CM 236: Tess Wilkinson-Ryan on When to Play the Fool
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People find the idea of feeling duped or playing the sucker, playing the fool, so aversive that they'll go way out of their way to avoid that feeling, even when it's counterproductive. Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. No one wants to feel like a sucker. In fact, the very thought of being one, of playing the fool, shapes our behavior in powerful ways.

But what if our fear causes us to make choices that aren't good for us? Or worse, what if people weaponize our fear in order to dominate or disempower us? Tess Wilkinson Ryan has written a stunning book on the topic. It's called Foolproof, How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Ourselves in the Social Order and What We Can Do About It.

A psychologist and law professor, Tess helps us understand what this fear is, why we have it, and how it plays out in law, politics, and everyday life. She also shares how to overcome it and make the decisions that are aligned with our goals. It's a book you'll keep thinking about long after you've read it.

One quick ask, if you like the podcast, take a moment to leave a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with Tess Wilkinson-Ryan. Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on. Thank you so much. It's so great to be here. We have a strong aversion to playing the fool, being seen as a sucker. How big of a problem is this and why does it matter?

I think it matters a lot. And in part, it matters because it's one of those cliches or aphorisms that we know about that we don't actually think about critically in our day-to-day lives. And so I think it really matters because there's all kinds of decision-making that implicates this sort of subterranean feeling that you might be playing the sucker, whether you're out shopping, whether you're making decisions at work, in your professional life, in your personal life.

There's all kinds of things that we do that raise the possibility of feeling duped. And so understanding it better can really change the way that we approach a lot of parts of our lives.

There is a real fear that's associated with this. Psychologists have even developed a theory of it, even a word for it. Can you talk about this? The word is sugraphobia. And this word was coined by three psychologists, Kathleen Vose, Roy Baumwister, and Jason Chin. And they wrote an article called Feeling Duped. And they coined this term, sugraphobia, which literally means, like the Latin roots would be sort of fear of sucking, right?

But the idea I think comes through. People find the idea of feeling duped or playing the sucker, playing the fool so aversive that they'll go way out of their way to avoid that feeling, even when it's counterproductive. Can you give us an example of that? So let me start with one that's maybe super familiar. This is one that I really can't talk about this topic for more than a couple of minutes before people bring up traffic. Okay.

So a classic example is of people who feel taken advantage of. I would say merging is the moment that a lot of us feel this way. Someone merges in front of you. Maybe you've been waiting in the line for a long time and someone else sort of zips along to the side and then pushes in and people feel duped by it. And then we'll do things to avoid sort of feeling like they have been

you know, irreversibly had that are ultimately counterproductive, like, you know, tailgating or retaliating in some form. Another familiar place for a lot of people is the feeling that they get in various kinds of consumer transactions where they go to buy something that they think should have a particular price. And when it's too high, they start to feel taken advantage of. So my younger sister, she told me this story because she knows about this interest of mine. So she had gone biking with friends in Vermont.

She was going biking with some very serious bikers. And she's a great athlete, but she's a person with a full-time job who just can bike on the weekends here and there. She's not like a professional athlete. And basically the ride was hard and it was hot. And she was starting to get really thirsty. Like she didn't have quite enough water. And she thought to herself, like she needed to get some Gatorade. And so they coasted into this town in

And in Vermont, if you go to a general store, things can kind of go one of two directions. One is that sort of like a regular truck stop, general store type place. And another is that it's more of a tourist trap. And this turned out to be the latter. So she went into the store, goes to get the Gatorade, and the Gatorade cost like $6. And she knew perfectly well that like at a gas station, you get the same Gatorade for $1.50.

And she said that she had a moment of being like, I'm not going to be the fool who buys into this outrageous sort of scam that's being perpetrated on tourists to Vermont and then had to stop herself and say, what am I doing? This Gatorade is literally worth $100 to me right now. Like she wanted to be able to get back on her bike and ride home. And so she had to stop herself and be like, what do I care if the store wins on this one? And so she bought the Gatorade and went home.

So my question for you is, I think that we can tap into the feelings that are related to feeling like maybe your sister did or feeling like the people who get cut off in traffic. So it seems like those feelings would be pretty innate, pretty natural to conjure up. But tell us a little bit more. What are the emotions that are at the heart of this fear of playing the fool?

