In Gill's view, my grifter had activated a "social interaction script": "If someone seems nice and they're in need, we feel we should reciprocate. A lot of times we act according to a fairly unconscious, automatic script, and scam artists take advantage of that. Until you've been taken in by it, you can't understand the power of it."
That made me feel a bit better.
So did the comments of Jerald M. Jellison, a social psychology professor at USC.
"There's an implicit social etiquette, where without anybody saying so there are rules by which we're supposed to treat one another," Jellison said. "The person who makes the request sort of defines the situation. Here's a person in need, making, in a sense, a reasonable request."
"You pick certain values in life," he added. "You pick values of fairness and cooperation and responsibility, and you pay a price for that. How do you want to go through the world -- on the defensive and suspicious of people, or not? If you make that choice not to, people are going to take advantage of you."
Still, Jellison noted, my psychological bruising and the vanished $20 were arguably small prices to pay.
"Going through life the other way," he said, "is just too unpleasant. Look how much you've gained from it. It has really caused you to reexamine yourself and your values."
I've reexamined myself, all right, and I assure you I won't be falling for any similar schemes anytime soon. In the future, my donations will go to bona fide organizations -- the kind that send you those irksome reminders at the holidays. In the co-evolutionary arms race, chalk one up for the cooperators.
