Sridhar Ramamoorti, David E. Morrison III, and Kelly R. Pope
A.B.C.’s of Behavioral Forensics: Applying Psychology to Financial Fraud Prevention
and Detection Wiley Publishing
How widespread is the fraud: Is it the apple, the bushel, or the crop? We often ask ourselves this question when we hear about the staggering amounts of fraud committed in this country. We also wonder why “good people do bad things.” By “bringing Freud to fraud,” this book emphasizes that fraud is a human act frequently motivated by an individual’s emotions and cognitive state (including associated group behavioral dynamics). But a rogue executive seems quite capable of recruiting accomplices and perpetrate collusive fraud—hence the notion of bad bushels, as well as pervasive, toxic cultures spawning rampant fraud, producing bad crop scenarios. For years, academic scholars have attempted to study and understand these behaviors. But the focus has been on the “how” rather than the “why” of fraud, with greed typically proffered as the primary rationale. The book uses behavioral science concepts such as “violation of trust,” to describe and explain fraud. Indeed, the psychology of fraud, or more broadly, “behavioral forensics,” is about learning to get into the fraudster’s mind, to “think like a crook to catch crook”! Emotional manipulation, the big and small lies, the conscious and unconscious mind and their urgings, psychological defenses, human, trust-based relationships— all play a role. This non-technical book also looks at the psychology of the victims using real world case studies.
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