Notes From The Book Of Swindles

骗术 (piàn shù)

Dissolute porters carry examination candidates and travellers only half the promised route and then stop to extort a higher fare. Unbeholden to any morals, female criminals seduce merchants far from home, prostitute their female relatives, frame innocent men, steal horses on the highway, and enter into sham marriages for purposes of murder and extortion.

Swindlers conduct depredation in stealth ways. Unlike unskilled robbers, swindlers traveling by land and water impersonate rich scions, daoists, alchemists, and acquaintances of powerful officials in order to prey and fleece merchants and examination hopefuls.

Business people will want to sell you an idea rather than a real value. The social proof delusion is creating repetitive exposure to impact the consumers with no improvement of the quality, and they will likely take it as a `fact`. Exposure creates increased passive involvement to suggest a product or a service is desirable or reliable. If information is just repeated over and over to you — it’s brainwashing, not informing.

Seducers may be sent in (a.k.a. the beauty trap (or Honeypot), 美人計, měi rén jì). In addressing the influence of arousal, Ariely and Loewenstein had the undergraduates stimulate themselves to a state of sexual arousal, and asked them to answer the same set of questions. The results show that people don’t realize how drastically different their decision-making is during a state of arousal. Someone may decline, but that promise is less…