The Psychology of Trust Reveals Why We Get Scammed

Tali Sharot talks about the psychology of trust and what that means for protecting us from scams.

We don’t get scammed because we’re careless, stupid, or gullible. We get scammed because our brains are wired to trust by default. When scammers add in elements like urgency, strong emotions, or appeals to authority, our brains naturally rationalize even the most obvious red flags. Knowing how the psychology of trust works and how the human brain processes risk is a powerful way to defend yourself.

See Wired to Trust with Tali Sharot for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.

Tali Sharot is a cognitive neuroscientist – she mixes psychology, brain science, and behavioral economics to understand how the default mechanisms of the brain influence how people act and make decisions. She is best known for her discovery of the neural underpinnings of optimism. Her book The Optimism Bias discusses the benefits and dangers of optimism. She has also written two other books, one about the nature of influence called The Influential Mind, and more recently Look Again, which is about habituation and human attention. Tali has always been fascinated with the fact that we have a physical organ in charge of our every thought, feeling, and action. To her, starting with the brain is the way to understand yourself or any person or animal.

If you want to understand yourself and any other human or animal, and nowadays maybe AI as well to some extent, then the brain is a good place to start.
Tali Sharot

Rationalizing Her Way Into a Scam

Tali has been scammed a few times. She wrote about one of the biggest ones in her last book. Around 2008, she was a postdoc fellow, which means she was in the stage between earning her PhD and becoming a professor. She lived in an apartment in London but traveled a lot for academic conferences. While traveling, she sublet her apartment to earn some extra money. At the time, she did it through Craigslist. At the time of this incident, she’d done it several times with no problems.

This time, she listed her apartment on Craigslist, and someone contacted her. He wanted it for exactly the dates she would be gone. Tali asked if he wanted to see it, and he said he just wanted a place to shower while he was in the city so he didn’t need to see it. To get the keys, he asked to meet at 9 PM near the tube station near Tali’s office. She met him in a dark alley – in retrospect, he was obviously trying to keep her from seeing his face clearly. He gave her the cash, and she gave him the keys.

It did occur to her that the whole thing was a little suspicious. Not wanting to see the place before renting it and meeting in a dark alley were both red flags. But the psychology of trust kicked in and she rationalized it away. She thought she was assuming this person was out to get her because he was male or had certain characteristics. Besides, he’d given her the money. She rationalized that she was being irrational and making assumptions she shouldn’t be.

The Results of Rationalizing

A week later, Tali came back from her trip, returned to her apartment, and tried to open the door. Her key no longer fit, and she could hear voices inside talking in Italian. The man she had sublet the place to wasn’t Italian. She knocked, and an Italian couple opened the door.

It turned out the guy Tali had sublet the place to had immediately rented it out to this couple for six months and took the first and last month’s rent in advance. A few days after they moved in another person showed up with luggage because the guy had also rented the apartment to him. The couple realized there was some kind of scam going on, but decided to stay because they had already paid. They knew Tali lived there because mail kept arriving for her, but the guy from Craigslist had said she was his girlfriend.

Tali ended up calling the police and also her brother, who was an attorney living in London at the time. Ultimately, the Italian couple left the apartment that night. Since Tali didn’t know how many people had keys at this point, she dragged the sofa in front of the door before going to bed. And the next morning, she realized that most of her stuff was gone. He took everything of value – not just her laptop and camera, but books, CDs, art off the wall, anything he could sell for a little extra cash.

Why Tali Ignored the Red Flags

The psychology of trust is often subtle. Even in retrospect, Tali isn’t entirely sure what led her to ignore the obvious red flags that something was fishy. One possibility is that she didn’t want to believe she was being scammed. He was giving her money, which was helpful for her. And it wouldn’t have been easy to find someone else to sublet the place on such short notice. And maybe she didn’t want to believe people would do that in general.

