijer, E. H., & Otgaar, H. (2011). The ease oflying. Consciousness and cognition, 20(3), 908-911.
3/ Ford, C.V. (1996). Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! The Psychology ofDeceit.Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.