One of the minor mysteries of life is the common observation that assholes get conned more easily than average. They drive on average overpriced, unreliable cars, for example. They buy into pyramid schemes. They hire crooked lawyers, their employees embezzle from them, they marry golddiggers and social climbers who betray them, they vote for Republicans.
Assholes tend to be patsies. Why? It's possible, say, that getting ripped off all the time might make someone less agreeable, less kind, less inclined to pleasantries. It's possible that the focus on superficialities of status and gain might lead to easier manipulation by the clever.
And it's possible that some deficit of mental capability leads to both - an inability to see the big picture or mirror other people's perspectives, say, preventing one from acting accordingly.
That last fits these results:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201474
Assholes tend to be patsies. Why? It's possible, say, that getting ripped off all the time might make someone less agreeable, less kind, less inclined to pleasantries. It's possible that the focus on superficialities of status and gain might lead to easier manipulation by the clever.
And it's possible that some deficit of mental capability leads to both - an inability to see the big picture or mirror other people's perspectives, say, preventing one from acting accordingly.
That last fits these results:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201474
Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity.