Common Sense and How Ignoring It Leads to Bad Outcomes – For Scam Victims
Common Sense and Scam Victims: How It Fails Us Before, During, and After Scams
Primary Category: Scam Victims Recovery Psychology
Intended Audience: Scam Victims-Survivors / Family & Friends
Author:
• Tim McGuinness, Ph.D. – Anthropologist, Scientist, Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
About This Article
Common sense is often misunderstood as a simple shield against deception, but for scam victims—especially those ensnared in relationship scams—it proves far more complex and fragile. Rather than being absent, common sense is often overridden by emotional need, cognitive bias, and psychological manipulation. This article explores how common sense is gradually bypassed before and during scams through tactics like emotional urgency, false intimacy, and authority mirroring. It also examines how mental shortcuts—confirmation bias, optimism bias, logical fallacies, and flawed personal schemas—distort judgment and create a psychological environment where victims justify irrational decisions.
Even after the scam is exposed, common sense remains elusive as shame, confusion, and trauma cloud perception. Victims may continue to ignore practical steps toward healing, avoid support, or believe that recovery will happen passively. True recovery requires not just emotional resilience, but the active rebuilding of common sense as a skill—one based on self-awareness, consistency, boundaries, and deliberate reflection. This process is not quick, but it is possible. And for victims seeking to reclaim their lives, it begins with the recognition that what failed was not intelligence, but a system overwhelmed. With intention, that system can be restored—stronger, wiser, and more self-trusting than before.
Common Sense and Scam Victims: How It Fails Us Before, During, and After Scams
Common sense is often held up as the antidote to bad decisions. It is seen as an intuitive guide to right and wrong, a kind of everyday wisdom that helps people navigate risks and avoid obvious dangers. But for scam victims, especially those deceived in emotionally manipulative relationship scams, common sense is not absent—it is overwhelmed, bypassed, or redefined. The truth is that “common sense” is not a universal standard. It is shaped by emotions, assumptions, and psychological needs. And in the world of scams, it often proves less reliable than we like to admit.
This article explores what common sense really is, how it is suppressed before and during a scam, and why it remains elusive even in recovery. More importantly, it provides insight into how common sense can be rebuilt and applied meaningfully after the trauma of a scam.
What Is Common Sense?
Common sense is generally understood as practical judgment that is grounded in shared experience. It refers to knowledge that seems so obvious that it doesn’t need to be taught—like not giving your house keys to a stranger or not sending money to someone you’ve never met. In theory, common sense is what keeps people from doing things that are risky, irrational, or self-destructive.
But common sense is not immune to distortion. It can be drowned out by hope, blinded by fear, or suspended by trust. In emotionally charged situations, especially those involving loneliness, grief, or romantic longing, common sense is often sidelined in favor of what feels emotionally right in the moment.
The Bypassing of Common Sense in Scams
Before the Scam
Victims often look back at their experience and say, “I should have known better.” They believe they ignored red flags and made decisions that violated their own sense of judgment. But it’s important to recognize that the manipulation starts long before the obvious lies. Scammers are skilled at bypassing common sense by building trust, creating emotional urgency, and mirroring their victim’s values.
The initial contact may seem benign: a friend request on social media, a message on a dating site, or a direct message on a professional platform. There’s nothing inherently unreasonable about responding to a polite message. From there, the scam unfolds slowly. The scammer invests time, attention, and emotional energy. They present themselves as trustworthy, creating a false sense of safety that makes the irrational seem rational.
During the Scam
Once the emotional hook is set, victims begin to reinterpret events through the lens of the scammer’s narrative. Common sense might say, “Why would someone I’ve never met ask me for money?” But by that point, the relationship has been framed as extraordinary—a once-in-a-lifetime connection, a deep bond that defies traditional timelines. The scammer may claim to be in distress, to have a child in danger, or to need temporary financial help until a big payment comes through. The victim wants to help. They want to protect the person they believe they love.
In these moments, common sense is not entirely gone. Victims often feel a twinge of doubt. But instead of rejecting the scammer’s requests, they explain away the doubt. “Maybe it’s just my fear talking. Maybe I’m being too cynical. If I really love this person, shouldn’t I help them?” What feels like empathy and loyalty is actually the emotional override of practical judgment.
