Honest people more likely to fall for scams on internet, study indicates

New Delhi

That honesty is the best policy is drilled into heads and hearts of young children as soon as they begin to gain control over their senses. But this exact attribute of some people's personality can also make them susceptible to online scams as they are deceived easily, a study has indicated. 

Researchers at University College London (UCL) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently carried out a study to understand why people are deceived online. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, outlines interesting patterns underlying how people detect lies online. 

"People all around the world have been losing billions to online scams year on year," Tali Sharot and Sarah Zheng, co-authors of the paper, told Medical Xpress. "This trend has worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic and is worsening with the advent of generative AI. Now, before we can help people detect online scams, we need to understand why people fall for them in the first place."

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Since both scams and fake news are rooted in deception and lies, the researchers first reviewed past literature focusing on the same. In offline contexts, people can also try to detect lies based on subtle cues, such as a person's body language.

"In online settings, we typically cannot rely on such cues," Sharot and Zheng explained. "We thus set out to study why people can be particularly bad at detecting lies, and thus scams, in an online context."

The authors did three interesting experiments with 310 people. 

All of them were asked to take part in an online card game played in pairs. 

Notably, certain cards would result in winning money, while others might cause a financial loss.

Participants could choose to lie about the card they received to win more money at the expense of another player. 

The participants, however, were never instructed to lie.

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"At the end of each play, participants rated how honest they thought the other player was," Sharot and Zheng said. "We examined what cues people used to judge others' honesty. For example, did they think others lied when they themselves did? Did they think others lied when the other person reported having a rare card? And did they think others lied when they themselves lost?"

The researchers observed two patterns. First, they observed that people were more suspicious of others if they had themselves lied during the game. Secondly, they were suspicious when other players were holding a statistically unlikely card.

Zheng, Rozenkrantz and Sharot also compared the behavior of players to the predictions of an artificial, simulated lie detector.

The researchers found that poor lie detection was associated with an over-reliance on one's own honesty (or dishonesty) and an under-reliance on statistical cues.

"These findings imply that honest people may be particularly susceptible to scams, because they are the least likely to suspect a lie and thus detect a scam," Sharot and Zheng explained.

"Moreover, as social media platforms use recommendation systems that feed people with more of the same content they like, these systems distort the likelihood of seeing certain information—fake news included. People's natural reliance on statistical likelihoods to infer what is true thus will not work well in these contexts."

(With inputs from agencies)