The Money-Empathy Gap

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

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

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index1.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index2.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index3.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index4.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index5.html

• 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. 
• In a country that likes to think that class doesn’t matter, these social scientists are beginning to prove just how determinative money is.
• Nor does it attempt to apply its conclusions about the selfishness and solipsism of a broad social stratum to every member within it: Gateses and Carnegies have obviously saved lives and edified generations, and one of the biggest predictors of a person’s inclination to donate to charity is how much money he has.
• studies of ethical behavior indicate a strong correlation between high socioeconomic status and interpersonal disregard. It’s an “additive” effect; the fever line points straight up. “People higher up on the socioeconomic ladder are about three times more likely to cheat than people on the lower rungs,” he says. Piff’s research also suggests that people who yearn to be richer or more prominent make different choices than those more content with their present level of material comfort.
• Americans across the board can have a high tolerance for inequality if they believe it is meritocratic. The research by Piff and his colleagues points to a different possible explanation for the income gap: that it may be at least in part psychologically destined. This in turn raises the ancient conundrum of chicken and egg. If getting or having money can make you hard-hearted, do you also have to be hard-hearted to become well-off in the first place? The bulk of the new research points decisively in the direction of the former
• “Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex, and amount of traffic.” When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers’ regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering
• In experiments she published in the journal Science in 2006, Vohs “primed” her subjects to think about money, which is to say she planted the idea of money in their minds without their knowledge before observing their social interactions compared with a control group. ..... Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group. In a conversation in her office in May, Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious—just disinterested. “It’s not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic,” she said. “I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.”
• Over and over, Vohs has found that money can make people antisocial. She primes subjects by seating them near a screen-saver showing currency....Vohs showed that money-primed subjects gave less time to a colleague in need of assistance and less money to a hypothetical charity. 
• “Money,” says Vohs, “brings you into functionality mode. When that gets applied to other people, things get mucked up. You can get things done, but it does come at the expense of people’s feelings or caring about them as individuals.”
• The corollaries to this poverty work are potentially explosive: Wealth may give you a better brain. It may make you a more strategic thinker, a savvier planner... And the cognitive benefits of affluence may accrue incrementally, speculates Dovidio, so that very rich people have better brain functioning than moderately rich people. These hypotheses are at the untested frontier of the new science: “I think in ten years we’ll have a compelling story on this,” says Dacher Keltner, the psychologist who oversees the work of Piff and his colleagues. But already the outline is becoming clear. Princeton University psychologist Eldar Shafir has shown that in environments of abundance, people make better financial decisions—it’s not that rich people tend to be better educated and can afford better advice, but that people living paycheck to paycheck don’t have the mental space to make the smartest long-term moves. The efficiencies of the affluent brain may trigger the shutting down of what the researchers call “pro-social” impulses and lead people toward the kinds of behaviors that a hedge-fund manager I spoke to characterized as “ruthless.
• This is Hazel Markus’s main research interest: the mind-sets of class. She and her colleagues have found, broadly speaking, that the affluent value individuality—uniqueness, differentiation, achievement—whereas people lower down on the ladder tend to stress homogeneity, harmonious interpersonal relationships, and group affiliation
• The American Dream is really two dreams. There’s the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there’s the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus’s work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken. (Research shows that the rich tend to blame individuals for their own failure and likewise credit themselves for their own success, whereas those in the lower classes find explanations for inequality in circumstances and events outside their control.) But the truth is much more nuanced. Every American, rich and poor, bounces back and forth between these two ideals of self, calibrating ambitions and adjusting behaviors accordingly. Nearly half of Americans between 18 and 29 believe that it’s “likely” they’ll get rich, according to Gallup—in spite of all evidence to the contrary

Bankers and the neuroscience of greed | Ian Robertson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Bankers and the neuroscience of greed | Ian Robertson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