And then there’s the role of hope. Many victims are at a vulnerable point in life—divorced, widowed, isolated, or simply craving meaningful connection. The scam becomes a story they want to believe. It gives them purpose, companionship, even joy. When emotions are high, common sense feels cold. It is pushed aside by the powerful need to hold onto something good.
Common Sense in Everyday Life: How It Is Still Ignored
Scams don’t only occur in romance. Every day, people ignore common sense in phone calls, emails, and texts. They click links in suspicious emails. They answer calls from unknown numbers. They provide personal information to strangers posing as bank representatives, police officers, or government agencies. Despite years of public warnings, these scams continue to succeed.
Why? Because common sense is not as common as we think. People still want to believe that others are acting in good faith. They trust authority figures. They fear consequences if they don’t respond quickly. Scammers exploit these tendencies by creating urgency, invoking fear, or offering rewards. In a moment of panic or excitement, common sense is silenced by emotion.
How Common Sense Is Undermined: The Influence of Cognitive Biases, Logical Fallacies, and Faulty Schemas
Common sense is not a lack of intelligence. It’s a form of practical reasoning—an internal compass built through lived experience, pattern recognition, and socially reinforced intuition. Yet even when this compass points to danger, many scam victims ignore it. Why? Because common sense doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It competes with powerful internal forces that distort perception and suppress rationality.
Cognitive Biases: The Invisible Filters
Cognitive biases are unconscious patterns of thought that affect how we interpret information and make decisions. They’re not flaws in intelligence—they’re adaptations designed to simplify complex data. But in the context of scams, they become liabilities.
Take confirmation bias, for example. This bias leads victims to focus only on evidence that supports their belief that the relationship is real, while dismissing contradictory signals—such as inconsistent stories, poor grammar, or requests for money. Optimism bias convinces victims that “this will turn out differently for me,” even if they know others have been deceived in similar ways. Sunk cost fallacy keeps them committed to the scam because they’ve already invested so much time, emotion, and money. Instead of cutting their losses, they double down, hoping for a resolution that will justify the pain.
Each of these biases distorts common sense. Instead of evaluating risks logically, the brain reinforces the illusion. Victims don’t lack awareness—they lack neutrality. Their thinking has been hijacked by their own expectations and emotional investments.
Logical Fallacies: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that create false but convincing arguments. Scam victims often construct internal narratives based on these fallacies, using them to justify irrational choices.
A common one is appeal to emotion. Victims say, “But I love him” or “She makes me feel safe,” as if feelings validate facts. Scammers exploit this by engineering emotional highs—romantic messages, urgent crises, or manufactured intimacy—that override suspicion.
Another is the false dilemma, where victims reduce the situation to two extremes: either they trust the scammer, or they accept a reality too painful to face. This binary thinking traps them. Instead of questioning the details, they defend their choices with intensity, because the alternative feels like emotional annihilation.
Appeal to authority also plays a role when scammers pose as soldiers, diplomats, doctors, or successful entrepreneurs. Victims transfer trust to the role, not the person, accepting claims they’d otherwise scrutinize. The title itself becomes the credential that blocks further inquiry.
These fallacies don’t mean victims are irrational—they mean they are human. They construct stories that protect their hope, even when that hope is built on a lie.
Faulty Schemas: The Frameworks That Shape Belief
Schemas are mental templates we use to understand the world. They develop through life experience, shaping what we notice, what we ignore, and what we expect. But when these frameworks are outdated, rigid, or built on trauma, they can become dangerous.
A victim with a schema that says, “I am unlovable,” may cling to a scammer who shows affection, no matter how inconsistent. Their belief that “no one else would ever care” makes the relationship feel indispensable. Another might hold a schema that authority figures are always right, or that speaking up causes rejection. These beliefs color every interaction, often preventing victims from voicing doubt or asserting boundaries.
Scammers are skilled at identifying and exploiting these internal frameworks. They tailor their manipulation to match the victim’s psychological landscape. What looks like common sense from the outside may be filtered through a deeply embedded belief on the inside—one that keeps the victim locked in self-blame or passivity.
The Breakdown of Internal Safeguards
Together, cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and faulty schemas form a perfect storm that suppresses the voice of common sense. They create a mental environment where warning signs are reinterpreted as tests of loyalty, and doubt is seen as weakness. Victims are not oblivious—they are caught in a psychological maze where every turn appears to confirm the scam’s reality.
