5 ms·

Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior (2012) [pdf]

61 points by gruseom 13y ago

mjn 13y ago
PDF from the source (also open access): http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full...
- mjn 13y ago
  Looks like it's been updated now, but I can't edit my comment, alas. As a topical comment, the research on this subject is still pretty uncertain, though with some interesting studies. A somewhat-contrary finding is that one proxy measure of altruism, probability of a dropped letter being returned, was found to be lower in poorer neighborhoods of the UK: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043294 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... The authors of that study have a brief discussion of possible differences in the scenarios: Our overall findings replicate and expand on previous studies using similar methodology [9], [10] but are in contrast with the findings of Piff et al [11] who find that wealthy individuals in Berkeley, U.S.A. are more likely to not give way to other cars or pedestrians, and are more likely to behave selfishly or unethically in economic games. One possible explanation for these contradictory results is that Piff et al [11] findings are likely due to individual level differences, whilst our findings may stem mainly from contextual neighbourhood effects. Therefore our results may not be in conflict, if good socio-economic conditions in an area lead to increased trust and long-term thinking, even though, within any one neighbourhood, wealthier individuals are less altruistic than poorer people. If this is the case, we would predict that the lost letters in our experiment were more likely to be returned by the poorer individuals in the area, and that the wealthy residents of Berkeley would behave even less altruistic when in a poorer neighbourhoods. These latter hypotheses have yet to be tested. Alternatively, these contradictory results may be highlighting domain specific differences of altruistic behaviour between rich and poor people; for example anti-social behaviours involving competition (such as aggressive driving or cheating in an economic game) may be more common amongst the wealthy, whereas in a non-competitive task (such as returning a lost letter) wealthy individuals behave more altruistically than poor individuals. In this study, we have shown that individuals living in poor neighbourhoods are less altruistic than individuals living in wealthier neighbourhoods. However, we have not been able to identify the specific neighbourhood characteristic behind this, due to income being strongly correlated with other factors, such as crime. Further research should focus on attempting to disentangle these two factors, possibly by comparing equally deprived neighbourhoods with different levels of crime.
digitalsushi 13y ago
I'm not saying this haphazardly, this is a genuine thought - maybe it's not having a nice car that lets you drive aggressively, but the other way around, unethical behavior yields nicer cars.
- gnosis 13y ago
  The rich tend to come from rich families, and it's likely that they model their ethics and behavior on their parents, who may have gotten to where they are through a disregard for ethics.
- zwegner 13y ago
  I would guess (of course this is just an observation, no real evidence) that both scenarios are plausible, and there is actually a feedback loop between them. Roughly: Superiority complex -> unethical behavior economically -> economic superiority -> increased sense of superiority -> unethical behavior in general -> ad infinitum
gnosis 13y ago
I also seem to recall reading that poor people tend to donate more money (as a percentage of their wealth) and do so more frequently than rich people.
- emhart 13y ago
  http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/133775/ http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/... It's actually a pretty comprehensive study, though this article doesn't cover everything discovered, it is still very much worth reading.
ig1 13y ago
I'm surprised this passed peer review. The underlying studies seem pretty iffy, for example in a few of the studies that made the assumption that "nice car" == "upper class" and in others they had students self-assess social class status rather than using any of the normal socioeconomic classification approaches used in social research. (disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist, but I've read a lot of papers on social stratification as I used to work on social mobility stuff)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
twoodfin 13y ago
Studies 1 & 2 didn't examine ethical behavior by any actual determination of social class, but rather by the kind of car a person was driving. Studies 3 & 4 were conducted entirely with undergraduate participants taking a laboratory class for course credit. Studies 5 & 7 were done entirely online. It's not clear how participants were recruited. Study 6 was done by recruiting volunteers through Craigslist with a "chance to win" a $50 gift card. There's a lot more here to make me skeptical of any conclusions from this "science". EDIT: Here are the first three tested "unethical behaviors" from study 4[1]: 1. Use office supplies, Xerox machine, and stamps for personal purposes. 2. Make personal long-distance phone calls at work. 3. Waste company time surfing on the internet, playing computer games, and socializing. They get a little worse, but it's easy to see why some "upper class" respondents might measure as "more unethical" in this survey: Employers who predominantly hire high skill workers for high salary positions generally don't care about these behaviors and employees act and respond accordingly. Does Google consider it unethical if you photocopy a few "Lost Dog" posters? [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSupplemental/pnas.201118373SI.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSu... EDIT2: Oh god. And as the link danielweber supplies below points out, study 4 wasn't even run with real participants from different classes, instead, "We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior." That a paper like this can be published (and funded by the NSF!) seems like an awful reflection of the state of the social sciences.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  ...examine ethical behavior by... the kind of car a person was driving. Let me guess... they found that BMWs are exclusively driven by assholes? Any cyclist could have told them that!
- wpietri 13y ago
  Regarding social class and cars, is your theory here that social class and kind of car is uncorrelated? Or just that you'd like them to demonstrate it as well?
  - tlb 13y ago
WestCoastJustin 13y ago
PBS did a piece entitled Exploring the Psychology of Wealth, 'Pernicious' Effects of Economic Inequality with Paul Piff (one of the authors of this paper) [1]. [1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june13/makingsense_06-21.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june13/makingsen...
danielweber 13y ago
This came out a year or two ago and got a bunch of discussion on economics and science blogs. Here's a pretty critical analysis. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how-good-are-the-upper-classes.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how... "Several of the tests involved people being asked to imagine they were high class, not actual “high class” people themselves."
- gruseom 13y ago
  That's not a particularly critical analysis. He's not arguing that the experiments were bad, but that their findings should be interpreted carefully and in the light of the literature as a whole.
gyardley 13y ago