• power is one of the most potent brain-changing drugs known to humankind, unconstrained power has enormously distorting effects on behaviour, emotions and thinking.
• Researchers at Tilburg University showed that people made to feel more powerful cheated more when they believed themselves to be unobserved. Power also made ordinary people more hypocritical when making judgments about moral dilemmas, being much more strict in applying rules to others, but much more lax in applying them to themselves. Even tiny amounts of artificial power, in other words, increased both immorality and hypocrisy.
• Paul Piff of the University of Berkeley found in a US-based study that, compared with lower class people, upper class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, to show unethical tendencies in decision-making, to take valued goods from others, to lie in a negotiation, to cheat in order to improve their chances of winning a prize, and to endorse unethical behaviour in a work situation.
•  It has become a cliche to explain the behaviour of bankers in terms of greed, but cliches are not always wrong. Power and money both act on the brain's reward system, which if over-stimulated for long periods develops appetites that are difficult to satisfy, just as is the case for drug addiction. We call these appetites greed and greedy people are never satisfied. That is the challenge for politicians and regulators.

Why working-class people vote conservative | Society | The Guardian

Why working-class people vote conservative | Society | The Guardian

the wrong point in the rights argument

Watching the BBC2 programme on the furore over certain human rights cases (Rights gone wrong?) it seemed to be that most of the controversial cases had the same basic problem : the primary mechanism to handle these cases was inadequate to provide the sense justice the public desired, but their anger was directed at the way follow up approaches were then often blocked by the European Court on Human Rights.

So for example the case of the failed asylum seeker who ran over a 12 year old and left her dying in the street. After serving his (unbelievably short) four month sentence he was allowed stay in the country (on the grounds of right to a family life) because he had in the meantime married an English woman. While the length of the sentence sounds ridiculous, the point is that it was only this which related to his crime, and it was this that was actually lacking. Once he had served his time then he couldn't be punished in future ways on the basis of it, yet this is what was basically being demanded in deporting him and breaking up his family.  Of course it is abhorrent to think of him leading a normal life after having paid such a small penalty for killing a young girl and bringing untold grief to her family, but the problem is his original sentence. It would be like if such a criminal won the lottery afterwards, and suddenly was seen to live a life of luxury. It would be frustratingly unfair in the grand scheme of things, but there couldn't really be a process by which such winnings would be taken off him 'just because'.

The same misplaced reaction is to be seen in the other cases mentioned. There was the issue of forced marriages, and how raising the age limit of people entering the UK to be married had (until stricken down by Strasbourg) reduced the phenomenon. Again the point was something should be done to tackle the problem directly, not rely on indirect methods (if no marriages were allowed at all then the number of forced ones would also drop). Similarly with the Abu Qatada case, since the fundamental problem here is that nothing can be done to him legally in the UK for what he is doing, but they want to deport him because of this (and can't because of rights against shipping off people to kangaroo courts). if the UK has a problem with his behaviour it needs to be able to bring in laws to deal with it, not rely on indirect workarounds (and of course the point is there are no laws because it is such a complicated and sensitive topic.

What I do admit is more complicated is the case of prisoners having the right to vote. When it comes to ex-convicts then would think the logic should be that if they have served their sentence, then afterwards they should get back their normal rights. Either they have paid their price, or they haven't, but if they haven't then there is something wrong with the original sentencing.  What I don't perhaps agree with is insistence on rights when in prison. If society has the right to take away some rights (their liberty) then I don't see why it can't take away others, for a specified amount of time. Maybe it is the blanket nature of the denial which is the problem, but surely this could be resolved. And of course there could be a case for certain extra limitations - for example psychological analysis - to refrain from returning right to vote after prison, but this would perhaps be too slipper a slope to start down, since having to meet certain conditions set by the state to be allowed vote for it could lead to unwanted places.

What was most informative in the programme was the history of the convention on human rights, and how it had been, of all people, conservatives like Winston Churchill who had pushed most for it in the post-war era. And of course there it is very debateable as to whether (as is the case in the UK) the democratically chosen laws of a country should be subject to a foreign court. The main point I would think in this argument would be that it is I think in general a good thing to have a semi-inviolate set of rules (consitution, bill of rights, etc.) which cannot be easily discarded by lawmakers, even if popular at certain times), but these rules need to be something society as a whole signs up for, and perhaps repeatedly, and one problem with the European convention is that too much unanticipated interpretation and stress might be being placed on a too old set of rules.


