VEXATIOUS OF BEING MADE A DUPE TO OUR OPPOSITION
Being duped is quite easy to experience, any genuinely honest person will agree.
I went on Twitter (X) and was careful to highlight all that I follow, and did a word search on duped. Here is what I found, mostly all related in someway to my verse above. The duped search also showed up in other western countries.
So just how susceptible to scams might we be, I correlated that to being duped broadly. I found a recent paper talking about vulnerability to scams. I thought it might be useful just to take a look at the psychology of this phenomenon a little. I found this interesting, I’ve included an excerpt from the paper. According to what I read, older adults aren’t necessarily vulnerable to scams according to the data. In fact at about middle age is when most of them are scammed according to this paper.
The Scams Among Us: Who Falls Prey and Why
Yaniv Hanoch
y.hanoch@soton.ac.uk and
Stacey Wood
[found no social media identities]
Volume 30, Issue 3
Sage Journal - First published online May 17, 2021
Individual Differences and Susceptibility to Scams
Researchers have also been interested in the link between individual differences and susceptibility to scams, and they have employed a myriad of individual-difference measures in trying to detect what characteristics might distinguish between victims and nonvictims. Among the characteristics examined are cognitive ability, self-control, and risk taking.
A large corpus of literature has shown that declines in cognitive ability and executive functioning are associated with reduced decision-making ability.4 Building on this line of reasoning, a study by Ebner et al. (2018) showed that higher cognitive ability served as a protective factor against falling prey to phishing attacks, but only among adults ages 75 through 89. A better predictor of higher scam susceptibility was lower positive affect.
[Positive affect is one aspect of pleasurable and positive experience. Although positive affect overlaps to a significant degree with the concept of positive emotions, they are not identical. Positive affect is more closely related to mood states whereas positive emotions involve positive feelings as well as characteristic patterns of physiological arousal, thoughts, and behaviors. Positive affect is usually measured through the use of self-report scales, such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, in which respondents are presented with words describing both positive and negative moods and asked to rate each according to the extent that it describes them.]
Similarly, Mueller et al. (2020) examined the role of emotional intelligence and demonstrated that participants who scored higher on the ability dimension of emotional intelligence exhibited reduced intention to respond to mass-marketing solicitations. Moreover, older adults scored higher on emotional intelligence and exhibited reduced intention to respond to scam solicitations. Using a different set of measures, Jones and colleagues (2019) found that performance on a cognitive-reflection task* (but not performance on the Stroop task or a reading span task) served as a modest predictor of susceptibility to scams. DeLiema et al. (2020), however, found no relationship between fraud victimization and cognitive ability in their data.
*[The cognitive reflection test (CRT) is a task designed to measure a person's tendency to override an incorrect "gut" response and engage in further reflection to find a correct answer; however, the validity of the assessment as a measure of "cognitive reflection" or "intuitive thinking" is under question. It was first described in 2005 by psychologist Shane Frederick. The CRT has a moderate positive correlation with measures of intelligence, such as the Intelligence Quotient test, and it correlates highly with various measures of mental heuristics. Some research argue that the CRT is actually measuring cognitive abilities (colloquially known as intelligence)]
Two other candidate predictors are self-control (also known as time discounting or impulsivity) and risk taking, which have been employed to explain both criminal behavior and the quality of financial decision making (e.g., Ottaviani & Vandone, 2018). For instance, Anderson (2019) identified low self-control as a predictor of being a fraud victim, and Whitty’s (2019a, 2019b) examination of both cyber- and romance-scam victims revealed similar trends. A study by the AARP Foundation (2003) showed that investment-scam victims (compared with nonvictims) were more likely to buy things on the spur of the moment, and lottery-scam victims (compared with nonvictims) were less likely to plan their future purchases. In an analysis of more than 11,000 Internet users, Chen et al. (2017) showed that self-control served as a key predictor of being an Internet-scam victim. Finally, Modic and Lea (2013) developed a scale designed to evaluate susceptibility to persuasion. Data from two investigations using this scale showed that self-control was a predictor of both past and future compliance with scam solicitations.
One can think of scams as informal lotteries or gambles. Therefore, risk-taking tendencies should play a significant role in responding. Indeed, using data from a 2017 survey by the Federal Trade Commission, Anderson (2019) showed that individuals with a high tolerance for risk, compared with those with a low tolerance for risk, were almost twice as likely to report having been a fraud victim. Similarly, individuals who reported having made a risky purchase had almost double the probability of being a fraud victim, compared with those who reported having made no such purchases. However, Mueller et al. (2020) failed to show a relation between financial risk tolerance and measures evaluating scam susceptibility and susceptibility to persuasion. The studies by Anderson (2019), Mueller et al. (2020), and Modic et al. (2018) are the only ones we know of that have included a risk-taking measure. Using a different approach, Mueller et al. (2020) and Wood et al. (2018) asked participants to indicate how beneficial and how risky they perceived scam solicitations to be. Results of the two studies converged, revealing that participants’ benefit and risk perceptions were the main predictors of intentions to respond to the scam solicitations. Capitalizing on the large corpus of research on risk taking and risk perception, future studies could examine whether, for example, the manipulation of benefits and risk could help reduce or increase intentions to respond to scam solicitations. An additional key question is why some individuals fail to see the risks involved in engaging with these scams. Belief in fake news, for example, is linked to reduced analytic thinking, delusional thinking, dogmatism, and religious fundamentalism (Bronstein, et al., 2019), but it is an open empirical question whether similar mechanisms underlie participation in certain types of scams.
Accordingly from the information above, it might seem that being politically duped may not translate directly into being scammed. All I could do was assume they were similar, but obviously I’m simplifying too much. In any case I thought it to be a valuable exercise to try and find some factors which might be involved in political ‘dupery.’
Finally I did my alphabet last night and this morning on someone who is almost limitless in being worthy of words to describe him. I found a whole alphabet worth, all which seemed to me to fit.
Thanks for reading. I keep learning things every day by doing this. I consider it not wasted trivia. Perhaps I’m correct?
175th Posting, March 4, 2024.