Another aspect of the psychology of trust, one that Tali has actually written a paper on, is that people suspect others in situations where they would act the same way. If you would lie about your height or weight on a dating app, you’ll suspect others of doing the same. But if you wouldn’t claim to be a German heiress when you’re not, you won’t be expecting someone to do that. It takes a bit leap to believe that not only would someone do something like that, they would meet you in person and give you cash and still be planning to scam you.

There’s also the possibility of confirmation bias. She had sublet her apartment before multiple times with no issues. If this was the first time she was doing it, she might have been more cautious. But it’s not irrational to learn from experience. It only becomes a problem when the current situation is different and you end up over-relying on prior experience.

Lessons Learned from This Scam

The big lesson from this situation is that Tali had a clear feeling and ignored it. If we were to talk about “parts” of the brain, the emotional part of hers was saying something wrong. It was a signal based on some kind of information. That part looked at the evidence and said something didn’t fit. But the logical part of her decided to override that warning.

There was a signal. That signal is based on information. … It was trying to warn me, and I decided to override that.
Tali Sharot

Humans have a truth bias. We tend to assume that people are telling the truth and that what’s around us is what it seems. That’s not irrational. The majority of what people tell us is true, and it makes sense that’s what we assume. There’s a lot of research showing that humans default to truth, and it’s harder to convince people that something is false. We’re programmed from experience to trust others.

The psychology of trust means we tend to default to believing others - and that's not a bad thing.

That does change with experience, though. Because Tali had this bad experience, she’s now more skeptical of people she doesn’t know. After encountering the scam renter, she started asking for things like potential renters’ passports to counteract similar scams. It wasn’t difficult to ask. Sometimes we only need to do small things to avoid scams. It’s interesting how the psychology of trust means we often don’t think about those minimal steps until after a bad experience.

It’s quite interesting that we so often don’t do the really minimal actions that we need to do to avoid these kind of [scams].
Tali Sharot

The Stakes Matter

What we view as the potential impact of a decision also affects how much the psychology of trust influences us to trust by default. In situations where we view the stakes as very high, like hiring someone to take care of your children, you’ll rely less on trust by default and really go out of your way to make sure the person is trustworthy and reliable.

With the rental scammer, Tali assumed that it was only a week. Even if things went badly with him, he would only be there for a week. And he did give her money for the week. It turned out she was underestimating the risk. There was the material cost of the stuff he took and the challenge of dealing with the couple that thought they were renting her apartment for six months. But there was also the emotional component of it. The experience was quite traumatic, and there was also an emotional cost of having someone knowingly do that to her.

There is an emotional cost to scams as well, to just knowing that someone knowingly did this to you.
Tali Sharot

It’s important to pay more attention to places in your life that are more likely to include scammers. You’re extremely unlikely to encounter scammers in everyday in-person interactions. But situations like renting a place in a new city, filing your taxes, online dating, and buying things online are places scammers tend to congregate. Anywhere there’s money involved, even less-obvious things like publishing a book or talking to a potential client, is somewhere you should be cautious.

How the Psychology of Trust Leads Us Astray

We have a narrative that we shouldn’t trust our emotions. Even in scam prevention, the common refrain is that scammers are manipulating your emotions to lead you astray, so you shouldn’t listen to them. The advice is that your rational brain needs to override your emotional brain. But that narrative comes at a cost. Because your rational brain relies on the psychology of trust, it can be wrong and led astray just as much as your emotions.

Emotions are separate from rationality, either. And they don’t come out of nowhere. If you’re having a feeling, it’s responding to something. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily accurate. But you shouldn’t just ignore it – you should look closer and figure out what this feeling is about. Gut feelings are a sign that you need to pay attention to something. In Tali’s case, if she’d listened to that gut feeling, she would probably have asked for more verification.

These feelings aren’t always right, but they’re based on your mind observing something that doesn’t fit with what usually happens. It’s called a prediction error, and our brains do this all the time. We’re constantly predicting what’s going to happen all the time. Right now, you’re predicting the next word you’ll read. If it’s something entirely unexpected, your brain will notice and pay attention. It uses your past experiences to make those predictions and will tell you immediately if something doesn’t fit.

