Scam Psychology: How Context Makes You Irrational (even though it made sense to you... at the time)

Obamacare Protest at Supreme Court (Photo credit: southerntabitha)

We are all affected by context of a question than we care to admit, and by presenting certain things with the wrong context, scammers lead us into making irrational decisions, such as join a scam and hand over money.

Let's take the subject "Affordable Care Act", for example, otherwise known as "Obamacare".

Did you know that more people support "Affordable Care Act" than "Obamacare", even though it's the SAME THING? 46% oppose Obamacare, but only 37% oppose Affordable Care Act. People even protested at the US Supreme Court.

[Source: USA Today quoting CNBC poll]

This is ignorance. And this is in the general public.

Scammers LOVE this, which is why there are Obamacare scams.  Just as there are scams about everything.

So why are more people against "Obamacare"? Because the term was used by Republicans as as derogatory term. Never mind that it's actually Mitt Romney (Republican) that really came up with it for his own state of Massachussetts, leading to a new term, "Obamneycare".

In short, Affordable Care Act doesn't have the "context", the derogatory meaning that Obamacare has.

The lesson is very simple: you have to be knowledgeable and ignore context to make rational decisions.

In business and investment, that's called due diligence, which is really just "fact checking" and "critical thinking". You get all the facts and look beyond the context.

And scammers want you to throw due diligence out the window... by hitting you with slogans to ignore due diligence as well as give you skewed context (that are half-truths, misunderstandings, embellishments, conflicting info, logical fallacies, outright lies, etc.) to lead you into their scam.