620. Strangers And Risk Avoidance

620.   Strangers And Risk Avoidance

It can be very difficult to find the right middle between avoiding risks and avoiding to hurt others by unfounded prejudices and racism.

Generally speaking, every first contact with a complete stranger is a risk.    It is often difficult or not possible to correctly predict a stranger's behavior.  
 

Herman Melville's novel 'Typee' is an excellent illustration of the problem.   In this story, two sailors are running away from the mistreatment by the captain of their ship.   The place is an island in the Pacific, where cannibalism was at that time some tribes' known practice. 
When starving, the heroes of the story had to decide, which path to take towards finding those natives, who would most probably help without having them for dinner.   The had only hearsay to rely upon concerning the location of those tribes considered to be the least ferocious.   
When the two sailors finally did meet some natives, there was no common language.   They were guided to the natives' village wondering what to expect, whether there they would eat or be eaten.  
Later they found out to have indeed met the one tribe, which they had been fearing the most, cannibals in the habit of sometimes eating the captives of tribal wars.   But the two sailors survived without being feasted upon.  
While the narrator of the story was puzzled, for what reasons they were spared, I could think of one possible explanation being the tribe's own definition of who belongs to the ingroup and who is outgroup.   Maybe only bellicose tribes were defined as outgroups, while their guests were enclosed into the ingroup set of behavior.  


Belonging to an ingroup is often a choice, being treated as outgroup is not a choice.

The real risk of being harmed by a stranger requires to be able to protect oneself by appropriate preventive behavior, which in turn requires to estimate the magnitude and kind of the risk.   
 

Much of today's inappropriate racism and prejudices have their origin in the times, when people living in small tribes and groups in areas of low population density were born into their ingroups.  Every person not belonging to the same community was automatically outgroup.   People mutually having no doubt about who else is ingroup were not prone to make mistakes in judging risks.   

Today in the complexity and globalization of modern societies, people often cannot know, if at all and how strongly they are considered as outgroup by strangers.    They cannot even know, if they are recognized correctly as members of any group or only confounded with members of any especially hated or loathed outgroup.    

Eating outgroup members is certainly an extreme, but when outgroup members are beaten, exploited, stolen from, insulted, socially excluded, ridiculed, abused as prey (entry 619) it is nevertheless caused by the same instinct.   

On that Pacific island, the probability of someone being a cannibal was certainly high only in those, who were visibly natives, while it could be assumed that the Europeans were no cannibals.   But considering them as cannibals because they were racially natives is a fallacy.   It just happened to be a correlation between the foe eating culture having developed, where only the natives were living, while the culture of not eating humans had been brought there by the Europeans.  This fallacy of mistaking a correlation with a genetic predisposition has contributed to deriving absurd assumptions from external traits like the color of the skin.   Such anachronistic fallacy has lead to the irrational, stupid and sick racism disturbing even modern civilized countries with mixed populations like the USA. 

There are two possible mistakes with very different consequences.   

Someone underestimating the risk from strangers just perishes and cannot hand on the knowledge.  Nor would his absence of gullibility to prejudice become prevalent in the gene pool.   Had the sailors in the story been eaten, nobody would ever have heard of to take it as a warning.    

Someone overestimating probabilities or only imagining non-existing ones, perpetuates irrational and unrealistic prejudices and racism.  
The guy, who kills or avoids the strangers, can never find out, if he did this for good reasons or not.    Had the sailors in the story had weapons and had they killed the natives and survived by eating their food, they may have well told later without any doubt to have killed cannibals to prevent being eaten.   They would never have felt to have murdered and robbed people. 

Lacking any knowledge about a stranger as an individual, estimates of these probabilities are based upon pre-concepts, previous experiences and knowledge or hearsay about the group, tribe and society, to which the stranger belongs.   These pre-concepts can be more or less valid or completely invalid.   All pre-concepts, which are not suitable to predict real risks based upon real attitudes and evident behaviors, are a fallacy.  

Both of the above mentioned mistakes impede the correction of the pre-concepts and perpetuate the fallacies.  

To predict a stranger's behavior requires a lot of estimating and guessing.

