Stacey Wood, Scripps’ Molly Mason Jones Chair in Psychology, was interviewed for The Atlantic‘s newsletter about how scammers are leveraging increased social isolation among Americans to defraud rising numbers of victims. In the article, “How America Got Scammed,” Wood notes that social media is a major channel for fraud, references the role of AI in making it more difficult to identify scams, and emphasizes the significant emotional ramifications for victims. She says that because scammers prey on a sense of artificial urgency to cloud their targets’ judgment, “it’s difficult to know if you would fall for it until you’re in that same emotional state.”