Terry Robinson was an American entrepreneur who made millions in commercial radio. But he died broke, having sent a big chunk of his fortune to a man who’d approached him with an investment opportunity involving vast quantities of gold bullion, allegedly hidden in caves throughout the Philippines. The man, Jim Stuckey, said he needed cash upfront to pay off the cave guards, whereupon the hoard would be theirs to share. And so, in multiple payments over several years, Robinson paid up. His daughter, Maggie Robinson Katz, tells the story in an enthralling two-part instalment of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, based on recorded calls between the two men, in which she dwells on one question above all: how could a man smart enough to build a business empire fall for what looks like such an obvious scam?
Except, as the psychology writer Maria Konnikova points out in the podcast, entrepreneurial types are actually more susceptible to being conned. They’re risk-takers who trust their own judgment, and know too much caution can be fatal: the trait that made Robinson a success was the same one that spelled his undoing. If he’d been a hyper-sceptical shrinking violet, he’d never have struck it rich; but nor would he have wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to a man whose manifestly bonkers story of hidden gold literally involved the biblical Ark of the Covenant.
There’s a lesson here for an era in which inexplicable stupidity seems to be a major driver of world events. How did those voters not see that supporting that person, or that decision, would lead to those results? How did that idiot become president despite being so dumb that, according to a recent New York magazine report, he can’t figure out how to fire his chief of staff, because firing people is the chief of staff’s job? One possibility is that there’s a flaw in our concept of stupidity. “The human world is so often portrayed as a noble battle between the stupid and the rest of us,” writes the blogger David Cain, “each of us drawing our own smart-stupid line… between individuals, often corresponding to political, religious, or sports team fanship boundaries.” But what if the smart-stupid line runs through “the heart of every human”, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said of the line between good and evil? Everyday experience suggests most of us can be both. A decent chess player “can visualise a tree of possible moves five or six deep”, Cain notes, “but cannot anticipate running out of toilet paper until the moment he does”.
The tale of Terry Robinson adds another twist: if the same trait can make you smart in some contexts and stupid in others, perhaps it makes more sense to think of stupidity as a relationship between your traits and your situation. Which means any of us might stumble into deep stupidity any time, through little fault of our own. In which case, Bertrand Russell wasn’t quite right to say, “the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt”. Rather, it’s that we’re all stupid and intelligent, depending on the context. And it’s the times we’re being stupidest that we’ll be too stupid to realise it.
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In her 2016 book The Confidence Game, Maria Konnikova shows how scam artists exploit universal psychological weaknesses – including our deep reluctance to confront the falsehood of a story in which we’ve already invested hope.