1.  The probability of specific attitudes leading to, enabling or facilitating specific behaviors.
2.  The probability of the stranger's having such specific attitudes.  
2.1.  The direct probability of specific attitudes being expressed and indicated by attires and body modification.  
2.2.  The two combined probabilities of the membership in a specific ingroup indicating the presence of specific attitudes and of specific attires and body modification indicating the membership in a specific ingroup.
3.  The probability to be considered as outgroup in contrast with an ingroup, to which the stranger is so much affiliated, that outgroup members are prone to be harmed.

Estimating and guessing the invisible is difficult in complex societies.

1. Subjectively felt affiliations with specific ingroups are often by choice.   Shared attitudes and other invisible attributes can cause strong subjective affiliations, which are hidden from and not noticeable for ignorant strangers.    The members of ingroups sometimes know how to recognize each other, while the indicators for this recognition are unknown to the outgroup members.   
Religions, political parties, social associations or sports teams are examples.    Easily defined traditional ingroups as are ethnicities, villages or neighborhoods are not always automatically experienced as ingroups.

2. The stronger someone identifies with an ingroup, the stronger he is prone to feel hostility towards outgroups.    To every ingroup, there can be more than one outgroup, who for a variety of reasons do not all elicit the same amount of hostility.    



The line between either a drastic misjudgment of probabilities towards being merely too cautious or the irrational, stupid and gullible belief in claims with zero probability is delicate and often blurred.   
 

Being aware, that every interaction with strangers is bearing a risk is by itself not a prejudice. 
The real problem is the correct estimation of the particular risk and what harm to prevent.     Not every caution is a fallacy, only because it is denounced as prejudice or racism by those being themselves the hazard.   Both previous behavior and expressed attitudes in favor of specific behaviors are indicators of real risks.   

Examples of alleged prejudices justified by the probability of a real risk:

1.  Most prisoners are in jail as a consequence of having harmed individual persons, therefore it is statistically probable, that someone just released from jail is not trustworthy.   Not wanting him as an employee or tenant is not a prejudice but a rational avoidance of a risk.    Those few, who are reformed and will not repeat criminal harm, have brought it upon themselves.   

2. Religious people are morally guided by rules established by their religion.    The more someone feels compelled to consider the guide book of his religion as absolutely imperative to his conduct, the more he feels a good person by following the book, no matter what the victims of his behavior experience or say.   

There are many muslim men on French dating sites and chats.   Rejecting them for being muslims frequently leads to the accusation of being either a racist or prejudiced.   Letting aside my general rejection of men with any religious belief, muslim men are especially hazardous to women, who want a monogamous man without sharing him with other women.  

The islam does of not only allow but prescribe unlimited promiscuity to men.   The koran explicitly allows a man four wives and an unlimited number of concubines.    What a non-islamic woman considers and defines as cheating and as a transgression, is therefore normal and morally correct behavior for a male muslim guided by the koran.   

In the possible case, that a muslim restricts himself to only one woman, this is in contradiction to his religion.  It can be due to a lack of either a wish or an opportunity, or it is only temporary, but it is not a moral attitude of feeling any obligation towards a woman to be monogamous.   

The egalitarian attitude, that a woman is equal to a man, and being a muslim, are mutually exclusive.  Any muslim's claim to treat a woman as an equal cannot be trusted, unless he leaves the entire abusive religion behind and becomes an atheist.    Therefore a woman rejecting muslim men is not prejudiced, but acting wisely based upon the awareness of a real risk.    By accepting to be muslims, men bring the rejection by monogamous women upon themselves.     

534. The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

534.   The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

Whenever someone bases the decision, how to treat another person, on a belief, which is so strong, that it impedes and overrides the rational perception and comprehension of evidence and reality, there are more or less fatal consequences for at least the misjudged person, often for both. 

Examples:

1. A very drastic example was the alleged proof of who is a witch by throwing the unfortunate victim into the water to see if she floated or drowned.    Men believed in this cruel irrationality, even though their brain had nevertheless enabled them to become fluent in Latin.   
2. In some cultures, parents not only decide, whom to marry their children to, but they choose an alleged match following an astrologer's advice.   This has certainly caused millions of people to suffer from being tied for a lifetime to a mismatch, the worst fate being that of women being abused by a man, whom they would not have chosen.  
3. Today people are less prone to fall for very blatant irrationality.  But the more the irrational claims and beliefs mimic science, the more people are gullible to mistake pseudo-science for science.   
   NLP is a good example.   In entry 177 (The Jerks' Fascination with NLP) I already elaborated, why NLP is a belief system, and why this blend of some elements from scientific psychology with irrational and unscientific claims make this so attractive to people with a distorted self-concept as if being rational.  

