Something You Should Know
The Psychology of Being “Played for a Sucker” & Food Myths That Won’t Die
01 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How does personality influence musical ability?
Today on Something You Should Know, how your personality determines how well you play a musical instrument. Then, no one wants to be a sucker or played for a fool, but maybe we worry about that way too much.
Really what I'm trying to do here is to make the case for being a sucker sometimes, 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.
Also, the secret to staying warm when the weather gets cold. And the facts and myths about the food we eat, from burnt toast to tomatoes and sugar.
I think, as a general rule, the population, certainly in the Western world, is consuming too much sugar. When you consider that a can of soft drink can contain 40 grams of sugar, which is actually more than the amount of added sugar that we should be eating during a day.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Ah, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or as the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.
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Chapter 2: Why do we fear being scammed and how does it affect our decisions?
The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts. Something You Should Know.
Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
So how could it be that your ability to play an instrument, your musical skill and ability, is determined by your personality?
Chapter 3: What are the psychological implications of being a 'sucker'?
Well, that's the question we're going to start with today. Hi, welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers, and this is Something You Should Know. So psychologists at the University of Cambridge tested people's musical ability and then linked their scores to their personality traits.
And what they discovered is that aside from musical experience, the trait of openness was the next best predictor of musical skill. Openness is defined as being willing to try new experiences and new ways of thinking. Extroversion was also linked to musical ability. So a person who is more open and outgoing will typically have more musical ability than people who are closed and introverted.
Interestingly, they found that the links between personality and musical performance were present even in people who did not play a musical instrument. This means that there are individuals who have the potential for musical talent but are entirely unaware of it. And that is something you should know. Have you ever been scammed? I have. I imagine most people have.
Nobody likes that feeling of being taken advantage of. Most of us are on guard a lot of the time to prevent being taken advantage of because it's such a horrible feeling to feel like a sucker. You feel foolish. And that actually may be a problem.
Chapter 4: What food myths are commonly believed and what are the truths?
The fear of being taken advantage of may be worse sometimes than being taken advantage of. So how can that be? Well, here to discuss it is Tess Wilkinson-Ryan. She is a University of Pennsylvania law professor and psychologist and author of the book, Full Proof, How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Ourselves and the Social Order and What We Can Do About It.
Hey, Tess, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thank you so much.
So what I love about this topic is it's a topic that I didn't know was a topic. I didn't know this was a thing that people study. I always thought that the fear of being a sucker was just like common sense, good consumerism, smart thing to do. But is this like human nature to always think, is this a real deal or is this guy trying to take me?
I think I agree with you that everyone thinks this is common sense, which is why I'm kind of having fun pushing back a little bit on this common sense and saying, wait a minute, aren't there a whole bunch of places in our lives when actually we'd be better off like playing the fool a little bit and sort of making the case for being a sucker, even though I think you're right. We are
pretty programmed to have sort of our antennae always on the lookout for the potential scam.
So is this perpetual fear of being taken or worrying about is this legit? Is this human nature or is this a learned behavior?
You know, that's a really interesting question. There are studies in other areas of psychology about sort of a natural ability to detect cheating. But I also think that it's clearly learned. And the reason I think that is because of all of the different sayings we have that reinforce this message. So if you think about how many fables are about scams, like
the Trojan horse, or the boy who cried wolf, and all the sayings from your parents like, don't take any wooden nickels, fool me once, shame on me, that kind of thing, which does suggest that there is this built up cultural apparatus that wants the members of a society to stay on guard.
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Chapter 5: Is burnt toast really harmful to health?
I do not want to invest my money with a person who's going to scam me out of it. That seems totally right. But let me describe a study to you where it seems like people are taking this fear of being betrayed and applying it in a case where it doesn't make a lot of sense. The study is an investment study. The task is you are going to be given $100 to invest in this company.
There's a 95% chance of either breaking even or of making a real profit. there's a 5% chance that you lose your entire investment. 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.
And why do you suppose that is?
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.
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Chapter 6: How do artificial sweeteners impact our health?
Some of the research on regret, which I think is obviously tied very tightly into the idea of being a sucker, because suckers obviously really regret agreeing to something.
There's a super interesting research on regret that basically says the things that makes people nervous is the decisions they make that they know that they're going to find out whether or not they made the right decision or the wrong decision. Whereas you're right, in the situation I'm describing, I was never going to know. And I'd rather not know. I could be blissfully ignorant.
