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The poster wrote that research shows that poorer people are typically (or in general) more ethical than richer and your reply is that there is evidence to the c

The poster wrote that research shows that poorer people are typically (or in general) more ethical than richer and your reply is that there is evidence to the contrary without any evidence just a hand waving argument. That doesn't show anything. You can indeed question the research of less ethical behaviour by richer people however you need to bring some evidence. This [1] article for example talks about a study which didn't replicate the behaviour. It's actually a well balanced discussion of the overall evidence. [1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_rich_people_really_less_ethical https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_rich_peopl...

bumby 3y ago
What was the hand-waving? A better approach is just to be intellectually curious and ask. Besides, snarkiness is against the HN guidelines. This article [1] has a lot of references that support that claim, and it's a higher quality of rigor than a magazine article. FWIW, I'm not saying the original claim was wrong, just that we should be cautioned against strong claims when there is mixed evidence at best. Likewise, I would caution against extrapolating too much from studies that use cars as a proxy for wealth. Car model != socio-economic status for a variety of reasons. I'd argue that original (and replicated) study from your link is pretty flawed to begin with. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z
- cycomanic 3y ago
  Sorry I didn't mean to come across as snarky. By handwavy I meant that one can easily come up with "logical" arguments around behaviour that dont reflect reality, so it needs to be backed up by evidence. Thanks for posting the article I was not aware of this research (while I was aware of the research showing the opposite). 2 things to note: 1. How is it possible that the two don't cite each other?! I have to call out the scientific report paper in particular. Piff's work is more than 10 years old and well known. Instead the authors only cite work that supports their premise. I would have thrown it out as a reviewer just based on this. That said the article I linked should have mentioned some of the work cited in the scientific reports article as well. 2. It seems studies are done quite differently, the article you linked seems to largely rely on surveys (sidenote I really dislike the use of mechanical turk for these things, way too unreliable) of assessment others or their own ethical behaviour. Piff's work was more experimental (thus lower numbers and less reliable in that sense)
  - bumby 3y ago
    No apologies needed, but I appreciate the thoughtful response.I agree that surveys are not the best tool. Unfortunately, for a lot of work that covers social components, they are a common method. While wealth is easily quantifiable, people's feelings towards topics like ethics are often best done by asking them. I think the Piff study is just really flawed because they were trying to use a quantifiable proxy. "we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class." IMO they chose a really bad proxy, and they never validated it. It's completely based on an assumption, and one that we can all probably point to personal examples that violate it. To me, that's "hand-wavy" science. To your point, I could probably come up with a handful of different explanations that correlate car make/model to seemingly aggressive driving behavior. Some of them probably correlate with wealth and others not so much. I do think there's a danger of confirmation bias. Just like the nature study demonstrates that there is a normative belief that wealthy people act less ethically, it's really easy for our status-obscessed ape minds to latch onto studies that support it. Even when they aren't the greatest.
    - cycomanic 3y ago
      Regarding survey's I don't necessarily disagree with surveys (although they can be flawed), but find that mechanical turk seems to give the worst way of doing a survey. It rewards going through the survey as quick as possible and I would also argue attracts people who optimise toward time (although I don't have hard evidence), not necessarily honesty (an interesting ethics question in itself). Regarding your thoughts on the car study I broadly agree it is not a very good proxy for wealth (also areas with many company cars likely skew results as well). However I do think that it's trying to independently verify peoples self-evaluation using similar experiments what gives us much better insights and there were a number of other studies with similar results. Confirmation bias is always a danger and the paper that was described in the article which could not reproduce the correlation between car cost and behavior tried to follow best practices to minimise it, so probably should be given more weight. I actually wondered if there is a difference also according to culture, i.e. Piff's results were obtained in the US, while the other article was in the Netherlands.

bumby 3y ago

What was the hand-waving? A better approach is just to be intellectually curious and ask. Besides, snarkiness is against the HN guidelines. This article [1] has a lot of references that support that claim, and it's a higher quality of rigor than a magazine article. FWIW, I'm not saying the original claim was wrong, just that we should be cautioned against strong claims when there is mixed evidence at best. Likewise, I would caution against extrapolating too much from studies that use cars as a proxy for wealth. Car model != socio-economic status for a variety of reasons. I'd argue that original (and replicated) study from your link is pretty flawed to begin with. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z

cycomanic 3y ago
Sorry I didn't mean to come across as snarky. By handwavy I meant that one can easily come up with "logical" arguments around behaviour that dont reflect reality, so it needs to be backed up by evidence. Thanks for posting the article I was not aware of this research (while I was aware of the research showing the opposite). 2 things to note: 1. How is it possible that the two don't cite each other?! I have to call out the scientific report paper in particular. Piff's work is more than 10 years old and well known. Instead the authors only cite work that supports their premise. I would have thrown it out as a reviewer just based on this. That said the article I linked should have mentioned some of the work cited in the scientific reports article as well. 2. It seems studies are done quite differently, the article you linked seems to largely rely on surveys (sidenote I really dislike the use of mechanical turk for these things, way too unreliable) of assessment others or their own ethical behaviour. Piff's work was more experimental (thus lower numbers and less reliable in that sense)
- bumby 3y ago
  No apologies needed, but I appreciate the thoughtful response.I agree that surveys are not the best tool. Unfortunately, for a lot of work that covers social components, they are a common method. While wealth is easily quantifiable, people's feelings towards topics like ethics are often best done by asking them. I think the Piff study is just really flawed because they were trying to use a quantifiable proxy. "we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class." IMO they chose a really bad proxy, and they never validated it. It's completely based on an assumption, and one that we can all probably point to personal examples that violate it. To me, that's "hand-wavy" science. To your point, I could probably come up with a handful of different explanations that correlate car make/model to seemingly aggressive driving behavior. Some of them probably correlate with wealth and others not so much. I do think there's a danger of confirmation bias. Just like the nature study demonstrates that there is a normative belief that wealthy people act less ethically, it's really easy for our status-obscessed ape minds to latch onto studies that support it. Even when they aren't the greatest.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    Regarding survey's I don't necessarily disagree with surveys (although they can be flawed), but find that mechanical turk seems to give the worst way of doing a survey. It rewards going through the survey as quick as possible and I would also argue attracts people who optimise toward time (although I don't have hard evidence), not necessarily honesty (an interesting ethics question in itself). Regarding your thoughts on the car study I broadly agree it is not a very good proxy for wealth (also areas with many company cars likely skew results as well). However I do think that it's trying to independently verify peoples self-evaluation using similar experiments what gives us much better insights and there were a number of other studies with similar results. Confirmation bias is always a danger and the paper that was described in the article which could not reproduce the correlation between car cost and behavior tried to follow best practices to minimise it, so probably should be given more weight. I actually wondered if there is a difference also according to culture, i.e. Piff's results were obtained in the US, while the other article was in the Netherlands.