Maybe I'll just think about two different sort of stages, I guess, maybe of the emotional trajectory. So the first is that people are feeling fearful of entering into some transaction that's going to make them feel like a fool. If they are duped,

they're oftentimes experiencing something that's, of course, one experience is of just being really sad, especially if you've lost something you care about, like money. So imagine if you've invested in a Ponzi scheme. You feel really, you feel sad and you feel betrayed. Oftentimes that feeling of sadness and betrayal is accompanied by something akin to humiliation,

So one of the arguments that I am trying to make, generally speaking, about the idea of feeling suckered is that it's a social emotion. People really experience it as being like a hit to their sense of dignity or status. So there's a sense of humiliation and then I think a resulting sense of anger that comes after this. So there's this sort of cluster of incredibly unpleasant emotions where you are feeling

fearful about this experience happening. Then you feel humiliated, you feel an intense sense of regret, and then possibly you feel really angry. You also mentioned alienation too, which is I think something that we don't often think about, but that's really important. Yeah, I think there's something particularly deep about the sense of

rejection or being on the outside that people feel after they experience the feeling of having been scammed. Where the idea is this is not something you do to people who you respect. You don't take advantage of people you respect. And so there's a sense that like, you would only be doing this to me if you were willing to sort of have me alienated from our social group.

It's really interesting if you read, we can talk about this later if you want, but so it's very interesting if you read the comments in a lot of the economics games that try to push these buttons.

People will play these economics games in labs and they're very kind of bland games, basically. But then the, but then the researchers will record what people say to each other or what they say, what they say to the experimenters after the game is over. And when people leave the game feeling betrayed, they will really, they will raise the issue. They will say things like, you think you're better than me? How dare you? Or I can't believe you're willing to alienate me this way. So I think there's this real sense that,

Feeling suckered is feeling on the outside. It's feeling sort of put to the side of the social group or of society in some way that feels really bad. Let's talk a little bit about how this gets weaponized. How does this fear of being the sucker, how does it get used in a way that's like a weapon? The weaponization of the fear of being a sucker is one of the reasons that I wrote this book to begin with because

Because I was really worried about the kinds of rhetoric that I was seeing at a personal level, and I guess also at a political level, that seemed to suggest that when people are looking to help others, that they might actually be suckers and that they should stop trying to help others.

So this sometimes comes up in political rhetoric with arguments like around, for example, around immigration, right? And the arguments will be something like,

Listen, you people who would like to have a more liberal immigration policy are saying that you want this because you want us to be generous and kind. But actually, what you are arguing for is actually for us to be taken advantage of. And this can be sort of pushed, this little button can be pushed in all kinds of ways, you know, sort of in political messaging. And I think it often is in ways that don't quite get discussed explicitly.

So why does our radar go off on this sometimes and not others? What's happening there? Psychologists often talk about questions of framing, about the way that a situation is framed. And you can really think about a lot of situations as being potentially situations where the sucker frame could be invoked but doesn't have to be invoked. So if I can maybe give you an example closer to home just to try to make it more concrete, right?

Every once in a while in the life of a teacher, which is my day job, every once in a while, I will have a student who has some kind of a problem that interferes with their ability to do the classwork in my class. You can imagine, for example, a student who comes to me and says, I need an extension for this paper. I've had a family emergency. And can we discuss what's possible?

My automatic response to that is to think, okay, of course, I should tell the student how badly I feel, how sorry I am to hear that they're having something difficult in their family, ask them what kind of support they need, and just figure out what the sort of normal protocols are for handing in some kind of work late. But you can imagine a world in which I have to approach that same problem. And right beforehand, someone kind of cues to me

that this is actually potentially a situation in which I'm being taken advantage of. So somebody says to me, like a sort of in a jokey way, oh yeah, let me guess, a family emergency right before exams. Like, you know, if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. And I hadn't been thinking of it that way, but now my sort of hackles are up in the same situation that appeared basically innocuous or, you know,

best case scenario, sort of seemed like a case for me to, you know, be compassionate person. Now I'm wondering, wait, am I supposed to be compassionate here? Or is, am I supposed to actually be suspicious? Is the right thing to do for me to sort of be on guard? And when that happens, I behave differently, right? I hope that I'm still sort of

kind and pleasant with the student, but maybe now I'm more guarded. Maybe now I'm introducing our conversation by telling them I need documentation. Let's make sure we fill out these forms right in order for me to be able to sort of process your request. And maybe I forget, right, to think about offering condolences or suggesting other resources for support.

So it's this kind of small triggers that can change the way you see something, that you see a situation that you otherwise thought of as being mostly about something like altruism or compassion or friendship even. And all of a sudden, a little reminder of the fact that you might be suckered in this life changes the way you act in ways you otherwise wouldn't have preferred.

