It's not as WIFOM as you think. the true WIFOM is thinking "The scum know this so they will act different"
It doesn't QUITE work that easily.
The key is the Townie and their true goal: finding scum. A passive townie helps to kill the town. The goes beyond the "they look like scum so they get lynched" mess. Ignoring everything else, a passive townie is too busy saving their own hide or worrying over mistakes to scumhunt. Whatever the cause, when an entire town acts that way, the town never wins. This happens regardless on how the scum act.
Thus townies learn..slowly.. that they have to be bold and aggressive to win. Thus they start becoming bold (well some.. the ones that can NEVER be bold end up being shunned until they stop playing, sadly). Even if they don't catch scum, the mere fact that they aren't torn apart by the town (once the town realizes that aggressiveness is NEVER a scumtell) is enough to keep them going. Eventually, they naturally improve and catch scum.
This leaves the scum at an odd situation. They may start off cautious or bold, but only until they start facing a true scumhunt. I tell you this, just about EVERY SCUM has, the first time they've seen someone say "you look like scum" panicked. Jeesh, when I was in Para 12 Janus made a quicky comment about my first RV-in truth his comment WAS mostly a RV- I panicked. No.. I PANICKED! I lurked the entire night, then only posted after he voted on someone else, THEN I made him my primary target to NK that very night!
Bold/Uncaring/or Cautious, once the attacks come on you, you feel it.. the urge to hide, to do whatever it takes to get them to stop.. just stop voting, stop attacking.. leave you alone. You realize the big fact about scum: you don't really care about the day game.
Mafia doesn't care. They don't NEED to hit you hard in the day to kill you and doing so leads to bad risks. Night, though, you can do whatever you want and not worry about anything.
So you grow cautious.. too cautious, until you realize that THAT is a scumtell. Thus you try to act like the town.
Thus we get to my last post. The townie, after a while, learn that they want to be bold and slowly becomes less worried about scumtells since they MUST be bold to catch scum. The best townies learn that their actions WILL cause others to attack them and that's fine.. because they can use the attacks to read the other players and better find scum. The scum, meanwhile, learns to fear the scumtell and not to care about the day game, so they do whatever it takes to avoid being noticed. They don't have any real use to being attacked.. so they don't want to be.
Yes, you have newtells which look like scumtells, and gambits that can backfire, and elite scum that can be bandwagoned on and not care..but that's NOT that rare, and even when it's done, there will STILL be clues to the truth. A townie can be anti-town for only so long before they break the town itself. A scum can be aggressive only so long as they don't die from it. Eventually, they'll break and show who they really are.
In a way, the TRUE WIFOM, then, is anything that makes you forget those facts.