

Research suggests that more money makes people act less human.  - toomuchcoffee
http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/

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ggwicz
_But psychology has only recently begun seriously investigating how having
money, that major marker of status in the modern world, ­affects psychosocial
behavior in the species Homo sapiens._

No. Two things. First, taking this study and applying it to "money" is very
correlative, and a decent leap considering the methods for the study. The real
value of this study, if there's any at all, is about someone having huge
unfair advantages in a general sense; having freedom to treat someone however
you want because they don't have the means to rebel.

And second, the examination of this isn't new at _all_. Heart of Darkness, One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now, King Leopold's Ghost, tons and
tons of artists have examined what happens when someone has an unfair
advantage without consequence; those are just some I plucked quickly, but
there are so many.

I'm not saying the point is completely invalid. In a lot of cases, money gives
people the exact freedom, privilege, and less-restrained power that leads to
this behavior.

But saying "Research suggests more money makes people less human" based on a
rigged monopoly game where the other person is severely relatively handicapped
is...a bit of a leap, to say the least.

The other studies mentioned in the article don't sound very convincing,
either.

 _quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field
studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially
speaking, dehumanize people_

Quizzes/questionnaires are notoriously prone to being bullshit, like the China
Study's questionnaires including "Pizza" as meat and the book going on to draw
correlations between its definitions of "meat" and diseases like cancer. I'd
way rather see more info on the "in-lab manipulations and field studies", it
was only touched on briefly, it seemed.

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fragsworth
How is this valid research? You can only draw a correlation between money and
"humanity". It makes more sense that people who have less "humanity" causes
them to become more wealthy, not the other way around.

To show convincingly that more money causes you to have less "humanity", you
have to have two groups:

1) Control group. Monitor their "humanity" over several years.

2) Test group. Give these people _lots_ of money. Monitor their "humanity"
over several years.

This would be quite an expensive study.

~~~
mcguire
Did you actually read the article? "Give these people lots of money" and
"Monitor their 'humanity'" is exactly what is described in the Monopoly game.
The result was that the group given more money "act[s] out ­social dominance
with a special ferociousness, slapping hands, stamping feet, or 'charging back
and forth and dragging huge branches'" (oops, I mean "he balloons in size
[...,] smacks his playing piece [...,] picks up Glasses’s piece [...] and
moves it for him").

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_delirium
Unfortunately, the article isn't yet open-access ( _PNAS_ has a 6-month-
embargo "delayed open access" approach), but the abstract can be found here,
which gives a little more detail on what precisely they're claiming:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.abst...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.abstract)

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stewie2
how do you define "human"?

~~~
evincarofautumn
The researchers mentioned in this article were generally measuring empathetic,
selfless, or compassionate behaviour, and the effect of wealth (or perceived
wealth) on that. So “human” in the sense of “humane”.

~~~
blueprint
Selflessness and compassion (at least, for that which occurred from wrong
behavior) are common among people who are ignorant of the importance of
justice (which may be defined as revealing things as they really are) and the
danger of compromising with injustice. Also, in order not to lose all of one's
money, one needs to be careful not to be deceived (which requires keeping
oneself and acting to serve oneself and the world, rather than selflessness).
Are you sure the experiment was able to control for those two issues?

~~~
crusso
I wondered the same thing.

The beginning of the article started with the implicit assumption that one can
learn anything at all about "rich people" from watching a couple of folks play
a rigged game of MONOPOLY.

It didn't get any more academically rigorous, so I attributed its rise in HN
to being link-bait and decided I had more important things to do with my day
like getting rich so I can become inhumane.

~~~
Benjo
If you'd prefer to read something with more rigor:
[https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=Z...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxwYXVscGlmZnxneDoxNzNmMTIwNDk5MTJiMzlj)

------
nirvana
I find it odd that a site started by a rich guy who decided to put together a
for-profit enterprise based on the idea that helping entrepreneurs get their
first startup off of the ground would both make him richer, and make them
richer, is frequented by so many people who want to believe that the "rich"
are "evil" and need to be punished in some sort or another. (and this article
is trying to put a scientific gloss on that belief.)

Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief, but the mechanism by which
he is getting richer is very much the same mechanism that other rich people
employ, though often with less obvious social benefits. So, PG is not an
anomaly that proves the rule. He's a more visible example of the rule that is
often obscured with hot air, but that applies in the vast majority of cases.
For instance, while I truly despise Bill Gates, I must recognize that Windows
made billions of people's lives easier[1] and thus Gates made his money by
improving the world.

Some people can get wealthy via pull and theft, for example, many politicians
get wealthy essentially by trading pull. I'm sure there are examples of non-
politicians that get wealthy this very same way (trading political pull at a
net loss to society.)

But the real way to get wealthy is to make other people's lives better-- in
fact, this is the startup advice often seen in other contexts as "find a real
pain point and solve it."

[1] ...not easier than if those people had a good operating system, but that's
not the comparison. The comparison is to those people not having any operating
system, or having only MS-DOS if they already had a PC.

~~~
farinasa
The scope of your comment is extremely small. It ignores millions of other
rich people that made their money by exploiting people. I'm sure you can think
of your own examples without much difficulty. No social findings are ever
absolute. Humans are exceptional at breaking "rules".

But I would further criticize your comment with your use of the word "evil".
Evil evokes images that are irrelevant to actual behavior. Evil insinuates
that these people are intently malicious. The findings indicate the opposite-
they are unintentionally malicious.

Edit: I've been downvoted without response. Classy.