So Tess, let's build on that a little bit or maybe connect what you were talking about with the political piece with that great example and some deeper understanding of this weaponization. You talk about how it can also work against people on the lower and the very lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder. Like for example, when it comes to maybe how people are punished, things that show up legally, say more about this.

So one of the core pieces of the argument that I'm trying to make here is that typically people are more worried about being taken advantage of from other people who they view as either like subordinates to them, maybe in an organization or maybe in some other sort of social hierarchy or who are peers to them than they are about being taken advantage of by people who they view as sort of above them in the hierarchy.

The argument is if you end up in a scam type situation and you are the sucker, the feeling that that gives you is the feeling of having been essentially put down or you had one put over on you. And it's a way of putting the sucker sort of beneath the scammer on the hierarchy. And the further down on the hierarchy the scammer is,

the bigger of a deal it is to be sort of kicked beneath them. So I think in a workplace situation, you can imagine in a given workplace, let's imagine that I am, well, which I am, I'm a professor in a university.

And so I think of the president, the provost of this university as basically being my bosses, right? The dean. And then I have the students, for example, who or maybe younger faculty whom I would have some responsibility for. People in my position may find it more intuitively difficult.

scary to feel duped by, for example, students than by their boss.

because being exploited by my boss in some ways, like in the American, in your work system, like that's always kind of a risk. And in any case, like I sort of understand myself as already being beneath them on some hierarchy. Whereas if I feel like I'm being taken advantage of by someone who is my student, then I might feel like, oh, wow, I'm really failing at my current position. I'm actually at the bottom of a ladder, even though my position requires me to be further up, which means I'm doing a terrible job and it's embarrassing.

And that's a motivator to some kind of action. It motivates us to take action in a way that does an even greater disservice than the situation merits. Tell us about that.

I think the action that motivates is basically a sort of blanket suspicion and sometimes surveillance of people who are otherwise just sort of doing their jobs or otherwise lack social power. Let me just give another workplace example because I think maybe this will make it a little bit more concrete. So you can imagine in a workplace where there is an office supply closet and there's like a sign on the door saying like, this supply closet is being video recorded.

You know, there's a camera here to make sure you don't take too many office supplies. That's a way of telling people who might have to go to the office supply closet, which is normally going to be sort of, you know, everyday employees of the organization, that they are being suspected of trying to take too much from their workplace, right? Take too many pens or pencils and pieces of paper. In a world in which, for example, if you were in the C-suite, there would never be that kind of sign.

Because they would understand that, first of all, it's offensive and that there's a sense that people with high status are sort of supposed to be, you know, making the most of all of the resources available to them. Like that's just sort of savvy or that's just doing the right thing by their position.

If you really sit and think about that a little bit, you get this strong sense all of a sudden of like, wow, we really do have this tendency when it comes to status and position to spend a lot of time sort of nitpicking in areas that maybe that energy could be directed elsewhere when it comes to looking at maybe where unfairness is or where discrimination is, etc.,

I think that's right. The concern that I wanted to raise in the book is like a lot of this is a lot of energy directed at sort of policing people's behavior when people are otherwise pretty constrained and not being given a lot of resources or power.

And for some reason, that same suspicion of people's motives and choices just doesn't get directed up at the same level. We oftentimes don't think about the same kinds of questions when we're dealing with people who have more money and more power.

You write too that there are things that this kind of fear, this fear of playing the fool, it causes us not to do important things that would improve our lives and the lives of others. And I'm going to list these because I think they're important. I'd love it if you would take one that maybe is, it resonates the most with you and take us on a deeper dive. So you say first, we don't cooperate as much. We don't invest as much. We don't help as much. And we don't compromise as much.

What's one of these that you feel really is both harmful to us or maybe it's just one that you want to talk about in greater depth? Let me pick up on this question of investment and cooperation. A lot of enterprises that matter to us in this world require trust.

Sometimes these are enterprises that are basically sort of generous or you can think of sort of familial, but oftentimes there's a certain amount of sort of trusting leaps of faith that are required for the core economic activities of our lives. So let me think about investing here for a second, in part because there's a really nice example that I think I could describe that would help give the intuition. So the idea is if you're super worried that you are going to be

feeling like a sucker or you're going to be viewed as a sucker after you make some choice that you will be deterred from engaging this activity so one of the funniest examples from the book i think is this is an example of a research team that basically set up a table at a mall and just put a sign out that said free money and then they just counted how many people looked at the table and walked by which i think is funny in part because it's sort of silly like you can envision what you're thinking when you walk by that table you're thinking like i doubt it right

But they were, in fact, just giving away dollar bills. It was like if you walked up and you asked, they just handed you a dollar bill. So there's all kinds of reasons why you might be suspicious of that particular kind of a table. But let me just give you a more sort of rigorous experiment that tees up the same kind of question.