In these as also in many more examples, there is a pattern of a specific fallacy:  

The person

• bases a rational decision process upon incorrect or insufficient information acquired by absurd, weird, preposterous or insane methods.   
• is unperceptive, mindblind, immune to or otherwise not impacted by any information coming directly from the target of the behavior.   The target has no influence upon what information is used to determine, how s/he is treated.
• imposes the decision upon the target or attempts to, feeling entitled and justified to do so. 

This fallacy impedes trust and as a consequence it impedes a relationship from becoming a safe haven, which is impossible without trust justified by trustworthiness.   
Trustworthiness can only be assessed by the rational method of evaluating evidence.  This method compares all of someone's verbal and non-verbal expressions and behaviors at any moment with all of this at any another time, and also with external independent sources.   
The more often this comparison is consistent, congruent and without contradictions, the more the person's overall trustworthiness can be estimated as probable.   Never discovering a lie is a part of this.

Any other method, which relies on unverified and unverifiable clues, is a hazard and misleading.   Earning trust depends not only on the own trustworthy behavior, it also depends upon the partner's ability to recognize trustworthy behavior as such by the correct perception of evidence.    Trust cannot be earned from a person using unsuitable methods.  

An honest person never lying is nevertheless not trusted by a partner using flawed methods to evaluate honesty.   The delusion of being able to rely upon firmly believed pseudo-clues makes him oblivious of reality.      
Fools believing in NLP derive the pseudo-evaluation of alleged honesty or lack thereof from the target's eye movements.   This is a hazardous fallacy, as the study quoted below clearly shows.    Eye movements can be caused, influenced and diverted by many triggers.  During any conversation, people's attention can be easily caught momentarily by events at the periphery of their vision.   
The haphazard location of such events suffices to determine the erroneous attribution of an alleged trait towards one of two errors:      
Accidental eye movements of a honest person can forfeit the chance to be trusted.  
The blind believer in NLP can also easily be mislead to trust by a liar's accidental eye movements.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711205943.htm

"For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth."

"Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman. "

The pseudo-evidence fallacy and commodification share the common defective acquisition of information.    In both situations, the target is excluded from being considered as a possible source when choosing, which information is used for the decision how to behave.  Both situations indicate depreciation and disrespect of the target, but it works differently.

In the case of commodification, the target is mistaken for a passive utility in a onesided relationship and therefore not considered as able to be a proactive source supplying any information.  
The pseudo evidence fallacy disregards, devalues and rejects the information input coming directly from the target.   The real information is noticed but replaced by the false beliefs.   The target is considered as a proactive source of irrelevant or worthless information.  

531. Trust And Trustworthiness Without The Myth Of The Free Will

531.  Trust And Trustworthiness Without The Myth Of The Free Will

Rational trust depends on the other person's trustworthiness.    Blind trust is irrational and risky.   

Unfortunately, there is a logical problem concerning the assessment of who can be trusted and how much.   Only a person's untrustworthiness can be clearly proven by the evidence of at least one transgression.   One single act of betrayal and breaking the trust is enough to refute the transgressor's claim to be trustworthy and to deserve trust.   

But no such unambiguous evidence of trustworthiness is logically possible.  Trustworthiness cannot be assessed any better than as a probability of expecting trustworthy behavior in the future, whenever an available alternative option to transgress is not chosen.  Experiencing the absence of untrustworthy behavior justifies nothing more than the estimation of a high probability of trustworthiness.  Rational trust only grows according to experience.   

Experiencing no transgressions cannot be attributed with certainty to a personality trait of absolute trustworthiness.   It can equally be attributed to the mere absence of an occasion to transgress.   It is not possible to know, if a man not cheating does this by an innate preference for monogamy or because his animal instincts have not yet been tempted badly enough by any female body triggering him to transgress.  