However, as stated above, it seems most of the bad reputation the convention gets is from a minority of cases with unappealing outcomes, in which the convention is involved, but not primarily at fault. And when one considers the great bulwark the convention acts as against unfair intrusion by the powers that be into the lives of individuals, and as the rules of a club into which countries with serious problems can be coerced, then much careful debate and analysis would be required before tinkering with it.

further information :

• European convention on human rights (pdf)
• convention on human rights wikipedia entry

how many freeloaders in a trusting society?

I always think it is a good sign of the overall health of their societies that cities like Munich and Vienna, despite their size, still can implement an 'honesty' ticket system on the public transport. While of course there are regular checks, my own personal experience is to have traveled many times and only had my ticket checked once or twice, and having only once seen someone else in the carriage being forced to pay during such a check, it was obvious the level of conformity was quite high. But it is interesting to get some hard numbers on just how many 'cheats' these checks turn up. The following story from the Austrian News reports 60,000 violators, out of approximately 2 million people checked. While 60,000 sounds a lot, it works out as just 3%, which is remarkably low. One could also expect that the checks are presumably carried out at the most likely times for people to cheat (I would guess there's more temptation at night than on a regular morning commute) so overall the percentage is probably even slightly lower. So good to hear, and a good example of how people can be trusted to do the right thing...at least in Vienna!
http://wien.orf.at/news/stories/2529980/

Moral behaviour in Animals

Excellent TED talk from Frans de Waal on Moral Behaviour in animals :

"Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share."
http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals.html

The basic point is that the foundations for the pillars of our morality, fairness/reciprocity and compassion/empathy can be seen in animal behaviour, and thus have a long evolutionary history.

In this talk de Waal shows examples of co-operation, even when no immediate gain to one partner, and perhaps more important, awareness of another, and even concern. So while perhaps unsurprising that Chimpanzes will work together to obtain a treat, or even that one will help out even if not hungry (presumably in anticipation of getting the favour returned in the future) it is less expected that even if they obtain the same treat, they will favour a mechanism whereby another Chimp obtains something as well over one in which only they are rewarded. The most amusing example was of 2 Capuchin monkeys being handed different treats. Initially the first monkey was happy to be rewarded with some cucumber, but when it saw its neighbour being rewarded with a grape for the same task, it not only got upset, but hurled the cucumber treat back at the experimenter. Even just being upset while being simply economically rational would still indicate awareness to the how the other monkey is being treated, but the fact that the first monkey is so upset as to reject its treat completely is irrational, and fits well with a concept of fairness which is so emotionally ingrained that its violation trumps immediate self-interest (as captured in the human phrase to cut off one's nose to spite one's face).

Ability to co-operate in light of future interaction, awareness of others, and an ingrained and importantly emotionally powerful sense of fairness are key to a functioning moral system, and it is fascinating to see these at work in other species, showing a clear evolutionary basis.

While not shown, de Waal even suggested the Capuchin monkeys once demonstrated the ultimate moral element -  self-denial in solidarity with others - when one monkey was seen to refuse the grape unless the other got one too. While this might be aberrant Capuchin behaviour, it also must have some evolutionary history so could well be present, if partially and easily overrided, in such animals.

The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'

A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2012/01/esc_brain_decides_sell_out.html
Some points from the study :

• The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.
• "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns [ Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study] says. "Our findings indicate that it?s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people?s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."
• Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms" Berns says.
• The experiment also found activation in the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotional reactions, but only in cases where participants refused to take cash to state the opposite of what they believe."Those statements represent the most repugnant items to the individual" Berns says, "and would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage."
• Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.

The full report is available here

Virtuous Behaviors Sanction Later Sins

People are quick to treat themselves after a good deed or healthy act:

"the study, published in the journal Addiction, is the first to examine the health ramifications of the licensing effect, but others have shown its influence on moral behavior. In 2009 a study found that reminding people of their humanitarian attributes reduced their charitable giving. Last year another experiment showed that when individuals buy ecofriendly products, they are more likely to cheat and steal.
"Sometimes after we behave in line with our goals or standards, it's as if our action has earned ourselves some moral credit," says psychologist Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto, an author of the green products study. "This credit can then subsequently be used to engage in self-indulgent or selfish behaviors without feeling bad about it."

