Telling if someone is "fake"

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I'm afraid I don't really have any useful advice to give.

I've been burned this way so many times, I now assume people are fake until they build up a track record over time. Since I am resistant to their overtures, few keep trying long enough for me to believe they are genuine in their desire to be friends.

I wish I could help you find a middle way.

The answer's easy - don't associate with people. Well, people who are ignorant of autism and unsympathetic to its afflictees (about 99.9% of the population) anyway.

Yes, it's a bit restrictive, but it's the only way to minimise being burned.

Don't give any more than they do.
They smile at you? They get a smile back.
They want to know highly personal information? They share some of theirs first.

I've experienced this as well... and not only in the dating scene, but with society in general.

This is exactly what I have been doing (asking people I know I can trust) and that works out okay... It's kind of awkward when I have to keep doing it. A therapist who can't read people is kind of an oxymoron!

You're right about the "fake" people... they all also seem to be gossips!

One major red flag I've been reminded of recently: if someone tells me I can trust them, it means I can't, and I shouldn't. :- (

Trust no one and suspect everyone.

How can you tell if a friendly person is true or not?
What are they after? Do they try to sell you a car? Did they do something (secret) mean and are trying to fake you out? Do the 'answers' to their questions have a potential to BENEFIT them, or compromise someone they know, including you? Are they trying to mooch smokes, or money off you?
If you give do they reciprocate??

What is in it for them?

If it's fair, normal, reciprocating behavior then yay!

Things like this get me every time! Not selling a car so much as selling in general! I get sucked into the salesman spell really easily.

Last edited by NEtikiman on 13 Jun 2013, 6:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am quite good at some of these things--there is a kind of salesman's fakeness that I think I am good at spotting and quites resistant too--though I suppose there may be a sort of Dunning Kruger effect at work. (How would I know?)

But there is another thing that happens in casual conversation where I am just not able to read beyond the overt message. This has happened at work several times. I thought that a distant person was suddenly being friendly because of circumstance and that we were perhaps become friends, only to learn that all of the friendly encounters were designed to extract information that was later used against me in office politics, which I am terrible at even when I havent armed my opponents.

And there are people who are like poker players, keeping everything very close--I have no idea how to read them at all. This makes me vulnerable to certain kinds of faking.

I agree with this. Except maybe that last sentence -- I don't quite know what it means...

The couple times I've been a salesperson, I wasn't bad... maybe because I actually studied what I was selling and also listened to what my customers actually wanted so that I could match them up the right way. The particular things I was selling were also special interests of mine at the time, so that helped a lot. I wanted to share my interest with these people who came to the store full of things I was interested in, so it worked out. Except when someone wouldn't be clear about what they wanted and expected me to read their mind -- then I got frustrated. But there were few instances of that that could not be remedied with a few direct questions about their lifestyle and such. And usually the NTs I worked with agreed that those particular customers were just trying to be difficult. In the end, though, it was the sales managers who were jerks and would take advantage of me in some way -- having me clean the whole store even when no one else had to do so and even though I had been getting the highest sales, for instance.

Thank you for drawing this out! This is exactly the kind of situation that caused me to post this! I don't want to blanketly not trust people because I think, in some ways, my be being so trusting is a positive quality, but I know I have been burned by office politics many times!
I know one or two people in particular who burned me, so I keep an eye out for people who's mannerisms remind me of those other people, but this isn't always right. I don't want to be a closed off jerk at work, but I do want to be more cautious.

Yeah, it often happens that when you get more cautious, the office decides your not friendly and, thus, expendable.

I don't really have the problem, but I was betrayed a lot as a kid, so I am the opposite with trusting people I don't know.

I have set limits on how much I trust someone I don't know and how much I will disclose to them. The more they prove I can trust them, the more I'm willing to share with them.

I really struggle with this, yes.

Even though I'm an intelligent person, and also I am pretty good at reading facial expressions and body language, I can be horrifically naive about people and their real intentions, particularly if they do all the right things to behave like a decent and well intentioned person.

As a woman, I think that most of my worst choices in men, and failures in relationships, has been due to my lack of skill in figuring out who is sincere. It's been the bane of my existence -- well, one of them!

I've learned over the years to be better at this, but I still get betrayed by people in general every once in a while. And I think that as recently as yesterday I picked the wrong person to confide something in. I'm now regretting it already.