The assessment of trustworthiness by only extrapolating previous behavior is a retrospective method without a chance to avoid being harmed.   People gamble with their own vulnerability, when due to lacking enough information they trust by trial and error, until they get wise only when hurt by a transgression.  

 

Consciously discarding the myth of the free will includes also discarding the concept of a person's absolute trustworthiness as a trait and being trustworthy by a free decision.   This leads to the alternative concept of the prospective assessment of a person's relative trustworthy behavior in the framework of the specific relationship between two persons.  

This concept does not expect anybody to be equally trustworthy to all people, independent of how much the person benefits from transgressions.   In this concept, the estimation of another person's possible relative trustworthiness is based upon two limitations:

1. Both persons agree on shared definitions of transgressions.  
   
   When two persons have promised monogamy and exclusivity to each other, cheating is clearly a transgression and proof of untrustworthiness.  
   But when two persons like for example Sartre and Beauvoir agree on the commodification of others, then their sleeping around like alley dogs is for both not a transgression.  They were trustworthy to each other but instead they did break the trust of all those, whom they hurt by the denial of exclusivity. 
   
   
2. The choice of preferring non-transgressing behavior over the transgression is ultimately beneficial for both.  This choice is determined (as outlined in more details in entry 512) by factors as these.  

2.1.  Direct impacts by the specific kind and strength of needs for homeostasis and the individual specific sensitivity of the pleasure center.    Nobody has a reason to indulge in a transgression, unless it either reduces dishomeostasis or causes pleasure.  

2.2.  Indirect cognitive impacts by the consideration and anticipation of long-term consequences of the tempting transgression, either by the calculation of comparing the immediate benefits with expected external punishments and rewards or by the awareness of the cognitive consequences of either preventing self-punishment by feeling guilty or enhancing self-rewarding by feeling good due to acting in accordance with the own value system and ideal self.

It is a frequent fallacy to expect another's trustworthiness as a consequence of an alleged free will to act according to the rules of a religion, social norm or other extrinsic motivations.  Relative trustworthiness can most reliably be expected, when the behavior expected by the trusting person is intrinsically motivated as being also most beneficial to the own needs.    

Therefore trial and error with haphazard partners is not a rational method for the goal of finding a trustworthy partner for commitment.  The rational method is choosing carefully a partner, for whom the trustworthy behavior is innately more beneficial than transgressions would be.   

It is many women's foolish mistake to get involved with a man, merely because he is attracted to their body and promises, whatever seems to lead to his homeostasis.  This does not justify women's irrational hope, that he will never again touch another woman.   This is trial and error and more often than not ends with the woman being hurt by a cheating jerk.    

A wise woman chooses the man, who succeeds to convince her, that monogamy and exclusivity are his own innate preference and needs, that being trustworthy to her expectations of commitment is also what is most beneficial for himself.  
Allowing herself to be convinced of a man's trustworthiness is of course also only a question of correctly estimating the probability.   A man afflicted with dishomeostasis may lie, he may be in denial of some of his tendencies, he may overestimate his self-control, he may mistake his ideal-self for his real self and there are more such hazards.   What a main claims as his attitudes, values, resolutions and aspirations towards a woman concerns mainly the cognitive indirect impacts.  But these alone do not suffice as a reliable basis for the assessment of his trustworthiness.    

The soundest assessment is derived from his predispositions concerning the direct impacts.   A man with high instinctive needs for those homeostations and stimulations of the pleasure center, which he can obtain best by transgressions, is a hazard, no matter, how convincing he appears to be otherwise.   
The less a man is determined by his instincts towards the objectification of women's bodies, the more he can be trusted to treat women without abuse and objectification, without hurting their dignity.

While a careful choice of a man, who shares the most benefits by reciprocally fulfilling each other's needs, is no guarantee against transgressions, it is at least a method to reduce the risk.  

384. Predictability And Pseudo-Compatibility

Predictability And Pseudo-Compatibility

A relationship as a safe haven needs to be reliable and predictable based upon the justifiable trust, that the other will not commit transgressions and will not do harm or hurtful things.   

