How do you not look like a tourist? What stops street sellers badgering locals? What is the role of information in haggling?

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're talking about getting ripped off when you go abroad. Peter, you got ripped off recently, I think. Tell us about your recent travels.

Well actually, it's a tale about how I managed to avoid, or learning to avoid being ripped off abroad. So I recently got back from Nepal and I would highly recommend a visit. Beautiful place, beautiful people, never fails to impress or frighten depending on what's happening. But yeah, a brilliant place. There's something I know, we had a few days in Kathmandu and Kathmandu is like many tourist cities, there's lots of street sellers who are pretty pushy and trying to get you to buy some of their locally made or probably Chinese made tat from their shop. And I found that as I was walking around, and I wasn't particularly changing the types of places I was in, but the street sellers got less and less aggressive towards me. They kind of collectively gave up. And I felt that maybe I was in some way moderating my behaviour to automatically rebuff them in some way. But I found that I felt like I was becoming more native. So people were approaching me less and trying to sell me less. Maybe because of the way I was carrying myself, or the way I was walking, or the way I was avoiding eye contact or whatever.

Maybe you just gradually looked more and more poverty stricken.

Maybe I did. More and more dirty and smelly, so they left me alone. But yeah, it was an interesting sort of transition. I witnessed this happen over a few days. So yeah, I wanted to explore what was that? What was going on? Has anyone got any answers?

I don't know, I wasn't there. I suspect he found himself if it was Nepal. And they could probably tell. Did he spiritually experience it? Yeah. And they knew not to go near you once you'd become holy or whatever. But I think there is obviously, I think people massively underestimate the amount of culture we carry around with us and the amount of cultural understanding that we have, that just enables us to not look like a foreigner. There's a famous urban legend, which has got the ring of plausibility about it, about a guy who, a sort of foreigner travelling in an airport somewhere and doesn't know what to do with the tea bag. And someone explains, you put that in the tea and then you take it out and a few seconds later, and that's your tea done. And then of course, he takes the little packet of sugar and throws that in wholesale. And you think, well, actually, that's kind of, it's not implausible that something like that might have happened. You know, if a tea bag goes in whole, why shouldn't the packet of sugar go in whole? But I think that sort of example illustrates this, just the huge amount of understanding that we have that enables us to sort of operate. And I know if you don't notice it, because it just feels like business as usual. But certainly, if you're English, Kate Fox, who's an anthropologist, has written lots of really interesting books about the English. And, you know, there's a whole, I mean, I think there's a whole chapter in one of her books about just how to behave in pubs. And all of the things, you know, the fact that obviously, there's no table service, even if you see the bar staff wandering around, you know, that when you get to the bar, there's a queue, even though it's an invisible one, and it looks like a scrum, but it's not. And, you know, the fact that there's a system of buying rounds, which is suspended under certain circumstances, you know, which are shared and understood. And, you know, that you don't tip the bar staff, even if it's a tiny amount of money you're expecting. That one tripped me up when I went to the States. I remember it was, I think the bill was about sort of £2.90, $2.95. And I waited for change, which apparently is absolutely not the done thing. And this guy looked at me, the barman looked at me absolutely filthily, as I waited there for my change, you know, didn't realise what I'd done wrong. Yeah. Well, that's totally okay in the UK. It's got absolutely expected to sit there and wait for 1p change. Fine. Yeah, so I think, you know, the point is that actually we, so we have all this knowledge, cultural knowledge that we don't, we're just not aware of.

So, okay, so that makes sense. But I guess the question is, is how does that translate to us physically? And as we say, how we carry ourselves? Because let's say if we're right on this, in theory, you should be able to draw up some, if you could access the statistics of a rip off event happening against, plotting against time spent in a certain place. And you should see in the first 24 hours, you'd have actually not even just rip off events, you'd have higher approaches or higher attempts at a rip off. Do we agree?

Yeah, I think that's true. Effectively, you turn up into a new culture with cultural naivety about that culture, especially if it's one that is, you know, vastly different from your own. And the more time you spend in that culture, just like when we spend time in any environment, you learn about that environment and you shed naivety. And so, I mean, there are all sorts of examples of this. My own personal one was in holidaying in Mexico and going to the petrol stations, the gas stations there. And realising after I'd been a few times that there was a particular scam where they wouldn't reset the pump. So you would effectively pay for the person prior to your, the petrol as well. So you'd end up paying double the amount. But of course, it was all in pesos and unfamiliar and you didn't really know it was cheap anyway. So after about the third time I've been to a petrol station and this had happened to me, but unaware to myself, I noticed that the locals got out the car, even though it was self-serve, even though it was, you know, there was a person, an attendant, exactly. They would get out of the car themselves. And I thought, that's an odd behaviour. I'll do the same. And that's when I twigged what had been sort of happening and saw them then reset the gas thing. And then the rest of the time in Mexico, that's what I did. But there the heuristic I used to shed naivety was to copy what the locals were doing. And that is a good heuristic under most circumstances, I think.

