Why Smart People Fall for Phishing

Phishing remains one of the top security risks, and yet the moment it’s mentioned you can practically hear the collective eye roll.

Yeah yeah, don’t click links from senders you don’t know. Check the URL. Report suspicious emails. We get it. Who is still falling for this stuff anyway?

I’ve been asked this myself. “Hannah, why do we even run these phishing campaigns? Nobody here would fall for them.”

So I went and looked at the data.

And wouldn’t you know it, people had fallen for it. Smart people. Experienced people. People who absolutely know the rules.

That’s when it clicked. Phishing isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a human one.

Phishing doesn’t target idiots

One of the biggest myths in security is that phishing works because people are careless or untrained. In reality, most people who fall for phishing could explain exactly what they should have done five minutes later.

Phishing works because it targets instincts, not ignorance.

Humans are wired to help. If an email looks like it came from a colleague asking for something small and reasonable, our first reaction is not suspicion. It’s cooperation. Especially in workplaces where being helpful, responsive, and quick is valued.

Attackers know this. They do not need to be clever hackers when they can simply sound like a teammate.

Urgency breaks good decision making

Urgency is phishing’s favourite trick.

“Action required.”
“Final reminder.”
“Your account will be locked.”
“Payment needed today.”

Urgency pushes people into rush mode. The brain switches from thinking to resolving. The goal becomes making the discomfort stop as fast as possible.

And in that moment, do you really remember a security awareness video you watched months ago? Or do you just want the problem gone so you can get back to your actual job?

Most phishing clicks happen under pressure, not ignorance.

Context matters more than we admit

Security advice often assumes people are sitting calmly at a desk, carefully reading every email.

Reality looks more like this:

• Switching between meetings

• Replying on a phone

• Slack notifications popping off

• Halfway through something else

• Trying to be quick, not perfect

Phishing emails are designed to blend into that chaos. They are not meant to stand out. They are meant to feel routine, boring, and just urgent enough to act on without thinking.

That’s not a failure of intelligence. That’s a failure of expecting humans to behave like security tools.

Why awareness training alone doesn’t fix this

Telling people to “be more careful” sounds sensible, but it ignores how work actually happens.

You cannot train away human instincts. You cannot expect perfect recall under pressure. And you cannot shame people into making better decisions when the system is stacked against them.

If smart people keep falling for phishing, the answer is not more slides or louder warnings. It’s better design.

That means:

• Reducing unnecessary urgency in internal processes

• Making phishing reporting quicker than ignoring the email

• Adding friction to risky actions, not everyday ones

• Treating mistakes as data, not personal failures

The human gap

Phishing lives in the gaps between systems and people. No update fixes helpfulness. No policy removes urgency. No dashboard stops someone trying to do the right thing in the wrong moment.

Until we design security around how people actually behave, phishing will keep working.

Not because people are careless.
Not because they are untrained.
But because they are human.