How many times does someone need to be right for you to trust them?
Imagine getting an email offering investment advice and they tell you up front that the market is going up and you should invest with them as they are very good at picking the market and can give much more lucrative information than they offer in the email but, you will get this info free for 12 months. You don't pay much attention but, the market moves accordingly and you raise an eyebrow.
Next month the email comes again this time saying it will fall. Again, it follows the suggested action and again it says, invest with us. This goes on for a few months without them being wrong once and you put a little money on their suggestion and get a little return as the advice holds. After a year, you give them a call and say you are willing to invest heavily, after all they have a year long track record of positive returns.
A wise move?
As humans, we are trained to be attracted to polished sales presentations. We enjoy feeling that we can trust the information we are getting before we buy-in and are very disappointed when someone lets us down. But, is it they who lets us down or our judgement?
We are often very quick to judge favorably when we agree with what is being said or are already wanting to buy what is being sold. When the precondition is favorable, we may just need a gentle prod to go all in.
When we disagree however, it is much harder to get buy-in so a process of convincing needs to take place. How much though? Well, that depends on what is being sold and what the perceived value is in relation to personal desires. As well as who is doing the selling.
In the case above, one who sees the possible financial returns quite favorably will be more willing to invest than someone that does not care at all about money. The desire for something puts a certain amount of blinders on a person in just about every area that this can happen.
When there is no desire however, the convincing will take work and energy investment to build the want. The customer that is slowly lead into the buy-in often becomes the most veracious supporter of the product or person as they have invested into the process themselves. With all of that time and energy already sunk, no one wants to admit they judged poorly, so they continue their support.
The problem doesn't just come from the customer side though because the more support the seller gets, the more they are likely to convince themselves of the legitimacy of their sales pitch. This means that they may start to overreach with their claims and risk exposing their fragility.
The internet is of course a brilliant place to do this as there is a large pool of potential targets and if a net is cat wide enough, often enough, it will draw in small pool of loyal supporters. This pool will likely be biased and primed to find positives and dismiss or overlook negatives as they have now bought into the source, not the information provided.
They have made an authority out of the person that has convinced them and are less than willing to admit that they have put their faith in to someone that is less expert than they appeared at the beginning and through the honeymoon phase.
In my experience, those that stand out as suspicious are those that appear to never be wrong across many topics. It is not necessarily that they are shady, it is just suspicious. The reason for me is that we live in a world of huge volumes of information that is available to everyone but, interest dictates that most will not read most of it.
This means that someone can take a narrowish area and rewrite the words and thoughts of others and present them as personal insights. This is not exactly plagiarism but not far from it. No thought is a new thought as they would tend to say.
But, the narrow stretch of people that recognize the copying can be dismissed as the wide band of people that have never come across those ideas and concepts before, drown them out with their calls and rapturous applause at the brilliance.
This support however is unlikely to continue when the same person is met face to face on multiple occasions as soon the depth of their learning will bottom out or the failure to apply it is witnessed. This shatters the built impressions of the authority as reality behind the screen is seen.
It is kind of like a knowledgeable older college guy that seemed so smart talking about being made from stardust. It may work on a teenager but when forty and having heard it 100 times before, the magical stardust no longer has the same attraction. But, this is the internet, there is always another group that will buy-in.
Now, I do not remember exactly where I got the email example. Someone may know but it may have been from Thinking Fast or Slow or Freakonomics a few years back.
It is of course a scam. As most investment advice is.
Imagine 1 million emails are sent out, half say up, half say down. After the first month there are 500,000 people that got the correct trade tip. Next month, repeat with the 500K and 250,000 get the hot tip. Keep going and after 12 months, there are about 200 people that every month have received the right tip. After watching the money they could have a¨made, or increase what they have made so far by investing on the advice, it is not hard to convince at least some of them to get in deeper.
This scam is obviously impossible face to face. The investment from the scammer is just too high. This is why the people that act this way in the walking world rarely have long-term friends. They over reach too often and the trust is gone.
I don't know how many instances of being right is required to gain trust, but it is definitely more than the number of wrong required to lose trust. This is why it is better to be authentic rather than pander for support. Sometimes people will agree, sometimes they won't but in time, the openness shared including strength and weakness will attract people willing to learn better together.
I may be wrong of course.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
