Study Shows Rich People Are Greedy and Lack Compassion

[begbert2]

@septimus

I’m unsurprised as I’ve observed the effect often. However, as others point out, the direction of cause-effect is unclear.

What is interesting in the thread are the pathetic attempts to impugn the study, or deflect attention. I guess National Academy of Sciences is just a left-wing propaganda organ, and we can’t trust this result till it’s confirmed by American Enterprise Institute.

Most amusing was

So the result that the rich are greedier than the poor was so obvious, it’s a shame effort was wasted on a study. OK.

So the poor are just as greedy as the rich. OK.

Methinks the result put begbert2 into quite a frenzy. I suggest in future that he let his neural oscillations calm down before picking a point to post on.

I am so frenzied, oh yes. Look at me be frenzied. Watch me frenzificating here.

Actually, when I looked at the brief write-up on that news site, I was immediately struck by how dubous the study described was - specifically, the one based on the behavior of drivers. The dramatically poor don’t have cars.* In fact in this day and economy to be able to afford to fuel and maintain a car establishes you as being, not well off, but at least possessing of some source of income. And if you have an income, there is an entire social class of people poorer than you.

In other words, I perceive a probability of sampling flaws. There is a class of people who are under great social pressure to break a window pane to steal a loaf of bread - and I doubt that all of them give the proceeds to their sister’s son, either. And I didn’t get the vibe that these people were represented in the study.

That suspected problem with the study aside, though, it’s still would be very unsurprising to find scientific verification that the very rich skew selfish. Not because being rich makes you selfish, but because being selfish can be helpful in making you rich.

*defined as “people too poor to afford cars”.

[septimus]

@heatmiserfl

The paper wasn’t published in Scientific America. It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Also, this was not just one study. Several studies (both field and laboratory observation) were performed. The abstract summarizes a wide variety of bad behavior:

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short

Other related studies on a lack of empathy in upper class and/or powerful individuals. (Although one explanation is that upper class people may not recognize certain distress signals?)
Lower classes quicker to show compassion in the face of suffering | ScienceDaily
Upper-class people have trouble recognizing others' emotions | ScienceDaily
Are Power And Compassion Mutually Exclusive? | ScienceDaily

We might ignore the 3rd of these 4 papers (it uses education as a proxy for prosperity/power), but the others seem to have careful controls and clear outcomes.

@John_Mace

This is some pretty shoddy science. Just looking at the first study, I don’t see how they conclude that “people driving more expensive cars at this intersection” represents a good, random sample of “rich people”. It’s a good random sample of “people who drive more expensive cars at this intersection”.

Let’s agree to disagree about how serious your nitpick here is. But what about the better, more careful studies heatmiserfl cites?

@John_Mace

Many of us making these “pathetic” attempts are actual scientists.

You find a way to nitpick the weakest study presented; then use that as grounds to ignore the rest. Is that how science is conducted?

[Delayed_Reflex]

So has anyone read the PNAS article? If so, can you describe the details of the study? I don’t want to have to spend $10 to read it myself, so I’m not sure if all of the tests being described in the Scientific American article are part of the set of seven studies that is linked at the beginning of the article. The abstract of the PNAS article has some rather loaded wording:

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

(bolding mine)

Simply splitting the study group into two groups and assigning some attributes to them is using far too broad of a brush, IMO. The summary of this study is about as useful as saying “Tall people have the tendency to be more successful than short people” or “Black people are more likely to perform criminal activity than white people”.

The groups aren’t even consistent across the tests - in one test “upper-class” means luxury car drivers and in another test it means “people who are told to compare themselves to people less well-off than themselves”. In a different study, rich people were determined based on their family’s level of income and education. Yet Scientific American lumps them all together to define people as either upper-class or lower-class. What did the latter study even use as the cutoff for upper-class vs. lower class?

Is it surprising that the ratio of greedy:non-greedy people in the “upper class” is higher than the “lower class”? Probably not to most people. But does this mean that most rich people are greedy? Impossible to tell without reading the study - but the Scientific American article implies that there is a strong correlation. Greedy, unethical people may just be a relatively small subset of rich people, in which case any generalizations are unjustified.