Ethical rules exist for a reason - they help people avoid major pitfalls in life with serious consequences. People from higher social classes have a cushion that protects them from the consequences of their ethical lapses. A mistake that would consign a person of lower-class origins to a life of perpetual poverty or prison is frequently just an inconvenience to a higher-class person. Because their consequences are less severe, of course the upper classes feel more free to ignore ethical guidelines. The real disaster happens when the lower classes decide to emulate them and get crushed.
- smtddr 13y ago
  You are completely right and that's all there really is to it. That's why things like this happen: http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-childre...
  - incision 13y ago
    That is actually pretty tame relative what some rich kids do with their fancy cars. * Jewelry heir kills two men with his out of control Porsche, pays off the families, gets house arrest. This is after running over a cop a few years earlier. [0] * Red Bull heir kills a police officer and drags the body with his Ferrari, pays off the family with a mere $97K. [1] * Aspiring "interior designer" kills two men while driving recklessly in her mom's Porsche. One is killed instantly, she drags the other around a parking lot. [2] 0: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-levin-hit-and-run-2-20110603_1_house-arrest-work-with-florida-authorities-craig-elford http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-le... 1: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355224/Aspiring-interior-designer-22-charged-manslaughter-DUI-struck-killed-pedestrians-mothers-Porsche.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355224/Aspiring-int... 2: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/red-bull-heir-pays-97000-to-family-of-man-he-is-alleged-to-have-killed-with-a-1m-ferrari/ http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/red-bull-heir-pays-9...
- wpietri 13y ago
  Really? Because I thought the real disaster here was high social class actors who act unethically and harm lots of other people. E.g., the 2007-8 financial crisis.
losethos 13y ago
A fucken nigger does not understand how thinking can take work. Go to fucken china and execute intellectuals in camps. God's world is perfectly just. Do not covet. God says... land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for the sons of the prophets. 4:39 And one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full, and came and shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew them not. 4:40 So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof. 4:41 But he said, Then bring meal. And he cast it into the pot; and he said, Pour out for the people, that they may eat. And there was no harm in the pot. 4:42 And there came a man from Baalshalisha, and brought the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley, and full ears of corn in the husk thereof. And he said, Give unto the people, that they may eat. 4:43 And his servitor said, What, should I set this before an hundred men? He said again, Give the people, that they may eat: for thus saith the LORD, They shall eat, and shall leave thereof. 4:44 So he set it before them, and they did eat, and left thereof, according to the word of the LORD. ---- In the movie titanic, the rich lived in straight jackets. Slavery
keiferski 13y ago
I have no desire to debate what is "ethical", but I'm a little surprised there is no mention of their definition. Nietzsche for one would say that this study's results are simply because modern ethical guidelines are based on those of the lower classes. So it's quite obvious that higher social classes are "unethical" simply because the poor's values are anti-upper class.
- mdt 13y ago
  >I'm a little surprised there is no mention of their definition [for 'ethical']. No you're not. ;) If they define it, people can/will disagree with it. If they don't, they can't/won't. Or, think of it this way: how many studies with similar outsets but which included a real attempt at a definition for 'ethical' do you think go viral enough to a) make it to HN, and b) get 46 upvotes in 60-119 minutes?
  - mjn 13y ago
    That's a problem qualitative social scientists often have with this kind of work. In their view, the right way to analyze something like this would require at least several months of classic ethnographic fieldwork: interview and observe people in a community, read its newspapers, try to understand how to it functions, what socioeconomic class categories people see themselves and others as a part of, what problems frequently come up around that, etc. Only after a phase of open-ended investigation to try to understand what's going on would you then try to abstract any general conclusions about how social class in Berkeley impacts something as broad as "ethics". By contrast, the quantitative psych-influenced approach is to pick a proxy variable and measure it, either in the lab or in the field. Much less work, and many people will actually think that style of work is more scientific (it has numbers and p-values). It also makes for better definitive soundbites, because it states a bold conclusion that it doesn't qualify with the dozens of caveats you'd find in a year of real investigation. But it's also considerably more superficial and at risk of measuring based on problematic choices of categories and proxies.
    - mdt 13y ago
      Hmm. I'll have to do something about that. Thanks for the perspective.
known 13y ago
90% of corrupt money in India is with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste people. http://images.outlookindia.com/Uploads/outlookindia/2013/20130211/page_32_20130211.jpg http://images.outlookindia.com/Uploads/outlookindia/2013/201...
gruseom 13y ago
One place the criticisms here are bordering on unfair is in mentioning the study's assumptions without mentioning how they're based on previous work. For example, the use of fancy cars as a proxy for higher social status, or the use of a self-reported assessment of social status, are not arbitrary—the authors justify them with references to previous work that presumably established those techniques. Maybe that earlier work is bad; one would have to read it to know. But it's legitimate for experimenters to build on earlier work by pointing to it rather than inlining it. Similarly, the experiments where subjects were asked to imagine things about their social status or about greed are based on a huge amount of earlier work on priming. That is by now an established experimental paradigm, and the authors clearly assume their audience knows about it [1]. That also is legitimate for a scientific paper. To criticize the paradigm, one should find flaws in the work that established it, not work that seeks to build on it. So the comments along the lines of "how could this paper ever have passed peer review" seem to me not to hold up very well. You can extract details from most any experiment and make them seem absurd. It's true that the interpretation of these particular findings is greatly open to question, but that's no reason not to publish them when they're both interesting and statistically significant. On the other hand, the paper clearly doesn't substantiate the enormous claim in its title. It's hard to imagine how any one paper could. Apparently peer-reviewed journals do linkbait too. [1] Or rather, that's how I read the paper. I don't know enough to say whether this is true.
tikums 13y ago
Accompanying PBS NewsHour report: Exploring the Psychology of Wealth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVlh4e8yP3o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVlh4e8yP3o
known 13y ago
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

