8 ms·

There was a previous discussion a couple of months ago on hn about this fairly silly set of "studies": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122707 https://new

There was a previous discussion a couple of months ago on hn about this fairly silly set of "studies": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122707 The greatest part is where they admit that, for one experiment, rather than study actual rich and poor people, they just had undergraduates pretend to be rich or poor: "We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior."

gwern 13y ago
> The greatest part is where they admit that, for one experiment, rather than study actual rich and poor people, they just had undergraduates pretend to be rich or poor: Because if you did that, then people would instantly start attributing it to the past history of the rich vs the poor folks or something! The whole point of the lab manipulation is to start with a homogenous group of people, randomize, and then observe the effect of giving them some small amount of power.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Maybe next biologists will start studying bald eagles by dunking golden eagles upside-down in a can of white paint.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- tedunangst 13y ago
  It's a good thing none of the people pretending to be rich or poor had any preconceived notions of how ethical those groups are.
  - gwern 13y ago
    And it's a good thing that none of the psychologists told the subjects 'please mentally imagine that you are Warren Buffett'. ಠ_ಠ What on earth sort of manipulations do you think they're using? Seriously.
    - mentat 13y ago
      I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a Berkley student. This is where people got pepper sprayed for Occupy. They're going to have a bias...
      - gwern 13y ago
        > I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a Berkley student. I am ignoring it because if you bother to read the papers and look at their manipulations, there is no reason to expect the manipulations which increase a subject's 'wealth' or 'power' by trivial amounts to then trigger cultural preconceptions or ideologies about plutocracy and 'the rich'. To be honest, once you've read the actual papers, the main question becomes the opposite of what you and the other commenters are claiming! These manipulations are so minor and represent so little real 'wealth' or 'power' that it's not clear why I should expect these results to have any meaning in the external non-laboratory world.
chrischen 13y ago
And don't forget the Stanford prison experiment!

gwern 13y ago

> The greatest part is where they admit that, for one experiment, rather than study actual rich and poor people, they just had undergraduates pretend to be rich or poor: Because if you did that, then people would instantly start attributing it to the past history of the rich vs the poor folks or something! The whole point of the lab manipulation is to start with a homogenous group of people, randomize, and then observe the effect of giving them some small amount of power.

jlgreco 13y ago
Maybe next biologists will start studying bald eagles by dunking golden eagles upside-down in a can of white paint.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
tedunangst 13y ago
It's a good thing none of the people pretending to be rich or poor had any preconceived notions of how ethical those groups are.
- gwern 13y ago
  And it's a good thing that none of the psychologists told the subjects 'please mentally imagine that you are Warren Buffett'. ಠ_ಠ What on earth sort of manipulations do you think they're using? Seriously.
  - mentat 13y ago
    I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a Berkley student. This is where people got pepper sprayed for Occupy. They're going to have a bias...
    - gwern 13y ago
      > I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a Berkley student. I am ignoring it because if you bother to read the papers and look at their manipulations, there is no reason to expect the manipulations which increase a subject's 'wealth' or 'power' by trivial amounts to then trigger cultural preconceptions or ideologies about plutocracy and 'the rich'. To be honest, once you've read the actual papers, the main question becomes the opposite of what you and the other commenters are claiming! These manipulations are so minor and represent so little real 'wealth' or 'power' that it's not clear why I should expect these results to have any meaning in the external non-laboratory world.

chrischen 13y ago

And don't forget the Stanford prison experiment!