Link for this Post: Why We Click.by Lisa Vaas on EWeek
Here is an article which surprisingly opened me up to a whole new field of psychological study: called "Virtual Environments and Behavior" at one of my Alma Matters UC Santa Barbara (I got my Masters in Psychology there in 1981).
Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the EWeek piece:
Money is the motivation for scam-spam. The motivation for clicking on it is far less straightforward, and none of us is immune.
"It’s not like certain people are going to be nailed by spam all the time. Or that there are certain motivations that will just [always] trigger people [who respond] to spam scams. It’s really the interplay between personality and motivation, emotion—all sorts of things," said Dr. James Blascovich, professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara and co-director of the university’s Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior.
"It’s a little more complex, but not much different from the complex interplay of psychological factors that get people to succumb to any sort of scam."
The idea that none of us are immune is the main takeaway from a report titled "Mind Games: A psychological analysis of common e-mail scams," that Blascovich and McAfee published on June 25 . . .
Note: The picture at the top is from the article and introduces an interesting slide-show series done in conjunction with the article called "Sucking the Gullible Into ‘Scam-Spam‘
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