My theme this week is about how we worry about being cheated and the different ways in which we react to being cheated. Many people who bought off-plan or illegal properties in Spain have experienced what it feels like to be duped by unscrupulous individuals and companies, and have had to learn psychological strategies to cope with this. Indeed, being cheated is a universal experience and we all have to learn how to deal with the fallout. As landlords in the UK we have had more than our share of being deceived and it has taken an emotional toll. In fact it was my anger at one tenant, Amanda, whom we were trying to evict that served as the catalyst for me to do some research on the psychology of being cheated. I wanted to know: was my reaction normal and proportionate or had I lost the plot?
According to the psychological literature,* one of the main reactions of victims of con-artists is to blame themselves for not having been more careful about whom they trusted. That didn’t strike me as true at all; I blamed Amanda and I blamed society’s institutions and laws which protected her to our detriment. I didn’t blame us (actually, I blamed Adrian a bit for trusting her on the basis that he’d vaguely known her mum). When Amanda viewed our house, she chatted to us in such a friendly manner, complimenting the house, she had the rent and deposit and yes, she could get her mother to sign the guarantor forms, but her mother was on holiday until the following week and she’d like to move in before her mother returned; why shouldn’t we have trusted her?
Of course the whole thing was a disastrous mistake and after finally getting her out, we were terrified to re-let the house; ironically, the next person who viewed it was also called Amanda and I felt like blacklisting the name. The first Amanda had ruined our peace of mind to such an extent that the thought of going through it again with someone else filled us with dread. This is where our experience resonated with the literature as there was now the danger we could turn into cynical, mistrusting types forever, as the experts suggested.
We had experienced a similar reaction in an entirely different context on holiday in the Sierra Nevada in our twenties. Our budget for food each evening was 5,000 pesetas (£20), but late one afternoon we walked into a café in the deserted, out-of-season resort and asked for a couple of tapas. The man disappeared for twenty minutes and then brought out large plates of tortilla and prawns with ali-oli; far more than we needed, but we assumed he was just being generous. He then presented us with a bill for 6,000 euros (£24). This meant we’d be stuck in the hostal that evening as we wouldn’t have the money to go out.
When we told the man we hadn’t asked for all that food and only had 5,000 pesetas on us he said, ‘Well get some more money out from the cash till across the road.’ We refused and said he’d have to settle for the 5,000. After being stung in this way, from then on every time we asked for a tapa in a bar, we would say, ‘¿Cuánto es?’ as we pointed to each specimen under the glass counter, and the bar staff were bemused as they invariably said ‘100 pesetas,’ which was about 40 pence. We looked pathetic and petty and it spoiled our holiday.
So, this paranoia about being cheated can strike at any time and in different contexts. In the literature, the victims of cheats are called ‘suckers,’ which isn’t very nice, although apposite. Indeed, during one of our spats in the tanning salon where our tenant Amanda worked, I said ‘you’re taking the piss out of me.’ I felt a fool for having been stupid enough to trust her; so our experience here tied in nicely with the literature. It was all jolly interesting for psychologists but damn annoying for us.
I also found it a massive challenge to come to terms with what the experts called the ‘highly aversive’ feelings attached to the experience of being duped. The feelings can pollute your peace of mind for years, especially if you’ve received no justice, the person hasn’t paid back what they owe you and you then see them swanning around without a care in the world, almost definitely now doing the same thing to some other sucker.
Apparently, the main emotions are those of regret, frustration, shame and guilt. It is also tentatively suggested anger might be a part of this. A big bloody part, actually. Whenever I see Amanda in town (she’s just got a job near us in an establishment that Adrian refers to as ‘the tarty clothes shop’) and she’s dolled up, always in a new outfit, I remind her loudly: ‘You owe me £2,300 and I want it. Stop spending money on fags, booze, clothes and make-up, you criminal! And give me my money!’
In addition to this anger, the sucker (that’s me) may suffer from a chronic and possibly exaggerated fear of being duped. And this is what they’ve termed ‘sugraphobia,’ from the Latin, sugro, which means to suck. If you get this pathology, you go through life maintaining chronic vigilance against being duped. If being cheated has that unfortunate effect on you, and you become a sugraphobe, you will see the world in a certain way. You’ll assume taxi drivers take the long way around to run up the fare, that car mechanics and plumbers fix more than they should and overcharge you, and so on. You’ll spend most of your life worried sick that everyone’s out to get you. We made a conscious decision not to allow the likes of Amanda to turn us into pathological cowards in this way. Had we gone down that route, we would have had to give up our business; trust and the concomitant possibility of being open to being cheated, is an inevitable feature of being involved in business.
I believe sugraphobia is particularly rife in Spain now, with a culture of mistrust developing. These days, when you want a builder to work for you, he will ask for the money upfront, (justifiably) terrified that you might not pay him at the end of the job; whilst you, as the customer, don’t want to give him a penny before he’s started the job. When you’re buying new furniture and are asked to hand over 2,000 euros and you will receive your goods in six weeks’ time, you think, ‘Hold on, what if they go bust or just don’t deliver it?’ This mutual mistrust is spreading throughout Spanish society, en mi humilde opinión.
On the other hand, some people can be defined as nonsugraphobes. These are people who often don’t even realise they’ve been cheated, because it doesn’t fit into their world view. If they do notice it, they’re genuinely surprised. And they don’t then see it as a reason to change their behaviour; it couldn’t possibly happen more than once. Both approaches have costs. The sugraphobes, who suspect cheaters everywhere, go through life worried about being taken advantage of and may believe themselves victimised when they’re not and the nonsugraphobes will get stung more often than if they’d been more alert to the dangers.
In conclusion, after reading the research, which in many ways made sense of my emotions at having been cheated, I felt a bit better. It took my mind off Amanda and allowed me to achieve some emotional distance from the issue. It also demonstrated we hadn’t somehow been going mental or overreacting when dealing with her and the other lying cheats we’ve come across. I was also relieved that all of our experiences hadn’t resulted in us turning into sugraphobes; just given us a healthy dose of scepticism to no longer automatically believe everything we are told in this world.
*(Ref. ‘Feeling Duped: Emotional, Motivational, and Cognitive Aspects of Being Exploited by Others.’ Kathleen D. Vohs (University of Minnesota), Roy F. Baumeister (Florida State University), Jason Chin (University of British Columbia). Review of General Psychology, 2007, Vol. 11, No. 2, 127–141)
This is an adapted extract from my second book.
My first book is available to download for only £2.98 (to kindle, a PC, IPAD etc): This is the link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BJO2TU0