This is an experiment by researchers at Stanford and they just basically were asking people who came into the psychology lab to answer a question about investment. They said, here's the situation. Imagine we've given you $100 and we've told you, you can use any amount of that $100 to invest in a new company, to start up. We've had experts assess the risks involved and the risks are as follows.

There's an 80% chance that this startup doesn't do that well, but doesn't do that poorly. You just get your money back. You break even. There's a 15% chance that you double your money. And there's a 5% chance that you lose everything. The question for the subjects in the study was, how much of the $100 would you invest? It's a pretty good gamble. Four out of the five times that you're just going to keep your money, so it's sort of no risk, or it's just a break even. And then you have

three times bigger chance of doubling your money than of losing your money. However, they had subjects in one of two conditions. So each subject would learn an additional piece of information about this 5% downside risk. Half the subjects heard there's a 5% risk that you lose everything because the founders may have overestimated consumer demand for this product. The other half of subjects heard there's a 5% downside risk because the founders in this case might be fraudsters.

The people who were willing to invest more were the people who were just sort of doing the math and thinking about the possibility of like an error of consumer demand. They were willing to invest like 60 out of $100 on average. The people who heard that the founders might be fraudsters were only willing to invest $37 on average, which is a pretty big difference. I would like to argue that it's a difference that probably doesn't reflect anything real about the values of the participants.

My guess is it's more just like a sort of a bad feeling that you don't want to be involved in something that's potentially a scam, but that isn't quite thought through. Because normally, if you're trying to invest in a company, what you're mainly trying to do is to make money, right? The goal, I think, is usually wealth maximization in this kind of situation. I don't think that there was any sense that you were going to sort of be personally affiliated with the failed company.

And so if that's the case, it seems to me that the people in the fraudster condition were underinvesting.

Right. The fear that they might be associated with the fraud in some way or taken advantage of felt like such a big deal that it made them stay away from investment that they otherwise would have wanted to be part of. If you'd like the chance to get a free copy of this week's book, sign up for our newsletter, The 1-2-3, by heading to my website, GailAllen.net. Each new subscriber will automatically be entered into a drawing to win our most recent guest book.

Before we release the next episode, we'll send the winner their free copy and give them a shout out on the podcast. This week's winner is Vince from Ohio. Congratulations, Vince. We'll be sending you a copy of Jonah Berger's book, Magic Words. What's the 123 newsletter? It's one topic, two insights, and three actions you can take. Now back to my interview with Tess Wilkinson-Ryan.

Tess, the other side of this coin is cooperation. And it makes me think of the experiment you write about in your book, the one with the flow meter. It speaks to issues that can come up when we work on teams. Can you share some information about that work? The flow meter study is amazing. Yes, it's this incredible study that's really obviously comes from like a different era of psychology in certain ways. It speaks to an experience that I think a lot of us have.

at some point in our lives, which is that you are working in a group on some group endeavor, like a group project at school or some kind of a teamwork in your workplace. And you start to get the feeling that the people that you are working with are slacking off and you're the only one doing the work. And it starts to feel like you are going to be the sucker if you do all the work and everyone gets the reward.

So the idea of this study was to try to test this effect in a lab. And this is how they did it. So subjects were invited into this lab and they were introduced to a box. The box was called a flow meter box. And basically what the box was supposed to be doing was measuring the amount of air that subjects could pump in a small amount of time, like say, let's say a minute.

So basically you can imagine subjects that were basically pumping what looks like, I think, like a bike horn. They're sort of pumping like a bowl, basically. And it's pushing air through this tube. And there is a meter on the box that basically shows when they have pumped enough air to have technically succeeded in the task. So every subject was told, like, ultimately the goal is going to be to see how often you can pump enough air in a minute to have, like, won the task.

Subjects come into the lab and they are paired with another subject. So everyone's working in pairs. But here's the thing, in every pair there's one person who is the real research subject and the other person is what's called a confederate, which is someone who's already been primed by the researchers to have specific behavior. They get instructions from the experimenter that say, "Try this task out. We're going to see how you guys do so you just get used to the task."

Half of the Confederates are told, listen, in the training rounds, you should try to be really bad. And half of them were told, in the training round, you should try to be good at pumping the air. It turns out that in order to pump enough air to quote unquote succeed, to like make the sort of like green light go off or whatever, it was actually super easy. One person could easily do it by themselves basically every time.