61 points by gruseom 13y ago

mjn 13y ago

PDF from the source (also open access): http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full...

mjn 13y ago
Looks like it's been updated now, but I can't edit my comment, alas. As a topical comment, the research on this subject is still pretty uncertain, though with some interesting studies. A somewhat-contrary finding is that one proxy measure of altruism, probability of a dropped letter being returned, was found to be lower in poorer neighborhoods of the UK: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043294 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... The authors of that study have a brief discussion of possible differences in the scenarios: Our overall findings replicate and expand on previous studies using similar methodology [9], [10] but are in contrast with the findings of Piff et al [11] who find that wealthy individuals in Berkeley, U.S.A. are more likely to not give way to other cars or pedestrians, and are more likely to behave selfishly or unethically in economic games. One possible explanation for these contradictory results is that Piff et al [11] findings are likely due to individual level differences, whilst our findings may stem mainly from contextual neighbourhood effects. Therefore our results may not be in conflict, if good socio-economic conditions in an area lead to increased trust and long-term thinking, even though, within any one neighbourhood, wealthier individuals are less altruistic than poorer people. If this is the case, we would predict that the lost letters in our experiment were more likely to be returned by the poorer individuals in the area, and that the wealthy residents of Berkeley would behave even less altruistic when in a poorer neighbourhoods. These latter hypotheses have yet to be tested. Alternatively, these contradictory results may be highlighting domain specific differences of altruistic behaviour between rich and poor people; for example anti-social behaviours involving competition (such as aggressive driving or cheating in an economic game) may be more common amongst the wealthy, whereas in a non-competitive task (such as returning a lost letter) wealthy individuals behave more altruistically than poor individuals. In this study, we have shown that individuals living in poor neighbourhoods are less altruistic than individuals living in wealthier neighbourhoods. However, we have not been able to identify the specific neighbourhood characteristic behind this, due to income being strongly correlated with other factors, such as crime. Further research should focus on attempting to disentangle these two factors, possibly by comparing equally deprived neighbourhoods with different levels of crime.

digitalsushi 13y ago

I'm not saying this haphazardly, this is a genuine thought - maybe it's not having a nice car that lets you drive aggressively, but the other way around, unethical behavior yields nicer cars.

