-
Fool Proof
- How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order—and What We Can Do About It
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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Story
When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask." It turns out that whether they want higher salaries or more help at home, women often find it hard to ask.
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Interresting subject, bad delivery.
- By Guilherme on 01-11-14
By: Linda Babcock, and others
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The Up Side of Down
- Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success
- By: Megan McArdle
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work.
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Good Book
- By Ray on 05-21-14
By: Megan McArdle
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Predictably Irrational
- The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
- By: Dan Ariely
- Narrated by: Simon Jones
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.
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Good lessons, mediocre science?
- By William Stanger on 02-24-09
By: Dan Ariely
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Angry White Men
- American Masculinity at the End of an Era
- By: Michael Kimmel
- Narrated by: Aaron Williamson
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the enduring legacies of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a distressed Bill O'Reilly lamented that he didn't live in "a traditional America anymore". He was joined by others who bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry?
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Interesting book; Wrong reader
- By Carolina A. Miranda on 05-02-18
By: Michael Kimmel
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Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life
- A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity Are Revolutionizing Our View of Human Nature
- By: Douglas T. Kenrick
- Narrated by: Fred Stella
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Between what can be learned from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science a picture emerges. In Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life, social psychologist Douglas Kenrick fuses these two fields to create a coherent story of human nature. In his analysis, many ingrained, apparently irrational behaviors—one-night stands, prejudice, conspicuous consumption, even art and religious devotion—are quite explicable and (when desired) avoidable.
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Rather dated and self-aggrandizing
- By Laurie Frick on 07-21-11
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All the Rage
- Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership
- By: Darcy Lockman
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The inequity of domestic life is one of the most profound and perplexing conundrums of our time. In an era of seemingly unprecedented feminist activism, enlightenment, and change, data shows that one area of gender inequality stubbornly remains: the unequal amount of parental work that falls on women, no matter their class or professional status.
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Must read for men
- By Brooks Rainey Pearson on 06-12-19
By: Darcy Lockman
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Generation Me
- Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before
- By: Jean M. Twenge PhD
- Narrated by: Randye Kaye
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In this provocative new book, psychologist and social commentator Dr. Jean Twenge documents the self-focus of what she calls "Generation Me" - people born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Dr. Twenge explores why her generation is tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious. Dr. Twenge reveals how profoundly different today's young adults are - and makes controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole.
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I mostly agree
- By David Hill on 05-25-20
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Focus
- Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence
- By: Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D., E. Tory Higgins PhD
- Narrated by: Karen Saltus
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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We all want to experience pleasure and avoid pain. But there are really two kinds of pleasure and pain that motivate everything we do. If you are promotion-focused, you want to advance and avoid missed opportunities. If you are prevention-focused, you want to minimize losses and keep things working. And as Tory Higgins has found in his groundbreaking research, if you understand how people focus, you have the power to motivate yourself and everyone around you.
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Pain / Pleasure
- By Serena K. on 02-13-17
By: Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D., and others
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You Are Now Less Dumb
- How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
- By: David McRaney
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality - except we’re not. But that's okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of 15 more ways we fool ourselves every day. This smart and highly entertaining audiobook will be wowing listeners for years to come.
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Not a lot of guidance
- By A. Yoshida on 02-08-14
By: David McRaney
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Third Edition
- Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
- By: Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
- Narrated by: Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right - a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research and delivered in energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception.
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If you're a liberal hater - this book's for you
- By MRN on 11-13-20
By: Carol Tavris, and others
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Moral Tribes
- Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
- By: Joshua Greene
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.
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Good Science, Bad Philosophy
- By Jacob on 10-27-16
By: Joshua Greene
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The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting
- How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know - Your Kids
- By: Paul Raeburn, Kevin Zollman
- Narrated by: Paul Raeburn, Kevin Zollman
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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As every parent knows, kids are surprisingly clever negotiators. But how can we avoid those all-too-familiar wails, "That's not fair!" and "You can't make me!"? In The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting, journalist Paul Raeburn and game theorist Kevin Zollman pair up to highlight tactics from the worlds of economics and business that can help parents break the endless cycle of quarrels and ineffective solutions.
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Easy and applicable insight on Game Theory
- By VerN on 01-05-18
By: Paul Raeburn, and others
What listeners say about Fool Proof
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-24-23
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.
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- FrankG
- 07-01-23
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.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-10-23
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.”
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- hend
- 10-07-24
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.
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- Julia
- 05-13-23
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.
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- Lolo
- 02-26-23
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.
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2 people found this helpful