 Acclaimed psychiatrist Professor Raj Persaud asks whether voters will believe they are being asked to take part in a real National Conversation or being duped into believing they are integral to change
Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister and Jason Chin, psychologists at the Universities of Minnesota and British Columbia as well as Florida State University have recently published a fascinating paper reviewing the psychology of being a voter – sorry Freudian slip – actually, it was a review of the psychology of being a sucker.
In particular, they examined what they consider to be the widespread fear amongst the general public of being duped. The fear is so commonplace the authors wondered if indeed the fear of being taken for a ride might even be exaggerated to the point where we now tend to assume we are being stiffed when we aren’t.
They appear to have coined a term ‘sugrophobia’, which they claim derives from the latin sugro, which means to suck. Sugrophobia, they therefore suggest, translates literally as fear of sucking, that is, of being a sucker.
Human relations, compared to those elsewhere in the animal kingdom and throughout evolutionary history, embody a unique risk of one party being taken advantage of by another – for reasons we will come to later. It therefore makes sense that in order to protect ourselves from the possibility of the ever-present risk of exploitation, these psychologists argue, we should have evolved a heightened sensitivity to being conned by others.
One such mechanism by which we protect ourselves could be termed a capacity to categorise, perhaps rather cynically, some offers from others as too good to be true. this is such a common perception that Vohs and colleagues point out this has become labelled as the ‘the too good to be true effect’ or even has its own acronym within psychology journals (TGTBT).
As a result of the TGTBT effect, consumers may pass up on a good deal advertised for a product because their hardened scepticism leads them to now reflexively cynically suspect deception – the offer just cannot be as great as the vendor claims.
Research reviewed by Vohs and colleagues shows that sometimes if a merchant drops the price too low, the market for the product in fact disappears because buyers begin to assume they are dealing with a TGTBT scenario. the assumption becomes that the product will turn out to be of devastatingly low quality, so widespread sugrophobia means a low price becomes as aversive a signal to savvy consumers as the Insect house signpost at the Zoo to the arachnophobe. the sugrophobe steers clear because they believe the low price highlights the sucker should have seen this one coming a mile off.
In their paper entitled Feeling Duped: Emotional, Motivational, and Cognitive Aspects of Being Exploited by Others, Vohs and colleagues illustrate just how widespread sugrophobia is by reviewing a series of dramatic social psychology experiments which have elicited the effect.
For example, they point out that researchers have encountered amazing difficulty just attempting to give away money to the public
researchers have encountered amazing difficulty just attempting to give away money to the public 
, almost undoubtedly due to the TGTBT effect. In one such experiment, trestles are erected in shopping malls and other similar public locations that advertise and give away ready money for the asking ‘with no obligation or return’. Astonishingly, the majority of the passing public simply walk right past an offer of free cash (ranging from $1 to $50) without stopping to collect. At $1,90 per cent of people walk by. at $50, 78 per cent of passers by walk right by the opportunity for free money.
It would seem that the contemporary electorate are so used to ‘free offers’ which turn out to be anything but, that they now expect snaking strings attached and wearily can’t be bothered to investigate further. after all the experiment in reality was that free money with absolutely no obligation, no expense, work or peril to the receiver, and yet few accepted the offer because their perception must have been that realistically, there had to be more involved.
This experiment is telling us something sobering yet profound about how citizens view modern society – any apparent beneficial offer by another cannot be what it seems. We appear to have bred a modern individual who is routinely sugrophobic – free money can’t really be free, they reason, and it makes sense to grasp that if you are going to survive the rat race.
But another interpretation of the experiment is that so many walk past free money because they understand at the heart of all human interaction is a transaction – if someone is offering something to you, it usually means they want something back in exchange. Human beings act self-interestedly and therefore, apparently selfless behaviour cannot be purely as it seems.
The success of the human species is not based on the widespread misconception that each of us is superior in survival skills than any other creature on the planet. Just leave us alone in practically any wild environment and see how well we do before calling in the chopper from Disaster Relief.
Instead our triumph, relative to other species, lies in something much more intangible and that is our ability to specialise in providing goods and services to a greater extent than any other creature can. We then exchange these goods and services with each other so that all our needs are met. It’s this basic exchange and specialisation which is the key process underlying all individuals and communities’ social success.
Vohs and colleagues in their paper published in the journal Review of General Psychology point out that it was the great Scottish economist Adam Smith who, in emphasising the efficient profit that arose out of role specialisation, also noted the inevitable downside of specialisation which is that no one in a modern technologically sophisticated society will wield all the skills essential to survival.
Inevitably, we come to rely on others via trade. But in attempting to exchange goods and services with others, how do we establish, to the satisfaction of all parties, what constitutes a fair trade?
Vohs and colleagues point out that history is littered with infamous examples of what appears with the benefit of hindsight, to have been incredibly poor deals for one party and therefore, inevitably amazingly good ones for the other. An illustration of this is the purchase of Manhattan from the indigenous Indians by western settlers in 1626 for 60 florins.
One key problem then at the heart of so-called free enterprise or even a free society is as we progress through any average day incessantly exchanging goods and services with each other, how confident can we be that we are getting a reasonable deal, and [avoid] the constant nagging sensation we are being stiffed at every juncture.
This sensibility is inflamed by our knowledge that success in an inherently competitive system has to arise out of getting as much of another’s goods for as little of our own as possible. Everyone is therefore ‘incentivised’ to profit at our expense – we know this because we’re busy doing it as well.
This line of argument naturally ends up suggesting that these ubiquitous forces that prevail around us lead to a widespread chronic sensation of being duped – meaning, most of us come to feel that we give more than we get. We are constantly convinced we are gaining less than we believe we deserve.
But to Vohs and colleagues, this sensation doesn’t have to just arise out of financial exchanges – it can also be linked to social, emotional and a whole host of non-monetary trades we make in life – indeed, it can develop out of any social interaction.
A key example would be the way sex is ‘traded’ between consenting non-paying adults. A recent US survey of men’s and women’s complaints about each other, quoted by Vohs and colleagues in their paper, indicated that the most common gripes reflected precisely the duping both sexes accused each other of.
Men complained bitterly that women accepted gifts, drinks, suppers, cinema tickets without stumping up sex in return, while women complained that men promised love or commitment in exchange for sex, but then didn’t return phone calls the morning after the night before.
What is particularly ominous for general societal wellbeing is not just the burgeoning cynicism about each other our ‘caveat emptor’ society seems to be breeding, but also a sense of growing rage. Vohs and colleagues are particularly interested in our emotional reaction to being duped and suggest that anger is a particularly common outcome with the inevitable rage-fuelled desire for revenge.
Yet these psychologists point out this resentment can be counterproductive – often fatally so. They use the example that each year several dissatisfied customers die as a result of aggressive attacks on recalcitrant vending machines.
The circumstance is usually that someone inserts money into a machine which stubbornly refuses to provide a good or service in exchange. this provokes the customer to angrily shake the machine which if done vigorously enough, promptly falls onto the distraught purchaser, leading to a fatality. Hence the widespread warning labels now found on vending machines alerting customers to the fact that shaking vending machines can have fatal consequences.
It’s possible to think of politics and voting as being a bit like a vending machine – you inspect the illuminated signs and glittering products and are induced to insert your vote or your taxes and then the machine just glowers back at you, giving nothing in return. If you shake the machine in frustration or anger, by rebelling or attempting to obtain fairness by shaking up the system with direct action – it falls on you like a ton of bricks. The long - term consequences are we just walk past the glitzy offers now, even if they may not actually suffer from TGTBT.
The answer is for the customer to know a bit more about how vending machines work so as to be better able to spot the recalcitrant ones. Credence goods, point out Vohs and colleagues, is the term used by economists to describe those services and goods whose true quality cannot be determined often even after some actual experience of the product. The famous example of this is brake pads on your car – ever had the nagging doubt that performance was exactly the same after as before those expensive brake pads were replaced, that you were stiffed by your garage?
Does voting sometimes feel the same?
In which case, the answer is to get the mechanic to show you the worn pads before they get replaced and for you to see the new pads going on. If politicians are going to develop a better reputation than dodgy mechanics or used car salesmen, they are going to have to get better at showing us the new and the old pads and demonstrating clearly the difference – or we are going to have to learn to do our own servicing.
Vohs and colleagues point out that data reveals Swiss doctors (who are paid on a fee for service basis) and their immediate families seem to mysteriously require 25 per cent fewer operations than the average person (not blessed with having gone to medical school) in the same region. It would appear that knowing a bit about the body helps you to know when you are being offered an unnecessary procedure, but equally, being ignorant leaves you very vulnerable to being duped.
Going to medical school seems a heavy price to pay in order to avoid unnecessary operations, but it may well be everyone’s civic duty to learn enough about how the body of society works to ensure it survives our politicians’ ministrations.
If they appear to be making us a ‘free’ and ‘no strings attached’ offer – perhaps an offer of a National Conversation – we eed to remember that for us to not feel ‘used’ afterwards, it’s important to ask the kind of questions that ensure we breakdown the asymmetry in information between them and us and allow us to see past the vending machine window into the innards that arrange for actual delivery of promises.
Otherwise, we are left with a society where we either walk on by, no matter what offer of engagement is made to us, or we shake the system in anger and it falls over on top of us.
Dr Raj Persaud is Consultant Psychiatrist at The Maudsley Hospital, London and Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry
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