If 90% of rich people felt compassion to cancer patients and 95% of lower class people felt the same, would you feel that is significant? What if it was 20% vs 30%? Frankly, saying that “rich people are less likely to be compassionate than poor people” is pretty much useless without saying HOW much more.
This is on top of all of Blake’s very good criticisms of the study - I don’t agree that all of his hypotheses are necessarily more likely than those postulated by the scientists running the study, but they are plausible and should have been addressed by the scientists in their studies using proper controls.

[tullsterx]

Yeah, but rich people just don’t give a damn what studies like that show.

Or, could it be that people that are greedy and lack compassion are more likely to be rich?!

[Evil_Captor]

@begbert2

I am so frenzied, oh yes. Look at me be frenzied. Watch me frenzificating here.

Actually, when I looked at the brief write-up on that news site, I was immediately struck by how dubous the study described was - specifically, the one based on the behavior of drivers. The dramatically poor don’t have cars.* In fact in this day and economy to be able to afford to fuel and maintain a car establishes you as being, not well off, but at least possessing of some source of income. And if you have an income, there is an entire social class of people poorer than you.

In other words, I perceive a probability of sampling flaws. There is a class of people who are under great social pressure to break a window pane to steal a loaf of bread - and I doubt that all of them give the proceeds to their sister’s son, either. And I didn’t get the vibe that these people were represented in the study.

That suspected problem with the study aside, though, it’s still would be very unsurprising to find scientific verification that the very rich skew selfish. Not because being rich makes you selfish, but because being selfish can be helpful in making you rich.

*defined as “people too poor to afford cars”.

I think the study is a useful counterpoint to those who would define the wealthy as hard-working, noble “job creators” who live only to further America’s success and wealth. Like it or not, there is a widespread meme that wealth is associated with personal virtue, which frankly, is incredibly dubious.

[Delayed_Reflex]

@Evil_Captor

I think the study is a useful counterpoint to those who would define the wealthy as hard-working, noble “job creators” who live only to further America’s success and wealth. Like it or not, there is a widespread meme that wealth is associated with personal virtue, which frankly, is incredibly dubious.

Why can’t it be both? Hardworking, industrious, job-creating people can get rich. Greedy, cut-throat, unethical people also get rich. Why assume that “wealthy people” as a group are one or the other? I agree that people shouldn’t look at someone’s wealth and therefore assume they are virtuous though.

[Malthus]

These studies are loaded with definitional problems - for example, the terms “wealthy” and “upper class” are by no means obvious as descriptors (I cite numerous threads here on the Dope where arguments, some very involved, are made concerning what the criteria are for either and if “wealthy” and “upper class” mean much the same or not).

Things like “having a fancy car” and “thinking you are better off than others” are poor “surrogates” for determining the behaviour of the “wealthy” or “upper class” as a group, however defined. For example, as others have mentioned, owning a fancy car may require wealth, but those with wealth do not necessarily own a fancy car: it is only a certain self-selected minority that do. What you get is a measure of that minority. Similarly, as numerous threads here on the Dope disclose, people who are arguably “wealthy” frequently rate themselves as strictly “middle class” - that is, they think they are worse off than others rate them.

The other studies cited are rife with definitional problems as well. To give but one example, a study as to the relative compassion of the upper class uses this methodology:

A group of undergraduates completed questionnaires about their personal sense of power, which identified them to the researchers as either being high-power or low-power. The students were then randomly paired up and had to tell their partner about an event which had caused them emotional suffering and pain.

[Emphasis added]

And derives these conclusions:

Analysis of the participants’ final surveys (where they rated their thoughts about their partners) revealed that high-power individuals reported a weaker desire to get to know and establish a friendship with their partner. In other words, powerful people were not motivated to establish a relationship with distressed individuals. This idea is supported by the fact that the distressed participants reported less of a social connection with high-power partners compared to low-power partners. The authors suggest that powerful people’s tendency to show less compassion and distress towards others reinforces their social power.

