Your "mental frames" may make you scamable.
Ever gotten an email offer, a phone call, or seen an ad that didn't feel right to you, or seemed obviously to be a fraud? Have you ever lost money to a fraud?
The reason you may have lost money, or kept yourself from losing money, may be traced to the type of story you tell yourself about the world, something we at The Good People Research Company call a Guiding Narrative®. In recent research we conducted with team members from the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, Better Business Bureau Institute for Marketplace Trust, University of Minnesota, and the Federal Trade Commission, we speculate that certain "mental frames" (narratives) people have in four areas may impact how they are going to respond when presented with a potential fraud.
The mental frames relate to four areas of our thinking, or narrative:
Compliance
Opportunity
Intelligence
Order
In each of these mental frames, our beliefs lie along a continuum, from one poll to the other.
When it comes to "compliance," some people see complying with authority, such as government agencies, as an obligation, a contribution to the larger society incumbent on all good citizens. To others, compliance may tend to be interpreted as intrusion, a loss of power, an act of submission. If you're instinctively more inclined to comply with requests than not, you may be more predisposed to engaging further with a fraud than someone who may be compliance averse. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle and find our response to compliance situational. What we found important to note is that beliefs about compliance may factor into the fraud equation and existing with a mental frame that is at or near one pole over the other may have an impact on how you respond.
"Opportunity" is something most of us seek. However, we may diverge when it comes to how opportunity presents itself in everyday life. Some believe opportunity comes by luck, a chance event that must be seized at the moment or lost forever, and that opportunity is a zero-sum game, where there's a limited amount of opportunity and if someone else has a lot, there's less left over for the rest of the people. Others, believe that opportunity is in everyone's control and is unlimited, given hard work and good decision-making (with perhaps a little luck!). The majority of us probably exist in the middle of this continuum with our mental frame on opportunity, and find that we see it more one way or the other based on context. A person may believe that if they were born in an impoverished nation, they may have less economic opportunity that someone born in, say, the United States; the same person may realize they have agency, can create opportunity through hard work and determination, and find a way to move to a country that has greater economic infrastructure, or find a way to create opportunity where they live and help others do the same. The opportunity mental frame, like the three others we discuss here, are not absolute, but rather dominant guides to our thinking and behavior. These mental frame can also interact with one another given the nature of the potential fraud challenge that presents itself.
"Intelligence" is perhaps as or more important to human survival than physical characteristics. Intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend what is taking place around us and make good decisions. The more intelligent we are, the less vulnerable we become as we make out way through the world. For this reason, many feel it's important to always project that you know what you're doing and understand things. Others, on the other hand, feel it's important to learn as much as possible at all times, and therefore it's important to ask questions and suggest that we don't know everything, and sometimes very little about a particular subject. Again, most of us likely fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum, depending on the context of the situation. What's important to note is that a dominant mental frame that says intelligence is something that's important to project to others at all times rather than one that prompts the individual to constantly learn from others could make one more vulnerable to fraud as it favors not asking a lot of questions.
The idea that the universe has some rules or force outside of human thought and behavior falls under the mental frame we call in our research "order." Some believe that there's a natural, universal force that ensures good people get rewarded and bad people punished. Some believe there is no such thing, that we are all responsible for every action and the consequences have nothing to do with anything outside of how others respond to our actions. In other words, there is no correcting ideal or force at work outside of ourselves; fairness exists only as a concept in our minds. Most of us likely believe in some form of "right will be rewarded in the end," but are nevertheless conscious that there are bad people around us and we need to protect ourselves. One can imagine that if a person believes almost solely on the protection of a universal force that favors good people, they may be more susceptible to fraud. For many, this notion may not be absolute but still might imbue one to think there must be protections like laws or oversight that would not allow scammers to do what they do. Surely, banks would not allow bad checks to be passed along in this day and age, and isn't the IRS powerful enough to keep people from impersonating their agents? The nature of your mental frame with respect to order can interact significantly influence how you respond to a fraud attempt.
In 2022, we'll be conducting additional research that attempts to empirically validate the existence and impact of the mental frame just described on fraud vulnerability.
Meantime, we invite you to download and read the latest report on this exciting research. (Note: The report references "Metro Tribal, LLC" for co-author Craig Honick. The Good People Research Company is a company of Metro Tribal, LLC.