And I think it also performs this really useful function of signalling that you know what you're doing. You know, if you do a thing that only locals know about, it just gets rid of, there's not even an issue now. You know not to rip me off because you look like you're familiar with the country and that's fine. And I think one of the things that I find most irritating about, you know, when people try to scam you when you're abroad, or at least somewhere unfamiliar, is the thought that they think you're stupid. I find that more irritating than usually the sort of fairly insignificant amount of money they're trying to get out of me. It's more irritating that they think I'm stupid enough to fall for it.

But when you do, they're obviously proven right, aren't they? And you know, often you don't know. But there is that deep feeling of anger about realising you've been ripped off. And certainly, you know, they are right though in assuming you are stupid in a culture that is alien to you. You are effectively lacking understanding of that.

So that being the case, again, I think we've established that and all that makes sense. What about if we sort of pose a question? Is it possible, let's say I'm going to jet off to, I don't know, India tomorrow, is there a foolproof way of making sure that I don't get ripped off? Is there, or is there a way of steepening that learning curve to ensure that this doesn't

happen? I think there are a number of things you can do to reduce your naivety. One is, you know, you can talk to people who have been to that place. So again, a good example, and I don't want to reinforce sort of national stereotypes, but I visited a well-known archaeological site near a volcano and the... Sorry, which country were we talking about?

Sorry. Is this Mexico? No, no, no. Italy?

It might be. And some people had told us before we went, when you go up said volcano, Vesuvius, you can get horse and cart there and they will quote you a price at the bottom of the hill and you sort of sign up for the journey. Halfway up the volcano, there is a sort of a barrier across the road. And at that point, they then say, right, that's the journey over. If you want to get to the top of the volcano, it's X amount of euros in order to do that. So I was pre-warned of that scam. And as a consequence, we went up the volcano on a bus. But the point is you can talk to other people or more with today's technology, rather than rely on the handful of people you might know who've been to this place, you can obviously consult things like TripAdvisor or other, those kinds of knowledge sharing platforms allow you to research and learn other people's lessons. That's humanity's great strength,

isn't it? I think that's, I don't think that's realistic, because I think, you know, as much as you want to arm yourself with information, I think arriving somewhere new, particularly if the environment is very, very different to what we're used to, you know, your senses are being assaulted and you get in, you know, psychologically, you get knocked sideways a bit. And as much as you might want to, you're in a your state of emotion is very unsettled. And no matter how much you plan, you're always going to be vulnerable in the first 24 hours. That's my personal opinion.

I feel like it's the not having a sense of normality, which is just pure. It makes perfect sense. You're in a new environment. You don't know what's normal. It's just that's just statistics. You know, you haven't got enough data to be able to say, well, this person who's saying, quoting me 20 pounds for this cab ride, well, should it be two pounds? You know, should it be 20p? You just don't know, you know, but the rule, the rule that I, I use is, you know, do I care, right? If it's a scam, you know, I remember when I first went to Egypt several years ago, you know, I was being being charged something like five quid for a cab ride across town and everyone said, oh, you've got to haggle. You can't just, you know, you can't just put it to say, yes, you've got a house. I don't care. It's not worth it. It's five quid. I'm perfectly happy to pay that. And the same approach when I was in India and had to go and spend, you know, we had a tour guide and of course he took us to his cousin's rug shop and we had to spend an hour unsuccessfully haggling over the cost of a carpet, which I, you know, I kind of quite liked, but all I did was just do the same rule that I would apply anywhere else, which is how much am I willing to pay for it? I'm not, you know, and my figure was about 60 quid cause it was quite nice. It was, you know, made of cashmere, something or other. I thought, well, you know, I'd pay about 60 quid for this rug, but he wouldn't apparently go any lower than 120. Now, had I been, you know, a local, who knows, he might have flogged it to me for 20 quid or, you know, I, but, but you know, that rule was fine. That rule I can take with me, you know, and, and, and perhaps just not, don't worry about whether it's a scam, just ask yourself, is it worth, is it worth paying?

I think also you can, you can kind of adjust your risk threshold. I mean, I, I definitely err on, when I, when in an unfamiliar environment, I definitely err on the side of sort of ferocious mistrust of, of everybody, assuming everybody's trying to rip me off. But of course the downside of that is that you miss out on opportunity. Then, you know, there'll be all sorts of things that you will imagine are a scam when actually it would have been great to go and, you know, do that thing or partake in it. So, you know, there's, there's a, there's a sort of threshold which you might slowly kind of lift as you become more certain about your, your, your settings. And of course, actually, you know, part of learning is, is getting things wrong. So in, in Mexico, it took me three, you know, petrol stations to get, to get it, to get it right. You know, and 4,000 pounds. And 4,000 pounds and a night in a, in a Mexican jail. Yeah. So, so yes, you know, taking calculated risk is part of the learning process. So long as you, as Nick said, you know, so long as you don't mind the consequences of, of getting it wrong, then, then that's fine. That's