These results do not just apply to how powerful people react to strangers; the authors note that this study “suggests that high-power individuals may suffer in interpersonal relationships because of their diminished capacity for compassion and empathy. The many benefits enjoyed by people with power may not translate to the interpersonal realm.”

The very obvious problem with this study is that it is based on an assessment of differences in “sense of personal power” - among a group of undergraduates, who pretty well by definition do not, in fact, have any real “power” over anybody. How this translates into the behaviour of those who actually have “power” (again, something that may or may not correlate with either “wealth” or “class”) is anybody’s guess. The same study could be used to prove that those with an unrealistic self-assessment of “power” are unable to realistically assess, or form a connection with, others - conclusions just as “valid” as those presented.

Combine definitional problems with issues of moral judgment and political interest, and you have a perfect prescription for the sort of results-oriented pseudo-science that tends to bring the social sciences into disrepute.

[Malthus]

These studies are loaded with definitional problems - for example, the terms “wealthy” and “upper class” are by no means obvious as descriptors (I cite numerous threads here on the Dope where arguments, some very involved, are made concerning what the criteria are for either and if “wealthy” and “upper class” mean much the same or not).

Things like “having a fancy car” and “thinking you are better off than others” are poor “surrogates” for determining the behaviour of the “wealthy” or “upper class” as a group, however defined. For example, as others have mentioned, owning a fancy car may require wealth, but those with wealth do not necessarily own a fancy car: it is only a certain self-selected minority that do. What you get is a measure of that minority. Similarly, as numerous threads here on the Dope disclose, people who are arguably “wealthy” frequently rate themselves as strictly “middle class” - that is, they think they are worse off than others rate them.

The other studies cited are rife with definitional problems as well. To give but one example, a study as to the relative compassion of the upper class uses this methodology:

A group of undergraduates completed questionnaires about their personal sense of power, which identified them to the researchers as either being high-power or low-power. The students were then randomly paired up and had to tell their partner about an event which had caused them emotional suffering and pain.

[Emphasis added]

And derives these conclusions:

Analysis of the participants’ final surveys (where they rated their thoughts about their partners) revealed that high-power individuals reported a weaker desire to get to know and establish a friendship with their partner. In other words, powerful people were not motivated to establish a relationship with distressed individuals. This idea is supported by the fact that the distressed participants reported less of a social connection with high-power partners compared to low-power partners. The authors suggest that powerful people’s tendency to show less compassion and distress towards others reinforces their social power.

These results do not just apply to how powerful people react to strangers; the authors note that this study “suggests that high-power individuals may suffer in interpersonal relationships because of their diminished capacity for compassion and empathy. The many benefits enjoyed by people with power may not translate to the interpersonal realm.”

The very obvious problem with this study is that it is based on an assessment of differences in “sense of personal power” - among a group of undergraduates, who pretty well by definition do not, in fact, have any real “power” over anybody. How this translates into the behaviour of those who actually have “power” (again, something that may or may not correlate with either “wealth” or “class”) is anybody’s guess. The same study could be used to prove that those with an unrealistic self-assessment of “power” are unable to realistically assess, or form a connection with, others - conclusions just as “valid” as those presented.

Combine definitional problems with issues of moral judgment and political interest, and you have a perfect prescription for the sort of results-oriented pseudo-science that tends to bring the social sciences into disrepute.

[erislover]

@John_Mace

It’s really, really difficult to do measurable sociological science. There is so much subjectivity and you don’t have the ability to control the experiment the way you do in other branches of science.

I agree 100%. You can see the fruits of my disagreement in the liberal bias thread.

For example, would one find a similar result if done in Japan or India or Papua New Guinea?

Really, such a criticism is kind of silly. It would be an excellent follow-up study, but are you going to fault researchers for presenting data on some experiments for not going to every intersection in the entire world? Surely you would find the results significant at some point prior. Surely.