So you go into the paid rounds and all of these groups are told, if you succeed in, say, four out of five trials, you're going to get a bonus. You're going to get paid extra money for having done this experiment. Now, keep in mind, every subject who was a real research subject could easily pump enough air on their own

to get the prize. They didn't need the other person. But half of these subjects are going into the paid rounds, expecting that they're working with someone who's reasonably good at pumping the air. And half of them go into the experiment believing that they're working with someone who is a weak pumper, with someone who isn't good at it. Once you get into the paid rounds, the Confederates all have a new instruction. Every Confederate is told, be a terrible pumper.

Keep failing. The research subjects who are paired with people who were weak pumpers from the beginning basically get the bonus amount every single round, which is what you would expect. Because those people think, this person's not very good at pumping. It's easy for me to sort of make up the ground for both of us. I'll just keep pumping. We'll succeed every time. We'll get the bonus. And they do get the bonus.

The people who are paired with Confederates who they believe to be strong pumpers start pumping, and they see that their partner keeps failing. And they're thinking, what is going on here? Can this person not keep up their side of the bargain? And it turns out that those research subjects start pumping worse and failing more.

Even though they could keep winning for the team, they stopped winning for the team because they believe they're paired with someone who's trying to shirk or free ride off of their pumping. And they were able to show that your attributions of what that weak partner situation meant and

Like, do you feel like you're just helping someone out who isn't good at this task? Or do you feel like you're the sucker who's going to keep winning for everybody, even though they're not putting any work in? Those two distinct attributions change the outcome in what was otherwise a similar scenario. It's a really interesting thought exercise to ask yourself, what would I do in that situation and why?

Because I'm not sure that it's so obvious what the right answer is, like what you should do. But I do think it's worth like reckoning explicitly with what the goals in that situation are. There's something a little bit funny and perverse about the idea that some of these players basically said, well, I'm going to slack off on principle. Like what would be the principle there? I'm not, I mean, I understand. It's not that I don't think there couldn't be one, but I will say that if I sort of think about it, I think,

Gosh, I can't imagine what I'm doing in this experiment except basically just trying to take my bonus money and go home. And if that's the case, you know, what do I care about whether the other person also gets to win because of my extra effort? You write that some people are presumed to be suckers and others schemers and others may be both, not because of their behavior, but because of their ethnic or racial identity.

So there's a way that this plays out when it comes to racial and ethnic stereotyping. Can you explain what you mean by that and how that shows up for us? Yeah. One of the things that I was really trying to think about in this

whole project was the idea that stereotypes have content. Racial and ethnic prejudice has content to it. It's not just raw animus. There are beliefs embedded in

racial and ethnic stereotyping. And this is not my finding, this is the finding of many years now of social psychologists writing about stereotyping. There's something called the stereotype content model that I found that was for sure very influential for me. Part of what I wanted to do in both, in two chapters, the chapter on racial and ethnic stereotyping and a chapter on sexism and gender stereotyping, was to try to draw a through line

between the ways that sucker narratives

are woven into the fabric of racial and ethnic stereotyping. That stereotypes about some groups sort of getting more than they deserve or asking for special favors. So special favors, I think, is an interesting construct. I think special favors is actually a way of cuing the idea that people are trying to put one over. They're trying to get something that they don't deserve by, for example, claiming that they have been discriminated against.

A lot of these stereotypes, which do a lot of really pernicious work in our society, are rooted in the idea that you should disdain suckers and repudiate schemers. It's a way of discouraging people from cooperating with others who are from different racial backgrounds or ethnic backgrounds or of different genders.

So talk to us a little bit about this in terms of something that might be pretty commonplace that maybe we don't think about, maybe we don't critique. And then if you would, can you help us rethink it? Can you help us look at it and say, huh, maybe these are some of the questions we should ask ourselves when we see or hear something like this?

So I used to teach a course on wills and trusts. This is a course that's basically about how you distribute property after somebody has died. So either by their will or some kind of a trust or they have some kind of an estate that's being distributed without paperwork. In a standard wills and trusts casebook, you're going to have to take my word for it, but there are so many stories, so many cases that bear a similar pattern. And the pattern is this.

Someone has died. The person who has died is usually, in a case of a will contest, the person who has died is usually a wealthy man. There's a wealthy man who has died and he has children from an earlier relationship or an earlier marriage. And then he has a new spouse, a new, a wife who has been, who is not the parent of his children. He leaves a lot of money to his wife and

And then the adult children basically contest the will and they say, she doesn't deserve it. She was exerting undue influence on him this whole time. Something like that. When I'm teaching these cases or when I used to be teaching these cases, I'm

I would find how easy it was to slip into something that I started to realize was basically a pernicious stereotype, which is the idea that a woman in that position is a gold digger. So I'm using a term that I would never use in casual conversation because it is obviously really sexist. But so it's obviously an insult. But the idea of a gold digger is of somebody who is perpetrating a scam. They are pretending to be in love, pretending to care,

in order to extract money from the, in this case, from the decedent. And I would often have to stop in class and sort of make sure that the conversation didn't get overly sort of presumptuous about what was going on here. I have to point out these facts and say, look, the person who's being accused basically of being essentially having perpetrated this massive scam on this family is someone who oftentimes has been married to this person, to the husband for 30 years.

who has been doing caretaking for 10 years, who has been a deep part of this family. And in part because of this underlying sexism, particularly about the sort of role of women in these kinds of marriages, it was so easy to overlay these stories with these narratives about sort of conniving women and what they were going to try to get out of this situation.

And it was really a moment where I'd have to sort of stop and say, we should really be thinking carefully about the kinds of assumptions that we're making and the kinds of attributions that we're laying on top of this story. Because I think that they're basically reflecting something like a sort of a pernicious gender stereotype rather than any kind of a thoughtful unpacking of what's going on in this family.

I want to now maybe do with maybe a 30,000 foot level or maybe kind of a meta level on this, which is we have some concrete examples, we have some specific examples, but if we kind of look at the sucker phenomena writ large, there's a real price that we pay. If we want to avoid playing the fool, you talk about how it can get in the way of bigger goals. And I wonder if you could help us take that step back and take a look at this.

My deep concern is that the fear of playing a sucker, especially when it's not reckoned with openly, can caution us against a couple of things that we care about a lot. One of them is forming real important relationships with each other. And one of them is having integrity in the choices that we're making professionally and personally.

So whether it's sort of how to donate money, for example, or how to decide who you're going to work with or what organization you're going to work with or how to treat people in the day to day. The real concern at the heart of this whole thing is that the fear of being a sucker is a sort of caution against solidarity. It's a caution against connection.

And of course, there are times when you don't want to connect. I think it is absolutely reasonable to think that when you are going to buy a car, for example, that your first goal is not connection with the salesperson. But there are all kinds of times in our lives when actually the real goal really is about connection. It's about connection. It's about compassion. It's about taking each other seriously and making decisions based on integrity. So that's the concern or that's the sort of deep worry is that it's a way of

pushing us away from our art, from the selves that we want to be. I liked too that you talked about the hope we can have. There's been research that's been done that show that people who commit to

to seemingly playing the sucker by cooperating, by investing, they can actually influence other people in a positive way. This is one of my favorite studies from this book because it did feel so hopeful and also probably because I'm sort of motivated to think it's a great study because that's kind of my own strategy in a lot of professional situations, which is basically, you know,

So the strategy is you just keep cooperating. You keep cooperating and you let the chips fall where they may. And the argument from the study is this itself can encourage cooperation. So just very briefly, the idea of the study was that there was this cooperative task that was played round after round with the same four people. And normally in this cooperative task, it's called a public goods game. There's tons of studies about the public goods game.

And basically what people find if they play the public goods game with the same people over and over again is that people just become less and less and less cooperative over time. They start to feel more and more sort of like it's not worth it because they're just going to be the sucker if they keep trying to cooperate and everybody else just keeps trying to take all the money out of the game. But basically these researchers ran this iterative version of the game where one of the players was instructed, whatever else happens, you just keep cooperating. Like you just keep contributing.

And it turned out that that one player consistently contributing meant that the overall levels of contributions, even parceling out the sort of mandatory contribution,

that everyone else would contribute at higher levels if they saw somebody else that was contributing. So it sort of became like cooperating became contagious. And so the article was called something like the sucker is the savior. I think that's a really nice way of thinking about one of the roles that people can play who are up for cooperating is that what you hope is you give other people cover to make the same choice. Like at least they're going to be suckers and not going to be suckers by themselves.

Because I had read this, I happened to be playing, after I read your book, I happened to be playing a board game with five or six people. And it's a game that you play together, but at the end of the day, it's about what you score and what your points are.

And I thought, oh, you know, I want to test this out. I want to see if I do something that really seemingly could work against me if I play the sucker, if that could influence the game in a positive way where other people might be willing to maybe help each other out a little bit.

bit because they don't have to. They could, but they don't have to. And so every round that we would play, there'd be a certain way to get certain points. And so I would say to people, "Hey, don't forget about doing this if you can, because it might give you extra points at the end to add to the total points."

