Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order and What We Can Do About by Tess Wilki

The fear of playing the fool is a universal psychological phenomenon and an underappreciated driver of human behavior; in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, and Susan Cain's Quiet, Fool Proof tracks the implications of the sucker construct from personal decision-making to cultural conflict and offers an unexpected and empowering path forward. Suckers, dupes, marks, chumps, pawns, losers--we have a whole thesaurus for victims of exploitation. The fear of playing the fool creates terrible feelings of self-recrimination and social humiliation. But for a fear that is so familiar to all of us, it doesn't get a lot of attention, even though it has profound effects on behavior. Most of us are constantly navigating two sets of imperatives: how to be successful and how to be good. Fool Proof shows how the fear of being suckered can be weaponized to disrupt cooperation and trust, but also how it can be defused and reframed to make space for moral agency, integrity, and social progress. The goal is not so much to spot the con, but to renegotiate its meaning. In this groundbreaking book, University of Pennsylvania law professor and moral psychologist Tess Wilkinson-Ryan offers the first in-depth analysis of the sucker's game as implicit worldview. She draws examples from a startling range of contexts, from grocery shopping to international trade deals, from road rage to #MeToo. Wilkinson-Ryan brings evidence from studies in psychology, sociology, and economics to show how the sucker construct surreptitiously motivates our decisions both big and small. Offering real-world puzzles and stories as examples, Wilkinson-Ryan explores what kinds of hustles feel like scams and which ones feel like business as usual, and which kinds of people are pegged as suckers, or saints, or something in between. She takes deep dives into areas like the psychology of stereotyping, the history of ethnic slurs, and the economics of the family--and makes the case that the fear being duped plays a lead role in the perpetuation of sexism and racism. Her examples work together to make the overwhelming case that we can and should reckon openly with the prospect of playing the sucker, and that the stakes couldn't be higher for ourselves and our society. When we recognize the sucker dynamic, we can decide for ourselves what risks are worth taking, what relationships are meaningful, when to share, and when to protest. Fool Proof teaches us how to live with integrity in a sucker's world.