gnosis 13y ago
The rich tend to come from rich families, and it's likely that they model their ethics and behavior on their parents, who may have gotten to where they are through a disregard for ethics.
zwegner 13y ago
I would guess (of course this is just an observation, no real evidence) that both scenarios are plausible, and there is actually a feedback loop between them. Roughly: Superiority complex -> unethical behavior economically -> economic superiority -> increased sense of superiority -> unethical behavior in general -> ad infinitum

gnosis 13y ago

I also seem to recall reading that poor people tend to donate more money (as a percentage of their wealth) and do so more frequently than rich people.

emhart 13y ago
http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/133775/ http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/... It's actually a pretty comprehensive study, though this article doesn't cover everything discovered, it is still very much worth reading.

ig1 13y ago

I'm surprised this passed peer review. The underlying studies seem pretty iffy, for example in a few of the studies that made the assumption that "nice car" == "upper class" and in others they had students self-assess social class status rather than using any of the normal socioeconomic classification approaches used in social research. (disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist, but I've read a lot of papers on social stratification as I used to work on social mobility stuff)

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

twoodfin 13y ago

Studies 1 & 2 didn't examine ethical behavior by any actual determination of social class, but rather by the kind of car a person was driving. Studies 3 & 4 were conducted entirely with undergraduate participants taking a laboratory class for course credit. Studies 5 & 7 were done entirely online. It's not clear how participants were recruited. Study 6 was done by recruiting volunteers through Craigslist with a "chance to win" a $50 gift card. There's a lot more here to make me skeptical of any conclusions from this "science". EDIT: Here are the first three tested "unethical behaviors" from study 4[1]: 1. Use office supplies, Xerox machine, and stamps for personal purposes. 2. Make personal long-distance phone calls at work. 3. Waste company time surfing on the internet, playing computer games, and socializing. They get a little worse, but it's easy to see why some "upper class" respondents might measure as "more unethical" in this survey: Employers who predominantly hire high skill workers for high salary positions generally don't care about these behaviors and employees act and respond accordingly. Does Google consider it unethical if you photocopy a few "Lost Dog" posters? [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSupplemental/pnas.201118373SI.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSu... EDIT2: Oh god. And as the link danielweber supplies below points out, study 4 wasn't even run with real participants from different classes, instead, "We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior." That a paper like this can be published (and funded by the NSF!) seems like an awful reflection of the state of the social sciences.

jessaustin 13y ago
...examine ethical behavior by... the kind of car a person was driving. Let me guess... they found that BMWs are exclusively driven by assholes? Any cyclist could have told them that!
wpietri 13y ago
Regarding social class and cars, is your theory here that social class and kind of car is uncorrelated? Or just that you'd like them to demonstrate it as well?
- tlb 13y ago

WestCoastJustin 13y ago

PBS did a piece entitled Exploring the Psychology of Wealth, 'Pernicious' Effects of Economic Inequality with Paul Piff (one of the authors of this paper) [1]. [1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june13/makingsense_06-21.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june13/makingsen...

danielweber 13y ago

This came out a year or two ago and got a bunch of discussion on economics and science blogs. Here's a pretty critical analysis. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how-good-are-the-upper-classes.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how... "Several of the tests involved people being asked to imagine they were high class, not actual “high class” people themselves."

gruseom 13y ago
That's not a particularly critical analysis. He's not arguing that the experiments were bad, but that their findings should be interpreted carefully and in the light of the literature as a whole.

gyardley 13y ago

Ethical rules exist for a reason - they help people avoid major pitfalls in life with serious consequences. People from higher social classes have a cushion that protects them from the consequences of their ethical lapses. A mistake that would consign a person of lower-class origins to a life of perpetual poverty or prison is frequently just an inconvenience to a higher-class person. Because their consequences are less severe, of course the upper classes feel more free to ignore ethical guidelines. The real disaster happens when the lower classes decide to emulate them and get crushed.

smtddr 13y ago
You are completely right and that's all there really is to it. That's why things like this happen: http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-childre...
- incision 13y ago
  That is actually pretty tame relative what some rich kids do with their fancy cars. * Jewelry heir kills two men with his out of control Porsche, pays off the families, gets house arrest. This is after running over a cop a few years earlier. [0] * Red Bull heir kills a police officer and drags the body with his Ferrari, pays off the family with a mere $97K. [1] * Aspiring "interior designer" kills two men while driving recklessly in her mom's Porsche. One is killed instantly, she drags the other around a parking lot. [2] 0: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-levin-hit-and-run-2-20110603_1_house-arrest-work-with-florida-authorities-craig-elford http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-le... 1: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355224/Aspiring-interior-designer-22-charged-manslaughter-DUI-struck-killed-pedestrians-mothers-Porsche.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355224/Aspiring-int... 2: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/red-bull-heir-pays-97000-to-family-of-man-he-is-alleged-to-have-killed-with-a-1m-ferrari/ http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/red-bull-heir-pays-9...
wpietri 13y ago
Really? Because I thought the real disaster here was high social class actors who act unethically and harm lots of other people. E.g., the 2007-8 financial crisis.