And I would do that over and over again and kind of make a joke out of it. And I thought, I wonder if this is going to have any impact. And of course, some people said, what are you crazy? Like, why are you telling us this? But other people in the game slowly started to do it too with a different aspect. And they were kind of joking with me, but they were saying, hey, let's not leave Gail out there by herself. Let's try this. And so I just want to say that it's certainly not a study. It's not research-based. But it was interesting how it did impact the tone and the

and the tenor of the game. That's a great example. I think that that's the kind of thing that probably anyone who's ever been in a school or worked in a workplace can really empathize with. And I think if you've had the experience of working with people who are just sort of up for being cooperative, that it feels really heartening. I'm sure that you are familiar with the work of Adam Grant, as many of us are. And there's a great part of his book, Give and Take, about the difference between people who are givers and matchers

And basically he says, look, matchers are people who sort of try to reciprocate. And that's all kinds of great things to think about people who are trying to sort of return the, you know, return the favor, you know, be like good sort of tit for tat participants in a workplace relationship. And he said, but the funny thing is, is actually people who are givers irrespective of what they're getting back ultimately do better.

So that was a super interesting idea, right? The idea that people who are just like, I'm not even going to focus. I'm not even going to keep score. I'm just going to keep making the offers, you know, sort of trying to be generous where I can and hope it works out in the end. And in fact, it's sort of what he was finding was it did work out in the end.

You share with us the way to approach this kind of cost-benefit calculation. And it's something that you do, and I think it's a really helpful way for us to think about how to enact this in our lives. You talk about avoiding holistic decision-making and focus on what's called disaggregated analysis. Tell us a little bit about this and maybe how we could use it.

Great. I can assure you that if my kids or my family are listening to this, they're going to be rolling their eyes because I try to bring it into so many family decisions. Let's get out the matrix, guys. Okay. But I really am a, I am actually, I'm a believer in this system, not even for the particulars of it, but because I really think it's important when you're making a big decision to

to be explicit about what the values are that are at stake, be explicit about what kinds of values the different choices implicate. So this is the gist of it. The gist of it is you can imagine that I'm making some decision. I'm trying to decide, for example, whether or not to make a loan to my sister. She's asked or she's asked for, let's imagine that she's asked for a loan because she's going to buy a car and trying to decide whether or not to make this loan to her.

Actually, my general thinking about this has a whole bunch of components, right? I'm thinking about, for example, do I have the money, first of all, right? I'm thinking about how much money it is at that stake. I'm thinking about what I think the odds of her repaying me are.

I'm thinking about how it's going to affect our relationship for me to either make the loan or not make the loan. I've now named, like I say, four categories of things I might be thinking about. There's a method of decision-making that's called something like multi-attribute decision theory or multi-attribute decision-making.

Where the idea is that for any decision, you basically write down what the relevant attributes are of each possible choice that you care about. So for my case, it would be how much money are we talking? Do I have that much money? What am I worried about in terms of the relationship with my sister? And I literally write these out at like the top of my table. On the side, my columns are just the two choices I have, lend money or don't lend money.

And then for each choice, I'm going to go through and ask, to what extent would this choice vindicate something that's important to me? For example, lending the money. If one of my goals is saving up money myself, because I'm saving up money for, say, a down payment on the house, then maybe that would go under my saving money column. I would say, well, this would be bad for my saving money. And I give it a zero for saving money.

But for my relationship with my sister, I think, well, this actually would be really good. Maybe I even have a column in my sort of spreadsheet here that is my preference to be generous with my sister. I care about her welfare. I want her to drive a reliable car to and from work every day. The idea is I'm literally just giving numbers, usually say one to 100. It doesn't really matter what the scale is.

I'm just basically trying to say, how does this particular choice vindicate each of my different goals? And one of my goals might be that I don't want to be the sucker. That's fine. But I can try to ask myself, how important is that goal compared to the others? So one of the things that multi-attribute matrices like this do is they say, for each of the values that you're trying to think about here, try to weight them.

Like multiply out the number you've given them for how much this thing matters in this particular decision to the power of that attribute for you. So let's say, for example, that I don't want to be a sucker. I, in fact, think it's important for whatever reason for me not to look like a sucker or feel like a sucker in this case. I said that is important to me and that's much more risky. I'm much more at risk of feeling like a sucker if I do, in fact, lend the money.

But I also might say, compared to how much I care about my sister getting back and forth to work in a reliable vehicle without putting herself under real financial strain, I say, compared to that, actually, my fear of being a sucker is only a little amount. So I'm going to count that and say, I'm going to count my fear of being a sucker at like a quarter the weight of the weight I'm giving to my sister's sort of car happiness, something like that.

I will say I'm finding it very hard to describe a table, to describe a table in words. And I'm really having appreciation right now for the power of like a whiteboard. But that is- And you're saying that because there's a very clear table in your book. So I understand. Well, and I am known for sort of relentlessly drawing tables in this kind of a situation.

largely because I think it's really important for people to grapple with what the values are that are at stake and how important those values are when they're compared with each other. Doing that, my hope is that doing that makes you take seriously when you want to care about being a sucker, like when that's a real, something you really value and care about. And when it's something you care about that's just a little bit, but not a lot, when it's something you don't care about at all and you want to say, oh wait, I think it's infecting my decision-making in a way that I don't want it to.

Well, and I think your system helps us avoid regret because we've actually taken the time to prioritize what we really care about. And then if we make the decision and it's, let's say, to be less generous than we might want to be, but it's because we need that money for something else or whatever it is, we can look at that and say, okay, I might not be as proud of myself as I could be, but I know why I did this. I have some grounding here.

That's right. And I think it can give you the same sort of feeling on the other side too, where you say, look, I knew there was a risk that

that I wasn't going to get paid back in this situation. I understood that and I took it as a regular risk. There's all kinds of risks in this life and the risk that I might not get paid back, it only gets to take up this amount of space in my decision making. I think that there's the difference between sort of disaggregating what the values at stake are and thinking about the decision holistically is that the disaggregation sort of makes sure that each value stays in its own lane. It doesn't kind of infect the whole decision without announcing itself.

The theme of the podcast, Tess, is curiosity. What are you most curious about today? One of the things that I am really curious about is how children develop their values and fears

Around this idea of playing the sucker, but also around other kinds of priorities and fears. One of the most illuminating things to me from my personal experience thinking about people playing the sucker was when I asked my daughter how she would behave in various economics games.

And her answer was always, she was like nine at the time. And her answer was always, I would just like that. Basically she would never care if somebody was trying to dupe her, betray her. She would just keep cooperating. And, and,

And she had this, I was trying to sort of give her the perspective like, well, but wouldn't you be mad? Wouldn't you feel, you know, wouldn't you feel betrayed? And she was like, looked me like dead in the eye at one point and said, mom, but what do you care? And it was like a wild question that really made me, I mean, I felt like both, you know, nervous for her and proud of her at the same time. Because the question she was asking was, look, the situations you've described to me, the stakes are low, right?

These are these are not with your friends. It's just with sort of, you know, these theoretical exchanges or these, you know, anonymized transactions. And her view was like, why would you bother policing this strange set of fears or risks in a case in which you could just let things go and you'd be happier and everybody else would be happier, too?

And it really made me wonder at what point people develop these kinds of fears and how they differ from person to person, maybe because of something that's more innate and maybe because of what they, you know, what kinds of social settings that they're participating in as kids. Tess, my final question. Is there anything I haven't asked in relation to the book or some point that you want to make sure we walk away with that we just didn't get a chance to talk about enough?

When I think about what I want to take from this book or what I've taken from writing it, I don't think there's any one size fits all solution or any kinds of clear sort of edicts that flow from all this research. But I will say that it helps me in the day to day to think to myself that my goal around my sort of fear of feeling duped or feeling suckered or taken advantage of, that my goal is just to right size that worry, like to figure out for myself what

Given my goals and priorities, what's the right size of that worry? Sometimes the worry should take up a lot of space. You know, I'm trying to sort of model something in a professional context. I'm worried about appearing, you know, weak in ways that would matter for me professionally or would have sort of make me into a worse role model for others.

But a lot of times I'm just trying to think, okay, what are the real negative consequences? And how can I figure out how to give them the right amount of space in my decision making? When what I really want to have be true of me in the big picture is, you know, I want people to say, this is a person with integrity. This is a person with compassion. So that's what I'm left with at the end of this book.

That is such a great place to leave this interview on. Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure to speak with you. I like that idea of right sizing, playing a sucker in different situations and what's the right size in that particular situation. Super helpful. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. And thanks so much for reading it. It's really fun to talk about it and I really appreciate it.

Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Begabelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen.

Each episode, we give a shout out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week, it's Linda Haywood's impeccably researched nonfiction book, Njinga of Angola, Africa's Warrior Queen. It's the true story of a bold and daring 17th century African queen who was one of the most powerful rulers of her time. Thank you, Linda, for introducing me to a leader whose military might and strategic diplomacy informed her nearly 40-year reign.