‘Wait, am I the fool here?’: why our fears of being scammed are corrosive and damaging

Is our tendency to expect the worst of people preventing us from supporting those who really need help?

In 2007, three experimental psychologists, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, coined the word “sugrophobia”, which would translate to something like a “fear of sucking”. The researchers – Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister and Jason Chin – were looking to name the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the inkling that they’re “being a sucker” – that someone is taking advantage of them, partly thanks to their own decisions. The idea that psychologists would study suckers academically seems almost ridiculous at first. But, once you start to look for it, it becomes clear that sugrophobia is not only real, it is a veritable epidemic. Its influence extends from the choices we make as individuals to the society-wide narratives that sow distrust and discrimination.

The number of sucker synonyms alone suggests a cultural obsession: pawn, dupe, chump, fool, stooge, loser, mark and so on. Public debates about a wide range of social policies and technological advances feature inchoate fears about who’s going to be swindled next. Will ChatGPT help students cheat unwitting teachers? Is remote work popular since the Covid-19 pandemic because employees can slack off more easily? Does forgiving student-loan debt let “slacker baristas” exploit hardworking taxpayers, as one US politician suggested?