This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
Which would make you feel worse — losing $100 to a pickpocket on a busy street or donating $100 to charity, only to find out it was a scam? For many people, it’s the latter. Being cheated by someone you decided to trust is distinctly infuriating.
Getting suckered triggers strong emotions — and not only fury. Researchers studying cybercrimes have been documenting an array of effects on the mental and physical health of victims of scams. But while it clearly pays to be skeptical, especially as online scams proliferate and grow increasingly sophisticated, research suggests there’s also a price to pay for being too wary. When the fear of getting suckered looms too large, it changes people’s decision-making and behavior in potentially harmful ways, with underappreciated implications for the law, public policy and society as a whole.
“It’s a very basic dilemma that people continuously confront,” says Carsten De Dreu, a behavioral scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. When you extend trust to someone and they reciprocate, you both stand to gain, De Dreu says. But when people are overly afraid of being suckered, “they may not come forward, they may not start to cooperate, and hence this whole positive cycle of reciprocation and mutual benefit cannot evolve.”
The sucker in the mirror
Feeling suckered doesn’t just result from money-losing scams. Everyday experiences can evoke the same emotions. You might feel it on your daily commute after tapping the brakes to let some jerk cut in front of you. Or after you do the hardest part of a work project and your slacker colleagues get an equal share of the credit.
There’s a reason for that extra bit of irritation. “The difference between being duped and other forms of exploitation is that, when people feel duped, they see an element of themselves in what occurred,” says Kathleen Vohs, a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota. “They view their own behaviors as being somewhat complicit in what happened to them.”
Even in the relatively low-stakes context of a psychology experiment, getting suckered really sets people off. For many decades, social psychologists and behavioral economists have been investigating the mechanics of human cooperation with games of trust. In a typical setup, people have a choice between cooperating with a group of other participants to evenly share a monetary payoff or defecting. Defectors receive more money for themselves, but reduce the payout for the group — effectively making suckers out of them. In one early study, published in 1977, the researchers were taken aback by how strongly some subjects reacted. It was not unusual “for people to wish to leave the experimental building by the back door, [or] to claim that they did not wish to see the ‘sons of bitches’ who double-crossed them,” they wrote.
Such studies also suggest that the prospect of getting suckered reduces people’s willingness to cooperate. In one of the first studies to probe this “sucker effect,” researchers asked participants to rapidly squeeze two rubber balls, like the ones used to pump up blood pressure cuffs, rigged up to a mysterious box labeled FLOWMETER. Participants were told they could earn money based on how much air they and an unseen partner pumped in a 30-second period. Subjects who’d been led to believe their partner was less able to perform this task pumped vigorously, apparently willing to compensate. But those who believed they had a capable but lazy partner slacked off themselves, thereby giving up a financial gain to avoid feeling suckered.
In a 2007 paper, Vohs and two colleagues coined a term to describe this anticipatory fear of getting suckered: sugrophobia (from the Latin sugro, to suck). It’s a good thing to have, at least in proper measure. “Sugrophobia is adaptive for sure,” says Vohs. “Though, like most psychological traits, it’s adaptive in some doses — not too much and not too little.”
Too much sugrophobia can interfere with people’s ability to make rational financial decisions, for example. For one study, researchers looked at whether people were willing to invest money in a hypothetical company. Participants invested less money in a company when told the only risk was a small chance of loss due to fraud, than in another company with an identical risk of loss — but in this case due to market forces.
A 2017 study found evidence of similar dynamics in the real world in the wake of the Madoff scandal. (In the 1990s and early 2000s, investment advisor Bernie Madoff bilked wealthy clients out of billions of dollars in the largest Ponzi scheme in history.) Using court documents and federal filings by financial institutions, the researchers found that people living in areas with a high concentration of Madoff’s clients (where, the researchers reasoned, more people would be aware of the fraud and perhaps have a connection to victims) withdrew more money than people with similar economic circumstances in other areas. The people in Madoff’s area pulled a whopping $363 billion from accounts with investment advisors after the scam became public in 2008, moving a significant chunk of that money to the relative safety of banks. In doing so, many likely missed out on big returns as the stock market bounced back from the 2008 housing crisis.
Effects on health
More recently, researchers working directly with scam victims have begun to piece together a picture of the varied health impacts — physical, emotional and psychological — of being suckered. US consumers lost nearly $200 billion to fraud in 2024, the Federal Trade Commission estimates. Many scams now begin online, and scammers are getting increasingly sophisticated at targeting particular groups, says Marti DeLiema, a gerontologist who studies financial fraud at the University of Minnesota.
Scammers offering bogus employment opportunities target younger job-seeking people on LinkedIn, for example, while those offering tech support or help investing in cryptocurrencies tend to target tech-challenged older adults. “It’s easy to be specialized now, thanks to generative AI,” DeLiema says.
