Community | July 04, 2012 | 12 comments

How Money Makes People Act Less Human

source: http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/

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FreeSpiritMuse

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/

New research suggests that more money makes people act less human. Or at least less humane.

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.

Continues at link above.
  1. groups:
    Community,   Politics,   Culture,   Current Cultural Issues,   5 more
  2. tags:
    Greed,  The Human Condition
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12 comments // How Money Makes People Act Less Human

  • RevKen
    • +1
      RevKen  

    • I am not sure how scientific this really is. What do they know about the character of these two people?

      I have learned through life that people are who they are and life does not change them. I do not believe money changes anyone, it only allows some people to become the person they really are.

      Of course my observations have no scientific credibility but I have been doing my observations longer than their Monopoly game lasted.

    • 11 months ago
  • Leen61
  • warman1138
  • letsliveinpeace
  • s_peak
  • jimstoner
    • +5
      jimstoner  

    • I asked him, didn't you used to be a liberal? "Sure I was he said, until I came in to a great deal of money. Now I'm a conservative. It's poor and middle class conservatives that are the enigma."

    • 11 months ago
  • ampersand
    • +6
      ampersand  

    • I love the homey language in the paper's author in the following paragraph:
      "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.”

      I, myself don't think money per se transforms humans into unfeeling beings but in a lot of cases it can contribute to exactly the insularity and obliviousness that Piff talks about.

    • 11 months ago
  • artemis6
  • COMMONSENSEFORCOMMONGOOD_COM
  • remanns
  • remanns
  • mitekillem
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