“I do my own research” is intended as an expression of intellectual independence.
I don’t blindly trust authorities. I receive the assertions and arguments of others with skepticism. I make up my own mind based on the entirety of the evidence, and I don’t trust the official gatekeepers to present me with all the relevant facts.
Of course, this proudly held independence typically becomes a particularly imprudent form of credulousness. The people who do their own research are the most likely to fall under the spell of some conspiracy-theory-dealing fringe figure. In the old days, these were cult leaders. These days, they are YouTubers.
I wrote after the Jan. 6 riots about how credulity could feel like skepticism and independence: “if it’s a fringe figure, a YouTube channel your friends don’t know about, an odd message board no reporter would ever cite, it can feel like you discovered it, and so you’re choosing whom you trust rather than having it thrust upon you by gatekeepers.”
This phenomenon came to mind when I read the latest article from the financial advice columnist at New York magazine. “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger” was her headline. The subhead was, “I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.”
So why didn’t she think she was “the kind of person to fall for a scam”?
She writes: “Scam victims tend to be single, lonely, and economically insecure with low financial literacy. I am none of those things. I’m closer to the opposite.”
Sure, she is not single or lonely, but maybe she’s missing the reasons that singleness or loneliness make one susceptible to a scam. Singleness and loneliness might make one vulnerable to trust shady strangers for the same reason the folks who do their own research are prone to fall under the sway of fringe figures.
The common thread: Living a low-trust life leads one to unduly trust savvy strangers.
What are the clues that financial columnist Charlotte Cowles lives a low-trust life?
Start with this fact from her piece on the scam: The scammer on the phone told her to “not tell anyone what is going on. Everyone around you is a suspect.”
This included her husband. She didn’t believe her husband might be a drug smuggler, but when the caller told her, “You cannot talk to him about this,” she obeyed and cut him off.
If cutting off your spouse from crucial happenings like this sounds like something you would never do, consider Cowles’s past columns that touch on marriage.
“Not only is it the new normal to maintain financial autonomy from your partner,” she had written in the past, “I would argue that it’s healthy.” Then she added, “My own husband and I still keep all of our accounts separate, and Venmo each other when our collective expenses get uneven.”
She’s let on other details about her life in other columns: “I’m Married, But Sometimes I Prefer Sleeping Alone,” she wrote last year, explaining that after sleeping separately when her husband had a bad cough, she decided she preferred it. “Especially after exhausting days of work and caregiving, it felt decadent to be on my own, undisturbed, reading and flopping around without fear of kicking the cat or waking anyone.”
If you read Cowles writing about her husband, she always writes with warmth and love (despite having the weird magazine-writer tic of regularly calling him “my spouse”), and so nobody should think she is less than fully on board with this union.
But she is clearly a person who values individual autonomy more than most — similar to the people who do their own research.
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Autonomy is always in tension with sacrifice, trust, and connection. The disconnected are more vulnerable to being scammed.
Sometimes the shields we build in order to protect ourselves from others make us alone — and thus make us prime prey.