Fool Proof

How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order—and What We Can Do About It

By: Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Narrated by: Mia Barron

The fear of playing the fool is a universal psychological phenomenon and an underappreciated driver of human behavior; in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and Susan Cain’s Quiet, Fool Proof tracks the implications of the sucker construct from personal choices to cultural conflict, ultimately charting an unexpected and empowering path forward.

In the American moral vernacular, we have a whole thesaurus for victims of exploitation. They are suckers (born every minute), fools (not suffered gladly), dupes, marks, chumps, pawns, and losers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Cultural stories about suckers abound too: the Trojan Horse, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Emperor’s New Clothes, even Hansel and Gretel. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Don’t go out with him; he only wants one thing. The fear of playing the fool is not just a descriptive fact; it is a prescriptive theme: Don’t let that be you.

Most of us are constantly navigating two sets of imperatives: how to be successful and how to be good. The fear of being suckered whispers that you can’t do both, operating as a quiet caution against leaps of faith and acts of altruism. University of Pennsylvania law professor and moral psychologist Tess Wilkinson-Ryan brings evidence from studies in psychology, sociology, and economics to show how the sucker construct shapes, and distorts, human decision-making.

Fool Proof offers the first in-depth analysis of the sucker’s game as implicit worldview, drawing evidence everywhere from grocery shopping to international trade deals, from road rage to #MeToo. Offering real-world puzzles and stories, Wilkinson-Ryan explores what kinds of hustles feel like scams and which ones feel like business as usual, who gets pegged as suckers and who gets lauded as saints. She takes deep dives into areas like the psychology of stereotyping, the history of ethnic slurs, and the economics of the family—and shows how the threat of being suckered is deployed to perpetuate social and economic hierarchies.

Ultimately, Fool Proof argues that the goal is not so much to spot the con as to renegotiate its meaning. The fear of being suckered can be weaponized to disrupt cooperation and trust, but it can also be defused and reframed to make space for moral agency and social progress. Facing the fear of being suckered head-on means deciding for ourselves what risks to take, what relationships to invest in, when to share, and when to protest—drafting a new template for how to live with integrity in a sucker’s world.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Tess Wilkinson-Ryan (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

Illuminating!

Great read - very well written, and researched. This book illuminates our impulsive responses and motivations in so many different areas of our lives and it offers inflection point at which we can take control of our own approach to pursuing a life aligned with our values.

Good information but!

Pretty good stuff here. Interesting as it relates to human interaction and behavior. It would have been more productive to leave her political beliefs and biases out. Pretty sure she could have found better stories to portray her data.

Brilliant and insightful, helpful on an individual and societal level!

Wilkinson-Ryan does an incredible job of presenting information in an engaging and digestible way for readers who want to explore and understand psychological principals like these no matter their background. It’s an important read for the moment and helps us to take a look at some hard truths about where we are in society and how we can better understand one another once we look past “the political.”

Fool Proof a lot more colloquial and casual compared to the more shocking Foolproof by van der Linden

Mia has a little too much vocal fry in this (her copyright notice reading at the beginning and end are better and I had wished she used that clearer voice, but there's still light vocal fry with her "r"s) but I prefer Mia's voice compared to Sander van der Linden's voice in Foolproof, who has more studies and data at first (I'm only in ch2, where his ch1 is huge, and his book is also 100 pages longer with more visuals). The PDF for Fool Proof only contains enhanced footnotes for sources. The data study citations is still pretty extensive in Tess's book, and I really liked the introduction of psychological game theory style games exercises she introduced in this treatment.

Hidden Costs of Holding Back

For all the dangers of putting yourself forward for the sake of others and losing out, there are also costs of holding out -- even in the case of losing. Rarely do I read such a complete account of what we can miss out in vigilance.

Entirely too political

The 10x she discussed Donald Trump were a no for me. I chose this book because it was on a list of books Adam Grant was looking forward to reading this year. If I wanted to hear about how Republicans don’t want to be fooled into spending money on poor minorities, I would have scrolled Facebook for free.