how you work out where the boundaries are. I think there are implications for when we think about artificial intelligence and trying to get artificial intelligence to navigate the real world, actually, that's what you might expect it to do. You know, when you, for quite a long time, any kind of potential future general artificial intelligence is going to be gathering information about us and how we behave and probably not doing very much. I mean, in a sense, an artificial intelligence waking up one day, you know, in a, in a, in a human world is very much like us when we go abroad, you know, there's a whole set of rules that we know are there, but we don't know what they are. And we have to find out before we can, before we can

function. I think we're fairly close to wrapping up. I want to come back to Peter in a moment, but I actually I'm sitting here seething, because all it's doing all this, all this talk is doing is just bringing back to me the number of times I've been ripped off in the past in different places. Anyway, I want to bring it back round to Peter. So anything, you know, Peter, anything you want to round this off with from the fruits of our discussion of our, of our shared knowledge

and experience? Well, not, not really. I mean, I still haven't really got a satisfactory answer, but I think, I think what was happening is I was... What was the question? Well, why, why, why did this, why did this... Why did they leave you alone after a while? Why did they start leaving me alone after a while? And I, I think it's a strategy that I always employ all the time. It's just trying to be aware of what I look like to other people outside. So, you know, just, just, just being conscientious of the impact I'm having. And I think it was just, it was simply that and a bit of feedback. And, you know, I, I learned somehow to look like I wasn't buying anything without making that explicit by wearing a t-shirt in Sanskrit saying I don't want to buy anything. I was, I, somehow that sort of, that sort of external view of myself was giving me

the feedback I needed to... I kind of imagine there's, there's a whole market stall of t-shirts saying I don't want to buy anything. And you, in order to proceed, you have to, you have to go there first. Yeah, you have to buy one of those. Yeah. Yeah. And of course then... They're 400 quid each. Yeah. And they'll have you pegged as a mark the minute you buy one. But it makes you

think of, for example, martial arts. If you practice a martial art and get good at martial art, and let, and let's say, for example, the reason why you wanted to do it was in case you, you got into trouble and you needed to do it. You needed to spring into action and karate chop someone. The, the better you actually get at martial arts, the less likely you are to find yourself in a situation where you need to do that stuff because you sort of internalize the,

the confidence, let's say. You develop a sort of steely ninja stare. Yeah. And people start

leaving you alone. And people know that you are a person to be reckoned with. So, yeah. So...

How's that working out for you, Fraser? It's great. Can you not see? When did one of you last

lot try and pick a fight with me? I was scared, yeah. Yeah. But I think that's what you somehow managed to do in those first few days, in that day there or, you know, somehow you kind of knew that was, that was the trick, I think. And I think you successfully pulled it off, I suspect. So, yeah. Okay. I'm going to wrap up there. Before I do, has anyone got anything burning they want to say? No? Okay. Well, we were going to sort of suggest some fun scams that we... Oh, fun scams. Yeah. That's what I'd like to... Has anyone here tried to scam anyone?

Well, on the same trip, one of my traveling companions, his luggage fell apart. And so, he was in the market for buying a new suitcase. And there's... Nepal seems, at the moment, to be completely awash with knock-off North Face kit. Everything's North Face, but it's imitation. And I was listening to him bartering away in various shops, and he'd developed quite a good strategy for working people's prices down. But there was a really good bit of salesman scam going on with one of the sellers. He was saying that the bags he was selling, which were indistinguishable from all the other ones, were better. Because although everyone was openly acknowledging they weren't real, his were unreal made in Korea, rather than unreal made in China. So, his sales pitch was that they're of a higher quality of fake because they're made in Korea.

The real scam is the fact that we attach so much value to the labels, because they're functionally completely identical. I think a lot of cases, they come out the same factories, don't they? But the ones which are, in some sense, genuine, whatever that means, are worth a lot more. Yeah. Right on, bro. So, it's actually the international capitalist system.

Bringing down capitalism. Yeah, no logo. Okay, there's many more scams I want to talk about,

but we've run out of time. Actually, Robert Sapolsky, who I've mentioned before, he wrote a primates memoir. He's a primatologist who went to look at baboons in Africa. He said, I can't remember which country it was in, it was Kenya or somewhere. He said that the locals had this scam going, foreign currency scam, where they would give you a really good rate as a taster, so you'd go and change your first £100 and you'd get a really good rate. And then, of course, next time you'd give them a lot more money and they'd disappear with the money. So, he worked this out and all he did was just visit different people to get their taster rate, one after the other, and effectively ended up scamming them, which I think is quite a good way of turning it

around. Sounds like a quite easy game to play, that one. Nice, I like that. Revenge of the scammed. Okay, all right, let's stop there. Thank you very much. I'm Fraser McGruer, been here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. Until next week, bye-bye.