And even if you do say “let’s accept the result for the sake of argument”, then what does it actually mean in terms of what we do going forward?

How 'bout some science? You know, confirmation, repetition, hypothesis formation and testing…

I’m fundamentally skeptical of our ability to define, much less measure, motivations such as greed and compassion in studies like this…

Do we know what the “best” amount of greed or compassion a society should, on average, have?

Definitely not, which is why they’d use relative measures, to avoid that kind of bias.

[John_Mace]

@erislover

Really, such a criticism is kind of silly. It would be an excellent follow-up study, but are you going to fault researchers for presenting data on some experiments for not going to every intersection in the entire world?

It’s not silly, and I’m not faulting the researchers. Not sure why you would assume I was. I didn’t read the original paper, and maybe the put that caveat in there. To the extent that I’m faulting anyone, it’s people in this thread who are jumping to conclusions.

I don’t mean to denigrate social scientists. I know they work hard and try to do real science just like the rest of us. It’s very difficult, though, and because of the nature of the beast one should approach any results with a high degree of humility wrt any universal conclusions that can be drawn from the experiments. The last thing one should do is start a debate thread on this subject by poisoning the well about reality having a “liberal bias”. :rolleyes:

[erislover]

@John_Mace

It’s not silly, and I’m not faulting the researchers. Not sure why you would assume I was.

Oh, I don’t know, comments like “This is some pretty shoddy science” are not usually taken as attaboys or constructive criticism. Maybe that’s just how you roll, though. Tough love and all that.

I don’t mean to denigrate social scientists. I know they work hard and try to do real science just like the rest of us. It’s very difficult, though, and because of the nature of the beast one should approach any results with a high degree of humility wrt any universal conclusions that can be drawn from the experiments.

I don’t disagree. But unless your point was we should repeat this experiment because it is a good one (in which case you chose a strange way of expressing it) then a statement like “what if they did it in Japan” is not exceptional criticism, but faulting someone for publishing results of a small study. Is this what you want? Small studies like this to not count? Might as well tell the physicists they’ve been “shoddy” because they haven’t rerun all their experiments on the sun or in another galaxy yet.

[John_Mace]

@erislover

Oh, I don’t know, comments like “This is some pretty shoddy science” are not usually taken as attaboys or constructive criticism. Maybe that’s just how you roll, though. Tough love and all that.

I was referring to the specific part of my post that you quoted. I was not, in that post, faulting the researchers. But you’re right-- those earlier comments were better directed at those trying to draw authoritative conclusions from the articles rather than on “the science”.

I don’t disagree. But unless your point was we should repeat this experiment because it is a good one (in which case you chose a strange way of expressing it) then a statement like “what if they did it in Japan” is not exceptional criticism, but faulting someone for publishing results of a small study. Is this what you want? Small studies like this to not count? Might as well tell the physicists they’ve been “shoddy” because they haven’t rerun all their experiments on the sun or in another galaxy yet.

Once again, I was not faulting the researchers. I was faulting those drawing conclusions without asking those types of questions. It’s always better, in the social sciences, to do studies across cultures to see what influences culture has on the result.

If we have experience that the laws of physics are different on the sun, then I would expect scientists to not proclaim universal laws until they have verified their results on the sun. But we know better than that, and so we don’t have to. Bad analogy.

[robert_columbia]

@Evil_Captor

In one more iteration of the relentless meme that reality has a strong liberal bias,a study published in Scientific American demonstrates that wealthy people are more likely to be greedy, lack compassion and steal from others…

In other news, a recent survey indicates that Pope Benedict is a Roman Catholic and that in Rand McNally, hamburgers eat people.

[erislover]

@John_Mace

I was referring to the specific part of my post that you quoted. I was not, in that post, faulting the researchers. But you’re right-- those earlier comments were better directed at those trying to draw authoritative conclusions from the articles rather than on “the science”.

Thank you for this clarification. We have no dispute between us, then. Well, we do, but it would amount to a hijack at this point, so I’ll just let it stand.

