http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/
The Money-Empathy Gap
New research suggests that more money makes people act less human.
Or at least less humane.
By Lisa Miller
Published Jul 1, 2012
In a windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley,
campus, two undergrads are playing a Monopoly game that one of
them has no chance of winning. A team of psychologists has rigged
it so that skill, brains, savvy, and luck—those ingredients that
ineffably combine to create success in games as in life—have been
made immaterial. Here, the only thing that matters is money.
One of the players, a brown-haired guy in a striped T-shirt, has
been made “rich.” He got $2,000 from the Monopoly bank at the
start of the game and receives $200 each time he passes Go. The
second player, a chubby young man in glasses, is comparatively
impoverished. He was given $1,000 at the start and collects $100
for passing Go. T-Shirt can roll two dice, but Glasses can only
roll one, limiting how fast he can advance. The students play for
fifteen minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while
down the hall in another windowless room, the researchers huddle
around a computer screen, later recording in a giant spreadsheet
the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.
T-Shirt isn’t just winning; he’s crushing Glasses. Initially, he
reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a
series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the inherent
awkwardness of the situation. “Hey,” his expression seemed to say,
“this is weird and unfair, but whatever.” Soon, though, as he
whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting
rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate. He’s a
skinny kid, but he balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward
the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece (in the
experiment, the wealthy player gets the Rolls-Royce) as he makes
the circuit—smack, smack, smack—ending his turns with a
board-shuddering bang! Four minutes in, he picks up Glasses’s
piece, the little elf shoe, and moves it for him. As the game
nears its finish, T-Shirt moves his Rolls faster. The taunting is
over now: He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet Glasses’s gaze.
His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash.
For a long time, primatologists have known that chimpanzees will
act out social dominance with a special ferociousness, slapping
hands, stamping feet, or “charging back and forth and dragging
huge branches,” as Jane Goodall once wrote. And sociologists and
anthropologists have explored the effects of hierarchy in tribes
and groups. 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. By making real people temporarily very affluent, without
regard to their actual economic circumstances and within the
controlled environment of a psych lab, the Berkeley researchers
aim to demonstrate the potency of that one variable. “Putting
someone in a role where they’re more privileged and have more
power in a game makes them behave like people who actually do have
more power, more money, and more status,” says Paul Piff, the
psychologist who designed the experiment. The Monopoly results,
based on a year of watching inequitable games between pairs like
Glasses and T-Shirt, have not yet been released. But Piff
believes that they will support and amplify his previous
provocative research.
Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him
semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased
Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games,
questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that
living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially
speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more
selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.
It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his
experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for
children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody
anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize
their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It
makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would
stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
(clip)
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
