One born every minute

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We bought a dishwasher right before the holidays, but a month later the control panel lit up like a Christmas tree and it stopped running. When we called the store to get it repaired, the service department said it would be six weeks until they could come out.

Six weeks? I was furious. Part of it was the inconvenience of hand-washing dishes for a month-and-a-half, which is annoying. But more than that, I felt the store was ripping us off, selling us a lemon and then taking its sweet old time in fixing the problem. (They eventually got tired of my complaints and made it right.)

Penn law professor Tess Wilkinson-Ryan has written a new book, Fool Proof, which explains how the fear of being played for a sucker unconsciously affects our beliefs and behavior.

In Deep Metaphor language, it is about Balance – in the form of reciprocity. I do something for you, you do something for me. And if you renege on that, it is a violation of trust. Wilkinson posits that in law, this could explain why people demand (and sometimes receive) large sums in punitive damages for relatively mundane breaches of contract.

She argues for some interesting societal implications, too. In the US, at least, our government is quite cautious about antipoverty programs in large part, Wilkerson suggests, because of a societal fear of being played for a sucker. She also contends there is an element of this fear that drives misogynistic beliefs – women are stereotypically (and paradoxically) framed as both suckers and schemers, which leaves a narrow lane for a woman to earn credibility.

One wonders how much counterproductive consumer behavior is unconsciously rooted in this fear. Could it be related to people’s aversion to saving and investing?  Could it have something to do with the sunk-cost fallacy, where we keep throwing good money after bad in pursuit of a goal?  Could it affect physicians who are reluctant to diagnose a new, more effective treatment? Could this explain why some people are slow to adopt certain technologies? It seems like it could be present in a lot of places if you dig deeply enough.