[Age_Quod_Agis]

@Evil_Captor

The study, conducted by Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, used several different testing methods to come to these conclusions. In one test they hung out at busy traffic intersections and noted what kind of vehicles were being driven by people who cut others off at intersections. They found that luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. They controlled for a variety of other factors when they made these observations. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian.

I confess that my first reaction to this study was incredulity. Does anyone really expect that watching cars at an intersection is going to give scientifically valuable results? Surely we’re smarter than that.

At a minimum, there were an awful lot of variables that weren’t controlled here, as well as the specter of observational bias. In other words, maybe the observers were more likely to notice bad behavior by flashier “luxury” cars, or maybe the observers were more likely to suggest that behavior by “luxury” car owners was rude, or maybe they were were more likely to think that a car was “luxury” if its owner was acting in a rude manner. As John Mace pointed out, social science studies are typically fraught with these types of problems simply because of the nature of what’s being studied. (That’s not to say they don’t have any value. Just that their value is limited.)

However, I did want to point out that I read a book – called “The Millionaire Mind” – that performed a survey of over 1,000 people with a net worth over $1 million. They found that people with a net worth over $1 million tend to drive older, cheaper cars. Their point was that the rich tend to get that way by saving money, not spending it on frivolous, depreciating assets. That’s an interesting point in my current city, which is reputedly the world leader in people driving $50,000 cars while earning $40,000 per year.

But for purposes of this study, it raises the issue of whether people who drive “luxury” cars are actually more wealthy than people who drive Volvos. (Or is that a “luxury” car? The study apparently left it up to the observers to decide whether a particular car was luxury or not, and I couldn’t find where they set the cut-off point. Is a $40,000 car “luxury”? $30,000? What about a car that was worth $50,000 8 years ago?)

As furt pointed out, it seems more likely that it amounts to a self-selected sample. People who want to give the outward appearance of being rich are not necessarily rich. That doesn’t necessarily cast aspersions on the folks who actually have a lot of money.

In another test, subjects were divided into two groups. One group was instructed to think about how much better off they were than others, another to think how much worse off they were than others. At the end of the test, members of both groups were shown a jar of candy and told they could take as much of it as they liked, and that the rest would be given to children in antoher lab. Guess who took the most candy? The ones who thought about how much better off they were than others.

As pointed out by John Mace, in order for this test to support the article’s hypothesis that the rich are more selfish, we’d have to see some evidence that the rich spend more time thinking about how much better they are than everyone else.

But this does raise an interesting point for those that are in here arguing that rich people are less ethical. Surely we can all see that “The rich are worse than me” is a form of self-affirmation. Spend enough time in this thread, and I wonder how much candy those folks would leave in the jar.

[sleestak]

So I decided to do some math on the car study from the OP.

According to Wikipedia the percentage of households making more than 250,000 a year is 1.62%. (1.5 + .12) Link.

According to the same link, 79% of earners make less than 100,000 a year. (34+25+20)

Forbes did a study, using Experian, to determine what people drove. According to the study, 40% of households earning 250,00 a year or more drive luxury cars verses 8% of those making less than 100,000 a year. For the purpose of this post I am assuming rich == 250,000 a year or more. Linkto article about the study.

According to the U.S. census, there were 114,235,996 households in 2010. Link.

Number of households making more than 250,000 a year == 114,235,996 x .0162 = 1,850,623. Take that number and multiply by .4 and you get

740,249

Number of households making less than 100,000 == 114,235,996 x .79 = 90,246,436. Take that number and multiply by .08, the number who own luxury cars and you get
TA DA

7,219,714

And 740,249/7,219,714 = 10.25%.

So, 10% of luxury car owners are rich.

This particular study doesn’t show shit about wealthy people, unlike the claim in the article. This is exceedingly bad science, unless the original published article does the same math that I did and draws a different conclusion than the SA article.

Slee

[tullsterx]

GOOOOAAAAALLLLL!!!

He shoots! HE SCORES!!!

He cannot be stopped, he can only be contained!