People’s reaction to falling prey to a scam varies widely, says Mark Button, a criminologist specializing in cybercrime and economic crime at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Feelings of worry and stress are commonplace, Button and colleagues found in a recent survey of more than 300 UK scam victims. In more extreme cases, victims experienced loss of sleep, digestive issues and other physical ailments. Some scam victims withdraw socially, work by Button’s group has shown. That can lead to a vicious cycle, he says: “If you’re kind of on your own, you’re more likely to become a victim.”
This psychological impact on victims generally tracks with how much of their wealth they’ve lost, research by Button and others suggests, but that’s not the only factor influencing the extent of the effects. The emotional pain can be especially acute for those who fall prey to romance scams or elaborate investment scams in which the scammer works to establish a rapport and develop the victim’s trust over months or even years.
“You lose the thing that you’ve been looking forward to and fantasizing about for months,” DeLiema says. In addition, the financial loss can be especially devastating for older people who have less time and opportunity to rebuild their savings. “That’s going to dictate how they live the rest of their lives,” she says.
Shame also comes into play, and that means many fraud crimes are never reported, says Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, a law professor who studies the psychology of legal decision-making at the University of Pennsylvania. “People feel so bad about the interaction, they basically feel ashamed about it and therefore won’t talk about it or report it,” she says. “It’s stigmatized, because not only did something bad happen to you, but you let it happen. There’s a sort of a weakness associated with it.”
Placing the blame
Sucker psychology has implications for contract negotiations, divorce settlements and other areas of law where one party sees the other as trying to take unfair advantage of them, Wilkinson-Ryan argues in the 2025 Annual Review of Law and Social Science. She and others study legal decision-making by recruiting people from the general public and asking them to evaluate realistic legal scenarios.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one common finding is a willingness to punish the offender. In one study, Wilkinson-Ryan and a colleague asked subjects to assess the fairness of proposals for dividing property after a divorce. They were instructed that whichever party was at fault in the breakup was irrelevant, as is typical under state laws. Even so, subjects rated proposals made by a cheating spouse as less reasonable than the same proposal coming from a non-cheating partner.
At the same time, researchers have uncovered a tendency to blame the victim. In a 2014 study, Wilkinson-Ryan asked people who was at fault in a hypothetical scenario in which someone had purchased a credit card with an agreement that had unfair terms buried in the fine print. Most people said the customer was to blame because they should have read the contract more thoroughly — despite many of them saying it was unreasonable to expect someone to find an unfair term buried in a long contract. The result, Wilkinson-Ryan says, is that consumers rarely challenge contracts with bad terms, even when those terms probably wouldn’t hold up in court.
On a larger scale, sucker psychology can influence public policy — and not always for the better. For example, the purported goal of checking to ensure that welfare recipients do in fact meet income requirements is to prevent people from taking unfair advantage of social programs. Such fraud prevention is good policy, says Wilkinson-Ryan. But when the cheat-detection measures end up costing more than the cheating itself, she says, they end up going against the public good.
The fear of being suckered can also be weaponized by politicians, Wilkinson-Ryan writes in her 2023 book Fool Proof. Politicians have long used sucker rhetoric to stir emotions and sway public opinion. President Donald Trump has used it again and again to rile up his base, arguing that Americans are being taken advantage of by immigrants, wasteful government programs and an ever-shifting list of foreign countries. This rhetoric “gets at a very basic, fundamental human motivation not to fall behind, not to be suckered,” says De Dreu. “And that makes it very, very motivating to act.”
It’s also very effective at overriding empathy and compassion that people might otherwise act on, Wilkinson-Ryan says. “I think you see this a lot in the immigration debates,” she says, where people who come to the US seeking humanitarian asylum or better economic opportunities are recast as criminals coming to take American jobs. “It undermines impulses that I think we otherwise value in ourselves.”
So how should we navigate the complex swirl of emotions around suckerdom in a world where scams seem to be in the air we breathe? It’s reasonable to be wary, says DeLiema, whose work now focuses on interventions that might prevent people from falling for scams. “There’s a scammer for everyone,” she says. “You think you’re immune from scams? You haven’t met the scam for you,” she says.
At the same time, Wilkinson-Ryan urges people to consider the cost of being too guarded. Healthy skepticism is absolutely sensible, she says. “It’s just a lesson that gets over-learned and transported into these areas where it eats up what would otherwise be totally reasonable, thoughtful social and moral commitments.”
If people took the time to reflect, they might decide that the experience they’re missing out on is more important than the small chance they’re being taken advantage of, Wilkinson-Ryan says. “What kinds of important human experiences are we missing because people are afraid of being duped?”
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.