Understanding this doesn’t excuse dangerous decisions, but it explains them. And in recovery, it becomes critical. If you don’t identify how your thinking was shaped—and warped—you risk repeating the pattern, or worse, getting stuck in self-condemnation. Recovery is not just emotional—it is cognitive. It involves reexamining your thoughts, challenging false beliefs, and rebuilding your internal framework based on truth rather than trauma.
Common sense is not gone—it is buried. Your job in healing is to excavate it, piece by piece, and bring it back into the light. That is how you protect yourself moving forward—not with fear, but with clarity.
The Aftermath: Common Sense in Recovery
After the scam is exposed, many victims feel intense shame. They ask, “How could I have been so blind?” Friends and family may echo this sentiment, saying, “Didn’t you see the red flags?” These questions are painful because they imply that the victim lacked something obvious, something basic—common sense.
But this judgment is both unfair and unhelpful. The victim did not lose their intelligence. They did not lack morality or maturity. They were manipulated. Their common sense was gradually eroded by trust, hope, and psychological coercion.
Still, recovery requires the rebuilding of trust in one’s own judgment. This is one of the hardest parts. Scam victims often don’t trust themselves anymore. They fear making more mistakes. They second-guess every decision. They may even begin to question whether they can be trusted with their own healing.
Common Sense and the Work of Recovery
To heal, victims must begin to re-engage their sense of judgment—but now from a place of awareness. This does not mean avoiding all risks or becoming paranoid. It means learning to recognize the signals of manipulation, to tolerate uncertainty, and to separate emotional urgency from practical decision-making.
Some key principles of common sense in recovery include:
Nothing legitimate requires secrecy or urgency. Whether it’s a person, a company, or a recovery coach, if someone pressures you to act immediately and discourages you from speaking to others for guidance, step back.
Trust is built through consistency, not declarations. Scammers use dramatic stories and strong emotional language to fast-track intimacy. In real life, trust develops slowly, through time and verification.
Discomfort is a signal, not a weakness. If something feels off, pay attention. That “gut feeling” is often your common sense trying to speak.
Asking questions is strength, not skepticism. In recovery, don’t be afraid to ask questions—about your support group, your progress, your emotions. Engaging critically with your recovery is a sign of reawakened judgment.
Common Sense After the Scam: What Victims Still Get Wrong
Even after discovering the scam, many victims continue to ignore common sense in ways that prolong suffering. They stay in contact with the scammer, hoping for closure or restitution. They avoid seeking help out of shame. They turn to unqualified individuals or vigilante groups instead of trauma-informed recovery programs. They isolate themselves, convinced no one will understand.
Others may try to “move on” too quickly, convincing themselves that the best thing to do is forget. They suppress their emotions, avoid processing the trauma, and ignore warning signs of ongoing distress. They tell themselves they’re fine while privately struggling with depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts. This, too, is a denial of common sense.
The Recovery Trap: When Victims Expect Healing Without Work
There is a myth among some scam victims that healing will simply happen over time. They believe that reading articles, attending a few support meetings, or hearing survivor stories will be enough. They underestimate the emotional and cognitive work required. They resist journaling, therapy, or confronting their shame. They assume that passive exposure to information will lead to transformation.
Common sense, in recovery, says otherwise. You cannot recover from betrayal trauma without active participation. You must engage with your pain, examine your thinking, and choose new behaviors. Just as you had to choose to believe in the scam, you now have to choose to believe in your ability to heal.
Reclaiming Common Sense: A Final Reflection
If you are a scam victim reading this, you may still feel like your common sense failed you. But the truth is that it was not failure—it was hijacking. Your trust was exploited. Your hope was used against you. That does not make you weak. It makes you human.
Now is the time to rebuild that intuitive guide. Not by blaming yourself, but by understanding what happened. By learning how emotion clouds perception. By choosing to become more aware, more curious, and more patient with yourself.
Common sense is not a fixed trait. It is a muscle. And like any muscle, it grows through use, through experience, and through reflection. You already have it. The fact that you are seeking to understand, to recover, and to reclaim your life is proof of that.
Let the betrayal teach you—not that people are bad, but that trust must be earned. Let the pain show you—not that love is dangerous, but that it must be mutual and grounded in truth. And let your recovery remind you—not that you were foolish, but that you are still wise enough to learn, heal, and begin again.
That is the real essence of common sense: the ability to see clearly, act wisely, and move forward with compassion and strength.