Yeah, I think ignorance is bliss in that case because not only will you likely never know, but there wouldn't even be a way to go find out that would itch at you. So you just let it go because it's $6 and so what. So what's your message here? What do you think people should take away from this?
My message is often the fear of being a sucker feels so intense that it's a little bit closer to a true phobia where people don't want to go anywhere near it. It takes up more space than we actually intend to give it. And so it's totally sensible to think rationally about what kind of deals are going to yield outcomes that you want. Do I want to buy this product?
Do I want to make this investment? Do I want to make this loan? Those things, it's totally sensible to think, what is the outcome here really going to be? But that oftentimes the fear of playing the sucker gets to take up a ton of space in the decision that it doesn't actually deserve. And so my message in a lot of ways is,
The fear of being a sucker, the risk of it, should get to be like any other risk. Like just a normal risk that can be traded off against other priorities depending on how serious it is or what the real goals are. And oftentimes the real goal is something deeper than I want to avoid scams.
Oftentimes the real goal is something like I want to be a compassionate citizen or I want to be a person who connects with other people or something like that.
Well, it's such an interesting thing because, as I said in the beginning, I've never thought about this as a thing to think about. But how many times have you gone to a store and seen something with a price that seems very high, like your Gatorade example, and you think to yourself, I could get this for half the price at Costco or whatever. Yes. But then you never do.
You had the chance to buy it then. You wanted it then. You pass it up because you think you're getting taken advantage of. And then you never buy it. You never buy it.
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Chapter 7: What are the best ways to stay warm in cold weather?
Thanks very much. Glad to be here. So since it is in the title of your book, why don't we start out with Burnt Toast? Because I know I have heard, and I'm sure plenty of other people have heard, there's something about black toast, burnt toast, that's related to cancer, that it could cause cancer, and that you should need it. So what's the story with that, and is it true?
Well, it probably is true if you're going to feed your crumbs from burnt toast to mice or to rats in huge amounts, they may indeed develop cancer.
Chapter 8: How does hydration affect body heat retention?
Because whenever you burn wheat, which contains glucose and contains an amino acid called asparagine, these two will react together and form acrylamide. We call acrylamide a carcinogen. Now, a lot of people are confused by that term, but scientifically, it just means that it is a chemical that can cause cancer without taking into account under what conditions or in what amount.
In the case of acrylamide, that is true. because when you feed huge doses to test animals, you can trigger cancer. But that is a long way from saying that eating burnt toast will cause cancer in humans. The story, of course, becomes much more complicated because obviously the cornerstone of toxicology is that only the dose makes the poison. So it's a question of how much one would eat. And
If one would make a diet of burnt toast, you know, with every meal, there might be an issue there, especially if you combine it with burnt marshmallows or a steak that has been grilled to the degree that it's black on the outside. Yeah, then we're looking at a possible risk to health. But when it is consumed in reasonable amounts in moderation, that is a completely different story.
But is it cumulative? In other words, I may not eat a lot of burnt toast at any one meal, but if I'm eating over my lifetime burnt toast, burnt marshmallows, burnt meat, it all adds up. It has a cumulative effect, and that that could be hazardous. Is that right?
That's right. Less is better because acrylamide is indeed a recognized carcinogen, albeit it has only been shown to cause cancer in test animals at high doses. But nevertheless, we want to limit our intake of anything. that is potentially carcinogenic. So indeed, yes, we should be concerned about overconsumption of anything that has burned.
but I would not panic about eating a toast that has a little bit of char on it. But as a general rule, I think it's always a mistake to sort of tune in to one specific food.
So I wanted to ask you about, I hear this all the time, there are supplements that are advertised with the claim that it boosts memory or that improves performance. I don't know what that means, and I don't know if it's true.
Well, to... Cut to the chase. I think it is not true. I, of course, follow the literature very closely on this memory enhancement business, especially because as you get older, you become more and more concerned about this. Names are harder to remember, etc. I think it's a common feature of aging. Aging is a bad idea.
Anyway, obviously there is a lot of literature on this, but there is absolutely no compelling literature that any of these supplements will have any benefit. The one that is mostly touted is Prevagen. And when you look at the one study that they actually refer to all the time, you find that it really is rather unconclusive and they have some cherry picked data that has never been reproduced.
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