The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars by Lixing Sun;

Author:Lixing Sun;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

How do cheaters choose their prey? Abagnale selected his victims carefully for his check frauds. He preferred to deal with naïve-looking people such as young female bank tellers who were easily distracted by his handsome physique, flirtatious demeanor, and apparently respectable profession. In his own words, “It’s not how good a check looks but how good the person behind the check looks that influences tellers and cashiers.”

Selection of victims can be more systematic. Consider this. Many of us have received emails from some Nigerian princes, pledging to send millions of dollars for a joint business venture. If you fall for the offer, you’ll be asked to pay a few hundred dollars as “the processing fee.”

The scam is so transparent that you may wonder why the putative princes would even bother to send the message—again, again, and again. The scammers are by no means stupid. On the contrary, the messages that seem so plainly fake to most of us are intentionally crafted to screen for people who have the right mental loopholes. The logic: if you can’t see the obvious problem in the message, your judgment is sufficiently impaired to make you a potential victim. In other words, the scammers prey on people who lack the judgment—those who have mental loopholes that make them miss the obvious. It’s not difficult to guess that most of their victims are the elderly with declining cognitive abilities.

The Nigerian prince scam is an example of what I call individual cheating, directly targeting fellow humans—spouses, friends, relatives, coworkers, acquaintances, business partners, total strangers—for resources such as money, sex, and social status. Individual cheating surprises nobody because a wide range of animals cheat in just this way, as we all resort to the two laws of cheating that are quite familiar to us now.

What sets humans apart from other animals—including our close primate relatives such as chimps and bonobos—is what I call institutional cheating. This is cheating on rules and systems—taxes, voting processes, educational tests, or business opportunities. In this kind of cheating, the victims are not individual humans, but impersonal organizations—including firms, schools, NGOs, and governments. This was what Abagnale’s frauds were mainly aimed at. “My targets,” he confessed, “had always been corporate targets—banks, airlines, hotels, motels or other establishments protected by insurance.”

The prevalence of our social, economic, and cultural institutions opens a whole new world of opportunities to cheat. The victims are ultimately still people, but their individual identities are often unknown or difficult to define, so they are far less likely to provoke our sympathy. For example, if Bank of America loses a million dollars, you may just shrug and say, “That’s a shame!” But your feelings would be totally different if $10,000 were stolen from John Doe or Jane Smith, who in your mind is a kind person with a ready smile. For that reason, cheating on institutions may not carry the same moral status as cheating on individuals, as Abagnale experienced. At times, cheaters may even feel justified, like Robin Hood, if the organization they attack has a less-than-stellar reputation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.