Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Now, this is an experimental study, so half the subjects are randomly assigned to one additional piece of information and half to another.

Here are the two additional pieces of information that subjects could conceivably get.

Participants in one condition are told

The 5% risk of losing everything is because the investors of this company may not have accurately predicted the consumer demand for their product.

The other participants, the other condition is told the 5% risk of losing money is because the founders of this company may be scammers, they may be fraudsters.

How much do you want to invest?

This is a hypothetical task, so people are supposed to say how much of the $100 they want to invest in this hypothetical company.

The subjects, the participants who heard that the downside risk of this investment was a scam were willing to invest much, much less than those that heard that the exact same level of downside risk was just because of regular sort of misprediction of the market, by something like $30 out of $100.

So a huge difference in whether or not they'd be willing to enter this gamble based on the kind of mistake that they might make.

If the mistake was the mistake of being scammed, they really were much more hesitant than if the mistake was the mistake of a regular kind of error.

I think that the experience of being betrayed or scammed

is really humiliating.

Being a sucker is a very sort of alienating kind of low status position to be in.

And if you're just the victim of a random mistake or even of a random crime, it doesn't have the same effect as if you are the victim of some kind of a interpersonal hustle where you could have saved yourself, you could have taken better precautions.

And now you're going to blame yourself for having let yourself be taken advantage of.

Yeah.

Really what I'm trying to do here is to make the case for

to make the case for being a sucker sometimes.

And the reason I'm making that case is because I think that in a number of contexts in our lives, the fear of being played for a fool is counterproductive to our own actual goals.

Okay, great.