Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Scam Psychology: Presumption of hate

One of the more... insidious aspects of MLM is how its members will often NOT listen to "reason", even if it's coming from people they used to trust, like family members and best friends. They are often screaming for some understanding, that they really are trying to improve their situation, and why are people around them so... defeatist, and so on. They will appear to be completely brainwashed.

(Sidebar: China claims to have found a new type of paranoid disorder they temporarily named pyramid cult sales disorder. )

But what motivates such... hate? It's a combination of factors, but generally, it has to do with how you perceive people on the other side, and its origin was longstanding.

In a research by Liane Young at Boston College, it was revealed that both Democrats and Republicans (political parties in the US) claim that they were motivated by positive emotions such as love and loyalty to their party members, and their opponents were motivated primarily by hate and animosity.

In other words: "I think you hate me, therefore I hate you."  It's basically preemptive hate.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Scam Tactic: Deny everything, make up some other reasonable sounding reasons

When confronted with truth that contradicts their world view, MLMers often resort to denial, i.e. "that can't possibly be true". It's motivated reasoning, i.e. thinking with your heart, not with your head, and that means impulsive rather than logical decisions.

After the denial, then some alternate explanations was supplied with no proof in order to justify the view.

Recently on BehindMLM I encountered a perfect example of such.

On Feb 6th, 2016, commenter B.F. wrote on BehindMLM that MLM "Kyani" was "kicked out of the Norwegian direct selling organization (Direktesalgsforbundet) for using illegal health claims in the official marketing."

Less than 24 hour later, commenter "MLMexec" replied "Kyäni was not kicked out of the Norwegian DSA because of illegal marketing. They were trial members for a year and weren’t accepted as full members because Eqology and Zinzino joined forces to vote against it."

But is that true?