Research suggests that more money makes people act less human.(nymag.com)
nymag.com
Research suggests that more money makes people act less human.
http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/
16 comments
How is this valid research? You can only draw a correlation between money and "humanity". It makes more sense that people who have less "humanity" causes them to become more wealthy, not the other way around.
To show convincingly that more money causes you to have less "humanity", you have to have two groups:
1) Control group. Monitor their "humanity" over several years.
2) Test group. Give these people lots of money. Monitor their "humanity" over several years.
This would be quite an expensive study.
To show convincingly that more money causes you to have less "humanity", you have to have two groups:
1) Control group. Monitor their "humanity" over several years.
2) Test group. Give these people lots of money. Monitor their "humanity" over several years.
This would be quite an expensive study.
Did you actually read the article? "Give these people lots of money" and "Monitor their 'humanity'" is exactly what is described in the Monopoly game. The result was that the group given more money "act[s] out social dominance with a special ferociousness, slapping hands, stamping feet, or 'charging back and forth and dragging huge branches'" (oops, I mean "he balloons in size [...,] smacks his playing piece [...,] picks up Glasses’s piece [...] and moves it for him").
You read a journalist's interpretation of a research article. These are almost always a disaster from a scientific point of view. Your question is unfair to the original authors unless you read their paper.
Unfortunately, the article isn't yet open-access (PNAS has a 6-month-embargo "delayed open access" approach), but the abstract can be found here, which gives a little more detail on what precisely they're claiming: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.abst...
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how do you define "human"?
The researchers mentioned in this article were generally measuring empathetic, selfless, or compassionate behaviour, and the effect of wealth (or perceived wealth) on that. So “human” in the sense of “humane”.
Selflessness and compassion (at least, for that which occurred from wrong behavior) are common among people who are ignorant of the importance of justice (which may be defined as revealing things as they really are) and the danger of compromising with injustice. Also, in order not to lose all of one's money, one needs to be careful not to be deceived (which requires keeping oneself and acting to serve oneself and the world, rather than selflessness). Are you sure the experiment was able to control for those two issues?
I wondered the same thing.
The beginning of the article started with the implicit assumption that one can learn anything at all about "rich people" from watching a couple of folks play a rigged game of MONOPOLY.
It didn't get any more academically rigorous, so I attributed its rise in HN to being link-bait and decided I had more important things to do with my day like getting rich so I can become inhumane.
The beginning of the article started with the implicit assumption that one can learn anything at all about "rich people" from watching a couple of folks play a rigged game of MONOPOLY.
It didn't get any more academically rigorous, so I attributed its rise in HN to being link-bait and decided I had more important things to do with my day like getting rich so I can become inhumane.
If you'd prefer to read something with more rigor:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=Z...
I find it odd that a site started by a rich guy who decided to put together a for-profit enterprise based on the idea that helping entrepreneurs get their first startup off of the ground would both make him richer, and make them richer, is frequented by so many people who want to believe that the "rich" are "evil" and need to be punished in some sort or another. (and this article is trying to put a scientific gloss on that belief.)
Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief, but the mechanism by which he is getting richer is very much the same mechanism that other rich people employ, though often with less obvious social benefits. So, PG is not an anomaly that proves the rule. He's a more visible example of the rule that is often obscured with hot air, but that applies in the vast majority of cases. For instance, while I truly despise Bill Gates, I must recognize that Windows made billions of people's lives easier[1] and thus Gates made his money by improving the world.
Some people can get wealthy via pull and theft, for example, many politicians get wealthy essentially by trading pull. I'm sure there are examples of non-politicians that get wealthy this very same way (trading political pull at a net loss to society.)
But the real way to get wealthy is to make other people's lives better-- in fact, this is the startup advice often seen in other contexts as "find a real pain point and solve it."
[1] ...not easier than if those people had a good operating system, but that's not the comparison. The comparison is to those people not having any operating system, or having only MS-DOS if they already had a PC.
Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief, but the mechanism by which he is getting richer is very much the same mechanism that other rich people employ, though often with less obvious social benefits. So, PG is not an anomaly that proves the rule. He's a more visible example of the rule that is often obscured with hot air, but that applies in the vast majority of cases. For instance, while I truly despise Bill Gates, I must recognize that Windows made billions of people's lives easier[1] and thus Gates made his money by improving the world.
Some people can get wealthy via pull and theft, for example, many politicians get wealthy essentially by trading pull. I'm sure there are examples of non-politicians that get wealthy this very same way (trading political pull at a net loss to society.)
But the real way to get wealthy is to make other people's lives better-- in fact, this is the startup advice often seen in other contexts as "find a real pain point and solve it."
[1] ...not easier than if those people had a good operating system, but that's not the comparison. The comparison is to those people not having any operating system, or having only MS-DOS if they already had a PC.
The scope of your comment is extremely small. It ignores millions of other rich people that made their money by exploiting people. I'm sure you can think of your own examples without much difficulty. No social findings are ever absolute. Humans are exceptional at breaking "rules".
But I would further criticize your comment with your use of the word "evil". Evil evokes images that are irrelevant to actual behavior. Evil insinuates that these people are intently malicious. The findings indicate the opposite- they are unintentionally malicious.
Edit: I've been downvoted without response. Classy.
But I would further criticize your comment with your use of the word "evil". Evil evokes images that are irrelevant to actual behavior. Evil insinuates that these people are intently malicious. The findings indicate the opposite- they are unintentionally malicious.
Edit: I've been downvoted without response. Classy.
PG is only an existence disproof of the statement that all rich people are horrible, which nobody really claims. The claim in this article is that, all else being equal, more money has a negative average effect on certain personality/social characteristics. That's not even incompatible with the same people having created real value through their businesses.
I know we all have our prejudices, but come on... You completely miss the point of the article, while jiu-jitsuing some random communist strawman for good measure. Have you even read the article? Many of your objections are mentioned there. Or you could read the actual paper, if you find this newspaper article lacking in data.
BTW, please don't elevate rich people to a pedestal with the right hand, and at the same time, throw shit to politicians with the other. There might be a lot of cognitive damage with feet in Congress, but so there is in Wall Street. Personally, I prefer a democracy without Apple than Apple without democracy.
BTW, please don't elevate rich people to a pedestal with the right hand, and at the same time, throw shit to politicians with the other. There might be a lot of cognitive damage with feet in Congress, but so there is in Wall Street. Personally, I prefer a democracy without Apple than Apple without democracy.
>the "rich" are "evil" and need to be punished in some sort or another
That's not what the article is saying.
Also:
>Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief,
No, a sample size of one (or two) is not make a valid counterargument.
That's not what the article is saying.
Also:
>Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief,
No, a sample size of one (or two) is not make a valid counterargument.
No. Two things. First, taking this study and applying it to "money" is very correlative, and a decent leap considering the methods for the study. The real value of this study, if there's any at all, is about someone having huge unfair advantages in a general sense; having freedom to treat someone however you want because they don't have the means to rebel.
And second, the examination of this isn't new at all. Heart of Darkness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now, King Leopold's Ghost, tons and tons of artists have examined what happens when someone has an unfair advantage without consequence; those are just some I plucked quickly, but there are so many.
I'm not saying the point is completely invalid. In a lot of cases, money gives people the exact freedom, privilege, and less-restrained power that leads to this behavior.
But saying "Research suggests more money makes people less human" based on a rigged monopoly game where the other person is severely relatively handicapped is...a bit of a leap, to say the least.
The other studies mentioned in the article don't sound very convincing, either.
quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people
Quizzes/questionnaires are notoriously prone to being bullshit, like the China Study's questionnaires including "Pizza" as meat and the book going on to draw correlations between its definitions of "meat" and diseases like cancer. I'd way rather see more info on the "in-lab manipulations and field studies", it was only touched on briefly, it seemed.