Predictability means to be able to make a realistic prognosis of future behaviors by the estimation of probability.   In entry 95, I already mentioned the importance of calculating probabilities of the occurrence of behavior in the future.  In entry 173 I elaborated this by including the importance of considering the attitudes, which are causing or modifying behaviors.   

But the matter is even more complicated.  

Estimating the partner's future behavior implies:

1. It is important to listening to what he declares himself as his attitudes.  
2. His behavior needs to be compared with his expressed attitudes, if it is congruent or if there are contradictions.   Sometimes people are not aware of subconscious attitudes, that are nevertheless strong determinants of their behavior.   Subconscious attitudes can be incongruent with expressed attitudes, when the latter are superficially learned or imitated and not connected to innate tendencies.  Then behavior is congruent with the true hidden attitudes but contradictory to the expressed attitudes.       
3. Observable specific behaviors are indicators of attitudes, but attitudes determine usually a wider variety of correlated behaviors, that can be predicted only when knowing the attitude.
4. Observable proactive behavior allows to estimate probable future behavior.    The absence of proactive behavior is not as much a reliable source of information, because it is not the same as a decision to refrain from a behavior.  

I will use lying as an example.
 
If a woman catches her partner lying to her, she can predict, that he will lie again.   The more frequent his past lies, the more frequently he will lie in the future.  
His lying is a clear indication, that his attitude towards her is not suitable for treating her as a close and bonded partner deserving sincerity and honesty.   This faulty attitudes makes it probable to expect also other sly, manipulative, deceptive behaviors.   

But if the woman never catches her partner telling her a lie, this does not allow equally good predictions, because this by itself is not an indication of his general attitude towards her.   

Her lack of experiencing a lie from him can be due to

1. She did not catch him lying because of her unjustified trust.
2. He had so far no reason or occasion to lie but would otherwise not hesitate
3. He has a reason or attitude to actively refrain from lying. 
   
   These reasons are

• in his person  
  
  • He is someone, who always blurs out what he thinks, no matter to whom, even with unrelated persons, when it has detrimental consequences for him.
  • His self-esteem requires moral behavior and this includes special rules how to treat closely related persons, like not lying to them and not hurting them. 
• his attitude concerning her significance for him.   He values and appreciates her enough to enclose her in the ingroup of people, whom he honors with sincerity and honesty.   
• consideration of the consequences.  
  
  • He fears to be punished for lying by losing her
  • He wants to avoid the disapproval or other punishment by other significant persons like his family 
  • He fears being punished or wants to be rewarded by a deity due to some religious delusion.

Therefore not catching someone lying can either indicate true compatibility with someone, who is sincere and honest and who values her person in a relationship, or it can indicate pseudo-compatibility, when not having experienced someone's lying yet just does not allow predictions for the future.        

365. Atheism - Skepticism

Atheism  - Skepticism

Throughout this blog, I declared myself a skeptic and an atheist, using both words separately even though I implicitly consider both as related.    But I only defined in entries 305, 60 and 11, what it means to me to be an atheist but I did not explicitly mention skepticism.   Since an interesting discussion lately, in which some people declared themselves as skeptics but not as atheists, I got aware that this topic needs some further elaboration.   

On the level of cognition, atheism and skepticism are distinguishable.    On the level of skepticism as a behavioral paradigm, a skeptical approach to the claim of the existence of a deity can only lead to atheism.   Otherwise the person is applying skepticism only partially without being a skeptic as a personality trait.  

I already made the point, that a-theos means nothing more except to be without a god.  Being an atheist means to live as if I have never even heard of the option to believe or to let a belief determine my behavior.  

When being without a god is the baseline, then this does not even need to be the consequence of a choice due to having an option, it can just as well be a state of oblivion.    A person, who has never even heard of the possibility to choose a belief is automatically an atheist, as is a newborn or a monkey or even a fly.    Believing is a choice, either by a conscious believer or by the parents, who brainwash a child to believe.   Stopping to believe is a choice.    Someone calling himself an atheist describes the awareness of choosing to not believe in spite of this being an option.      

Skepticism means doubting any claim offered as an option to believe as if true.    Someone can as often react as a skeptic as he is confronted with claims.  He cannot doubt claims that he has never heard of.    Skepticism supplies the doubt, but not automatically also the best judgment and evaluation.    The latter depend on available information and upon scientific thinking and empiricism are methods to deal with the doubt.  

