One day last week, I went to my post office box and found an official-looking letter addressed to me, with the words “Second Notice” on the front of the envelope.
Wondering what it was I had forgotten to do, I tore the thing open.
It had something to do with a magazine I don’t subscribe to. Or car insurance I don’t need. Or something else that someone was trying to sell.
I don’t remember the specifics, because by that time I was thinking about other things. Like whether my friends who work at the post office have enough time to notice they’re putting a Second Notice in a friend’s mailbox.
Even though it wasn’t a bill, it looked like a bill. One of those kinds of bills that has “This is not a bill” in small print, somewhere in a hard-to detect spot.
And no matter what this Second Notice was, I was sure I had never received a First Notice from them.
That’s when it occurred to me that a lot of what we take for granted in advertising is based on lies.
The lies are so common, we don’t even blink when we’re bombarded by them. And they usually involve falsehood upon falsehood.
Take my Second Notice.
Lie 1 was the very fact that the piece of mail looked like a bill. It was designed in order to lie to me that I owed them something.
Lie 2 was the claim that they had tried to contact me about this alleged debt before.
Lie 3, related but different, involved their broadcasting, to whoever was boxing the mail, that this person they know (this is a small town) was in arrears on some debt for which she had been billed before.
Granted, the people at the post office probably don’t have time to monitor everyone’s mail, but the principle still holds.
The professional liars don’t expect everyone to fall for their falsehoods. They just use a blanket approach to marketing, knowing that now and then they will hit on someone who will fall for their scheme.
Often, that someone will be elderly. Because sometimes in later adulthood, there is some shrinkage in a part of the brain that helps us detect lies and scams.
It doesn’t affect everyone the same way, but there are enough who are so affected, to make this advertising approach a lucrative one for the professional liars.
This time around, my internal lie detector was intact enough to pick up on the deception. But will it when I’m 90?
I’ve had several friends in their 80s and 90s who would never fall for such a scheme. But I’ve had other friends that age, equally bright and capable, who still fell for dishonest claims that they never would have believed 20 or 30 years earlier.
Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to get in practice ahead of time.
How about next time you get something like a suspicious Second Notice, you share it with a trusted younger friend or relative, explaining that you know it’s a scam, but you’re just getting in practice, just in case you might need a second opinion when you get older.
That way, the habit will already be ingrained.
Advertisers who resort to these tactics might claim that they aren’t blatantly lying. Maybe just fibbing a little. Little white lies.
And granted, they’re not as outrageous as the “send us $500 immediately or the IRS will come get you” variety of scare tactic.
But the difference is only a matter of quantity.
Worse than little white lies. Maybe moderate-sized gray lies.
That’s enough of a lie for me.
Julia Cochran is a licensed professional counselor in Rincon and a psychology instructor at Armstrong State University. She can be reached at 912-772-3072 or by email at JCochranPhD@GileadCounseling.com. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Armstrong State University.