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Important Information for New Scam Victims
- Please visit www.ScamVictimsSupport.org – a SCARS Website for New Scam Victims & Sextortion Victims
- SCARS Institute now offers a free recovery program at www.SCARSeducation.org
- Please visit www.ScamPsychology.org – to more fully understand the psychological concepts involved in scams and scam victim recovery
If you are looking for local trauma counselors please visit counseling.AgainstScams.org or join SCARS for our counseling/therapy benefit: membership.AgainstScams.org
If you need to speak with someone now, you can dial 988 or find phone numbers for crisis hotlines all around the world here: www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines
A Question of Trust
At the SCARS Institute, we invite you to do your own research on the topics we speak about and publish, Our team investigates the subject being discussed, especially when it comes to understanding the scam victims-survivors experience. You can do Google searches but in many cases, you will have to wade through scientific papers and studies. However, remember that biases and perspectives matter and influence the outcome. Regardless, we encourage you to explore these topics as thoroughly as you can for your own awareness.
Statement About Victim Blaming
Some of our articles discuss various aspects of victims. This is both about better understanding victims (the science of victimology) and their behaviors and psychology. This helps us to educate victims/survivors about why these crimes happened and to not blame themselves, better develop recovery programs, and to help victims avoid scams in the future. At times this may sound like blaming the victim, but it does not blame scam victims, we are simply explaining the hows and whys of the experience victims have.
These articles, about the Psychology of Scams or Victim Psychology – meaning that all humans have psychological or cognitive characteristics in common that can either be exploited or work against us – help us all to understand the unique challenges victims face before, during, and after scams, fraud, or cybercrimes. These sometimes talk about some of the vulnerabilities the scammers exploit. Victims rarely have control of them or are even aware of them, until something like a scam happens and then they can learn how their mind works and how to overcome these mechanisms.
Articles like these help victims and others understand these processes and how to help prevent them from being exploited again or to help them recover more easily by understanding their post-scam behaviors. Learn more about the Psychology of Scams at www.ScamPsychology.org
SCARS Resources:
- Getting Started: ScamVictimsSupport.org
- FREE enrollment in the SCARS Institute training programs for scam victims SCARSeducation.org
- For New Victims of Relationship Scams newvictim.AgainstScams.org
- Subscribe to SCARS Newsletter newsletter.againstscams.org
- Sign up for SCARS professional support & recovery groups, visit support.AgainstScams.org
- Find competent trauma counselors or therapists, visit counseling.AgainstScams.org
- Become a SCARS Member and get free counseling benefits, visit membership.AgainstScams.org
- Report each and every crime, learn how to at reporting.AgainstScams.org
- Learn more about Scams & Scammers at RomanceScamsNOW.com and ScamsNOW.com
- Learn more about the Psychology of Scams and Scam Victims: ScamPsychology.org
- Self-Help Books for Scam Victims are at shop.AgainstScams.org
- Worldwide Crisis Hotlines: International Suicide Hotlines – OpenCounseling : OpenCounseling
- Campaign To End Scam Victim Blaming – 2024 (scamsnow.com)
Psychology Disclaimer:
All articles about psychology and the human brain on this website are for information & education only
The information provided in this and other SCARS articles are intended for educational and self-help purposes only and should not be construed as a substitute for professional therapy or counseling.
Note about Mindfulness: Mindfulness practices have the potential to create psychological distress for some individuals. Please consult a mental health professional or experienced meditation instructor for guidance should you encounter difficulties.
While any self-help techniques outlined herein may be beneficial for scam victims seeking to recover from their experience and move towards recovery, it is important to consult with a qualified mental health professional before initiating any course of action. Each individual’s experience and needs are unique, and what works for one person may not be suitable for another.
Additionally, any approach may not be appropriate for individuals with certain pre-existing mental health conditions or trauma histories. It is advisable to seek guidance from a licensed therapist or counselor who can provide personalized support, guidance, and treatment tailored to your specific needs.
If you are experiencing significant distress or emotional difficulties related to a scam or other traumatic event, please consult your doctor or mental health provider for appropriate care and support.
Also read our SCARS Institute Statement about Professional Care for Scam Victims – click here
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Después de ser víctima de una estafa, el sentido común no desaparece, pero puede verse afectado por la desconfianza, la alteración de la percepción del riesgo y el impacto emocional. Es un proceso psicológico complejo que requiere tiempo y apoyo para sanar.