But all this would not be of much importance were it not for the unavoidable requirement of making decisions based upon insufficient information as part of the survival of every day life.  Buying food means relying on the claims of the producer of its healthy ingredients.  But we need to buy food to survive.     

Gullibility and skepticism are the two opposite methods of making decisions when dealing with other persons' claims.  

The gullible believes everything and allows himself to be manipulated, he survives by imitating others' decision and evaluations, which are sometimes good, often detrimental but not often lethal.    This is why gullibility persists. 
The skeptic doubts everything, but he is still under the pressure to make decisions or to perish.    The skeptic refuses to make decisions based upon accepting others' claims as true, the skeptic avoids the misinterpretation of his own experiences like apparent contingencies.    A true skeptic does not believe.    A true skeptic estimates the probability of something being true.   If a skeptic is lacking sufficient information to estimate the probability, he does it consciously as a haphazard decision, if deciding cannot be avoided.  

Example.   A gullible person with a headache takes the remedy, that is presented to him with the strongest claim by the most sympathetic or manipulative person.   The gullible person believes, that it helps, no matter what it is.
A skeptic refuses to take homeopathic water.   But if he is a not trained in pharmacology, then the choice between different over-the-counter painkilllers is mainly a haphazard decision.   But as the headache needs a remedy, the skeptic buys one in the full awareness of not being able to evaluate the choice as really the best possible.

Therefore on the level of decisions, atheism is a logical outcome of skepticism.  Applying skepticism upon the claim of the existence of a deity can only lead to doubt this existence.      Someone with a headache refuses to buy homeopathic water and he refuses to pray to a god.   Both are claims of irrational remedies.        

95. Truth, Trust, Probability, Decisions

Truth, Trust, Probability, Decisions
I have eliminated the word belief from my active vocabulary for the purpose of my reaction to claims, I only use this word when describing others.  I also am using the word truth with a lot of caution.   Some things of my own experience and perception are certain enough to be considered as true.   Yet there can be hallucinations or other distortions.  

I prefer to calculate probabilities.    This calculation is based on the rational plausibility and the trustworthiness of the source.   Rational plausibility means the accordance or contradiction to other knowledge, that I have previously given high probability and the presence of evidence including own experience.  

The probability of a claim is a function of the scientific validity of a claim and the reliability of the source.   

A few examples:

If I read about the result of a research in a scientific journal with enough information about evidence from a double blind study, then it gets high probability.
If I read a claim without any evidence on a forum, I give it a probability, that is derived from how much it is similar to other claims, of which I do have evidence.  
When I hear the same claim, appearing plausible but without evidence and coming from independent sources, I start to increase the probability.
Any claim, that is in contradiction to evidence, automatically gets a probability near zero, no matter, how often it is repeated.   The same with claims, which are by their own definition beyond the applyability of evidence.  
When something plausible is beyond the reach of evidence, like the subjective experience of someone, then I calculate the probability by that person's trustworthiness in the past.   A person, who has never lied, can make the claim to have a headache.   In spite of the lack of evidence to measure a headache, I give it high probability as being told the factual reality of another.   
Would a notorious liar claim a headache, I would calculate a lower probability, because I would suspect a lie with a purpose.  
When a trustworthy person claims to have seen a ghost, then of course I can calculate a very high probability of the person's experience being subjectively real, but the probability, that it was a ghost and not something else, is still near zero.  

Of course my estimation of probabilities can be wrong, because many times I have only insufficient information.   But life requires again and again to make decisions, and decisions are as good as the information, they are based upon.   
Calculating the probability of the existence of a god as practically zero allows me the sound decision to behave as if I have never heard even the word 'god' before.  
Calculating that the probability of a claim without evidence is not good, even if it has been repeated hundreds of times helps to avoid buying, what commercials want me to buy.
Calculating the probability by reading on the web the independent experiences of other buyers and users of a product and the absence of negative experiences helps to make a wise decision in buying something.  

Calculating probabilities helps to make rational decisions undistorted by emotions, gullibility and manipulation.