Scam World

When people talk about why scams happen and what to do about them, they often focus on the traits of victims. For example, someone wasn’t attentive enough and got ripped off, or people need to watch out for signs of fraud. A different approach is to consider scams from the perspective of the systems or structures that make everyone vulnerable to scams. In this talk, I describe a “structural” account of why scams happen and explain why it leads us to a surprisingly different approach for managing scams. That approach has several benefits over commonplace educational programs for scam awareness.

Nathan Ballantyne is an associate professor of philosophy, cognition and culture. Ballantyne's work focuses on questions concerning inquiry, expertise, disagreement, and open-minded thinking. He is the author of "Knowing Our Limits" (Oxford University Press 2019) and co-editor (with David Dunning) of "Reason, Bias, and Inquiry: The Crossroads of Epistemology and Psychology" (Oxford University Press 2022). His public writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, and Forbes.