He was an engineer for thirty-eight years. He read the whitepaper. He checked that the company was registered, and it was. He ran the numbers on the returns and they were high but not absurd. When his daughter said it sounded like a scam he explained, patiently, that he was not the kind of person this happened to. That sentence, more than the whitepaper, is what the money was resting on.
In 1983 the sociologist W. Phillips Davison published a short paper in Public Opinion Quarterly describing something he had noticed in wartime propaganda, in advertising and in his own reactions: people consistently believe that persuasive messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves. He called it the third-person effect and offered it as a hypothesis. It has since become one of the most replicated findings in communication research. Ye Sun, Zhongdang Pan and Lijiang Shen pooled decades of studies in 2008 and found the perceptual gap robust across message types, samples and countries.
The gap has a shape. It widens when the message is one the person considers undesirable to be influenced by: advertising, propaganda, manipulation. Nobody wants to be the kind of person a scam works on, so nobody estimates that they are.
Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross at Stanford gave the general form a name in 2002: the bias blind spot. People readily recognise cognitive biases in others and rate themselves as less susceptible to the same biases. The mechanism they proposed is introspection. We check ourselves for bias by looking inward, find no experience of being biased, and conclude we are not. Bias does not feel like anything from the inside. Neither does being persuaded.
The obvious hope is that the smarter or better-educated a person is, the smaller their blind spot. The evidence does not support it.
Richard West, Russell Meserve and Keith Stanovich reported in 2012 that the bias blind spot was not smaller among people with higher cognitive ability; if anything, on some measures, it was slightly larger. Stanovich and West's broader programme, summarised in 2008, found that many of the classic reasoning biases are only weakly related to intelligence as conventionally measured. Stanovich's argument, developed at book length in 2009, is that intelligence tests measure the capacity for good reasoning and not the disposition to use it, and that the two come apart more often than people expect.
Dan Kahan and colleagues at Yale showed a sharper version in 2017. Given a data problem about a politically charged topic, people with higher numeracy were not more accurate. They were more polarised, because they used their skill to reach the conclusion their side preferred. Capability, on that evidence, is a tool that motivation points.
The picture that emerges from victim research is not the one the third-person effect predicts.
The Office of Fair Trading's 2009 study, led by Stephen Lea at the University of Exeter, surveyed and interviewed British scam victims across many scam types. Its headline conclusion was that victims were not less intelligent than non-victims, and that some had more background knowledge of the relevant area than people who had not been caught. Investment scam victims tended to have experience of investing. Peter Fischer, Lea and Kath Evans followed up in 2013 with an analysis of what distinguished people who responded to scam communications: the answer lay in the persuasion techniques and in the person's state at the time, not in any general deficit.
A study of investment fraud victims in the United States, commissioned by the NASD Investor Education Foundation and published in 2006, found that victims scored higher on a test of basic financial literacy than a comparison group of non-victims. The study's own conclusion was that financial literacy education alone will not inoculate investors against fraud. The likely reason is exposure and confidence: people who know something about a domain get more pitches in it, engage with them more readily, and trust their own judgment more.
Monica Whitty's 2018 study of romance scam victims found them more likely to be middle-aged, well-educated, and high in impulsivity and sensation-seeking. Loneliness did not distinguish them.
And the stereotype of the elderly victim is weaker than it looks. Michael Ross, Igor Grossmann and Emily Schryer reviewed the evidence in 2014 and concluded that, contrary to both popular and academic assumption, there was no compelling evidence that older adults were disproportionately victimised by consumer fraud. Older people lose more when they lose, because they have more. It is not clear that they lose more often.
Put these results together and the engineer's sentence becomes a risk factor rather than a reassurance. The third-person effect means he rates his own susceptibility as low. The bias blind spot means that introspection confirms it. His intelligence and financial knowledge give him no discount on the mechanisms scams use, but they do give him confidence, which is what the scam needs him to have. And his experience puts him in front of more pitches than someone who has never invested.
The research does not say that intelligent people are more likely to be defrauded. It says they are not less likely, and that they believe they are. The distance between those two is where the fraud happens.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable but useful. The check that protects a person is not "am I the kind of person this works on," because everyone answers no. It is "does this situation contain the things that work on everyone": pressure, a story that discourages verification, a relationship that has moved faster than its basis, a sunk cost. Those can be observed. Immunity cannot.