losethos 13y ago

A fucken nigger does not understand how thinking can take work. Go to fucken china and execute intellectuals in camps. God's world is perfectly just. Do not covet. God says... land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for the sons of the prophets. 4:39 And one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full, and came and shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew them not. 4:40 So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof. 4:41 But he said, Then bring meal. And he cast it into the pot; and he said, Pour out for the people, that they may eat. And there was no harm in the pot. 4:42 And there came a man from Baalshalisha, and brought the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley, and full ears of corn in the husk thereof. And he said, Give unto the people, that they may eat. 4:43 And his servitor said, What, should I set this before an hundred men? He said again, Give the people, that they may eat: for thus saith the LORD, They shall eat, and shall leave thereof. 4:44 So he set it before them, and they did eat, and left thereof, according to the word of the LORD. ---- In the movie titanic, the rich lived in straight jackets. Slavery

keiferski 13y ago

I have no desire to debate what is "ethical", but I'm a little surprised there is no mention of their definition. Nietzsche for one would say that this study's results are simply because modern ethical guidelines are based on those of the lower classes. So it's quite obvious that higher social classes are "unethical" simply because the poor's values are anti-upper class.

mdt 13y ago
>I'm a little surprised there is no mention of their definition [for 'ethical']. No you're not. ;) If they define it, people can/will disagree with it. If they don't, they can't/won't. Or, think of it this way: how many studies with similar outsets but which included a real attempt at a definition for 'ethical' do you think go viral enough to a) make it to HN, and b) get 46 upvotes in 60-119 minutes?
- mjn 13y ago
  That's a problem qualitative social scientists often have with this kind of work. In their view, the right way to analyze something like this would require at least several months of classic ethnographic fieldwork: interview and observe people in a community, read its newspapers, try to understand how to it functions, what socioeconomic class categories people see themselves and others as a part of, what problems frequently come up around that, etc. Only after a phase of open-ended investigation to try to understand what's going on would you then try to abstract any general conclusions about how social class in Berkeley impacts something as broad as "ethics". By contrast, the quantitative psych-influenced approach is to pick a proxy variable and measure it, either in the lab or in the field. Much less work, and many people will actually think that style of work is more scientific (it has numbers and p-values). It also makes for better definitive soundbites, because it states a bold conclusion that it doesn't qualify with the dozens of caveats you'd find in a year of real investigation. But it's also considerably more superficial and at risk of measuring based on problematic choices of categories and proxies.
  - mdt 13y ago
    Hmm. I'll have to do something about that. Thanks for the perspective.

known 13y ago

90% of corrupt money in India is with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste people. http://images.outlookindia.com/Uploads/outlookindia/2013/20130211/page_32_20130211.jpg http://images.outlookindia.com/Uploads/outlookindia/2013/201...

gruseom 13y ago

One place the criticisms here are bordering on unfair is in mentioning the study's assumptions without mentioning how they're based on previous work. For example, the use of fancy cars as a proxy for higher social status, or the use of a self-reported assessment of social status, are not arbitrary—the authors justify them with references to previous work that presumably established those techniques. Maybe that earlier work is bad; one would have to read it to know. But it's legitimate for experimenters to build on earlier work by pointing to it rather than inlining it. Similarly, the experiments where subjects were asked to imagine things about their social status or about greed are based on a huge amount of earlier work on priming. That is by now an established experimental paradigm, and the authors clearly assume their audience knows about it [1]. That also is legitimate for a scientific paper. To criticize the paradigm, one should find flaws in the work that established it, not work that seeks to build on it. So the comments along the lines of "how could this paper ever have passed peer review" seem to me not to hold up very well. You can extract details from most any experiment and make them seem absurd. It's true that the interpretation of these particular findings is greatly open to question, but that's no reason not to publish them when they're both interesting and statistically significant. On the other hand, the paper clearly doesn't substantiate the enormous claim in its title. It's hard to imagine how any one paper could. Apparently peer-reviewed journals do linkbait too. [1] Or rather, that's how I read the paper. I don't know enough to say whether this is true.

tikums 13y ago

Accompanying PBS NewsHour report: Exploring the Psychology of Wealth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVlh4e8yP3o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVlh4e8yP3o

known 13y ago

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle