Last week I heard a description of a recent study done where subjects were all given “accounts” of real money, but had the ability to pay to have other’s money taken away. In other words, subject A was arbitrarily given, say, $10 in his account, subject B was arbitrarily given $5. B could, if he chose, liquidate $1 of A’s money by spending .25. (So A would now have $9 and B $4.75; the researchers keep the $1.25). According to the radio guy, the finding was that the have-nots would be so jealous that they’d wipe themselves out just so they other guy wouldn’t have any either.
If you want to debate these findings and/or their implications, start a GD thread.
My question is, did anybody else hear this? Does anyone have a cite? I have looked on Google and NYT and lexis-nexis and I don’t find it anywhere.
I recall a similar study where subjects (pairs of friends) were instructed to guess a word based on clue words provided (like the game Taboo, if you’re familiar with that)by the second subject- instructed to provide the best clues possible for their friend. But when the first subject was informed that they had performed poorly on another test, they were more likely to provide their friends with weak, or even blatantly misleading clues. When interviewed about the bogus clues later, They said that they felt bad and wanted their friends to feel bad too, even though they had nothing to really gain by their friend’s poor performance.
I recall a similar study where subjects (pairs of friends) were instructed to guess a word based on clue words provided (like the game Taboo, if you’re familiar with that)by the second subject- instructed to provide the best clues possible for their friend. But when the first subject was informed that they had performed poorly on another test, they were more likely to provide their friends with weak, or even blatantly misleading clues. When interviewed about the bogus clues later, They said that they felt bad and wanted their friends to feel bad too, even though they had nothing to really gain by their friend’s poor performance.