Are We Really Good at Spotting Cons or People Being Scammed?

When it's happening to someone else, we see everything. We're actually able to rationally evaluate the evidence and weigh the facts in a pretty disinterested manner because we don't have any skin in the game. When it's happened to us, one of the first things they do is engage our emotion. And once we're emotionally engaged, we stop seeing clearly. So when we're in this kind of emotional state,we stop seeing the signs that we would have seen from the outside. They're not red flags to us. We think, oh, that's perfectly understandable.