Scams, Lies, and Brain Signals

The psychology of trust also means we can often pick up on deception. When someone is trying to scam us, most of what we notice are unconscious things. Strange temporal dynamics – talking too fast or too slow or taking too long to respond – happens in lying a lot, because lying takes more effort than telling the truth. We can pick up on that. We’re also pretty good at identifying when facial reactions are genuine or not.

Of course, that’s a spectrum. Some people are better at controlling those behaviors than others. Some things, like asking you to meet in a dark alley, are obviously suspicious. But if someone is really prepared, a skilled actor or liar, or they genuinely believe at least part of their story, a lot of those clues won’t be there. Method of contact matters, too. A lot of scams these days are over the phone, text, or online. That reduces the clues you’ll get.

But the advantage of text-based scams is you have more time. You don’t have to respond to an email, text message, or social media message right away. It gives you time to think about the situation or request and do extra verifications. Tali recommends having basic rules about when you’re going to engage. For example, don’t respond to anyone saying they’re calling from the IRS. If they’re really the IRS, they’ll find you. Tali has a personal rule that she doesn’t answer calls from numbers she doesn’t know. These rules on where you’ll engage can help give you space to think and avoid common scams.

It’s helpful to have base rules, just have your set of rules of the kind of things where you’re just not going to engage.
Tali Sharot

Becoming Aware of Manipulation

A lot of the old advice about avoiding scams doesn’t apply anymore. You used to be able to identify a scammer because they wouldn’t get on a video call, but now deepfake technology lets them look and sound however they want in real time. Urgency is still a warning sign, but scammers are increasingly investing months or even years into building trust before they even ask for money. With all the tech tools out there these days, it’s easier than ever to be scammed. But it’s also easier than ever for us to verify things because there’s so much information out there.

In some ways it’s easier to be scammed [now], but with all the information out there, there’s actually more that we can do.
Tali Sharot

We can Google people and businesses. We can look at social media, search for key terms and the word “scam,” and find out if someone else has posted on the internet before about encountering something similar. You can also take steps like asking for ID or other verifications, depending on the situation. Things like relationships and new jobs are harder because we’re motivated to believe even outside of the psychology of trust. But we can still take steps to verify in advance.

Any time there’s a request for money or you’re meeting someone for the first time, it’s good to have some kind of check. Even with scams online, there are often small clues there if you take the time to look. Many scams rely on us not paying enough attention. If we’re just a bit more attentive, a lot of times we can save ourselves.

A lot of the time [scammers] are just relying on the fact that we are not attentive.
Tali Sharot

Increase Your Awareness

Tali’s most recent book, Look Again, is about habituation. That’s the process of how we stop noticing things. When things are frequent and basically the same, our mind just stops paying attention to them. This is a good thing. It frees up resources to redirect to other, more important things. But it means that if you’ve been fine in a situation a few times, your brain will stop paying close attention to the situation because it doesn’t see the value of putting resources there.

Take emails, for example. Many of us are looking at dozens or hundreds of emails per day. We don’t tend to look at the actual address the email was sent from because we’re doing it all the time and most of the emails we get aren’t malicious. But Tali recently got an email that looked like it was from a colleague – the name was correct, but the email was different. She didn’t notice at first because she wasn’t looking closely.

A lot of the time, as long as the stakes aren’t high, it’s not a big deal. Tali responded to the fake email, and it was okay. Once the scammer responded asking for money, then she checked and realized it was fake. When the situation gets to asking for money or personal info, that’s where things are at risk. Even if you have that psychology of trust telling you it’s okay, that’s when it’s time to check. Until you get to that point, it’s generally okay.

Learn more about Tali Sharot and her work at affectivebrain.com. That website is for Tali’s lab, and has some of her talks, academic papers, and essays for the general public. You can also find her books Look Again, The Influential Mind, and The Optimism Bias wherever books are sold.