 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=license-to-sin


While I think it is already clear that morality relies on feeling ‘good’ about something (but this is not to denigrate it, just to point out it’s mechanism is tied to our emotions ) maybe these findings indicate that the emphasis is more about feeling good about oneself, as opposed to feeling good about any particular action. I.e. it is not at the low level of individual moral choices that the emotional drives work, but at the higher level of our overall self-image, whether we see ourselves as ‘good’ people. Seen in this way, maybe if one boosts one’s self-perception, by for example giving to charity, or making an effort to recycle, then there is temporarily less drive to boost it any further. This ‘I’ve done my bit’ approach is of course insidious, since can lead to a slippery slope of moral abrogation, and it is our actions in all moral spheres that matter.

Are there any possible solutions? If this really is the case  then the most effective one might be to try to make the right actions less ‘special’  but instead consider them basic minimum of what we should do, and hence less  ‘boosting’ individually to our overall image. So for example if green behavior is the exception, then it might lead to excessive moral self-congratulation, whereas if it is the norm, then this effect is limited. Nobody feels particularly good about not having dropped litter, since it is just expected, and such ‘baseline’ attitudes need to be expanded. Of course ‘norms’ rely on society at large, and are slow, and hard, to change. Incidentally this is perhaps another argument against the ‘makes no difference’ response, since even if the action itself (recycling one’s own waste) results in no tangible effects, it has a social effect by serving as an example, and might help change the norms so that eventually enough people act so as to make a difference (and of course arguing against it has an even greater corrosive negative effect, since it also contributes to what the ‘norm’ will be).

But what can the individual do? As suggested in the report self-awareness seems the best candidate to try compensate for the ‘license to sin’ effect. Knowing that we are predisposed to such behavior may make us analyze each future choice that bit more, and by centering our focus on the now and not the past, our self-perception will be perhaps less biased by the good things we’ve done previously.

"You may be able to avoid the pitfall simply by remembering that the feeling of having "earned it" leads down a path of iniquity."
 
Hopefully this will work, since to twist the famous phrase, it seems all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to have done some good before.

Aristotle : actions speak louder than reasons

From Story, by Robin McKie :
"As Aristotle observed, why a man does a thing is of little interest once we see the thing he does. A character is the choices he makes to take the actions he takes. Once the deed is done his reasons why begin to dissolve into irrelevancy."

Jonathan Haidt on 5 moral foundations, and political differences

Another fascinating TED lecture : Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.

Have encountered quite a few articles on this theme (e.g. those mentioned in previous blog post here) but Haidt presents not only some light liberal/conservative trait differences, but a concept for the underlying innate foundation of morality which these stand on.

So, in stark contrast to a 'blank slate' at birth, Hadit proposes we have a 'first draft' of morality, which he explains with a quote from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. "The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."
Haidt wanted to determine what such a first draft would be, and since it would need to be universal, studied the literature on anthropology, culture variation in morality etc. i.e. as he says "What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? That you find across cultures and even across species?"
As a result of this they identified 5 best matches, which they call the 5 foundations of morality, to quote (with some omissions) from the TED lecture:

1. harm/care. We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.
2.  fairness/reciprocity. e.g. "The Golden Rule," and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.
3. in-group/loyalty. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
4. authority/respect. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.
5. purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.

Surveys of how people prioritized these values, showed reliable differences between liberals and conservatives, even in different countries. While all were agreed that harm/care and fairness were important, they were slightly more important to liberals than conservatives. Where there was much more difference however, was with respect to the other 3 foundations : in group loyalty, authority and purity. These were ranked significantly less than harm/care and fairness by liberals, but the more conservative the subject, the more important these pillars of morality became : 

                                       

The point being made is that all 5 elements are important to morality as resulting from our nature, so none can be dismissed, but people of different political stripe differ in their emphasis. This is not to be relativistic, since in certain times and certain societies some values maybe should take priority over others. Of course while it might be easy for liberals to point out how over adherence to in-group loyalty and authority might lead to things such as authoritarianism and xenophobia, it could also be argued that extreme fairness could be seen as the basis for forced communism, with disregard for individual rights. So these insights do not provide easy answers, but do suggest how we can work towards answers : namely to appreciate that all these strands are fundamental to our societies, and that we need to step back from our own personal convictions to see the whole picture, and properly evaluate the priorities of others. They may not be right, but then again we might not be either. 

Personally I find the whole area of moral psychology one of the most fascinating and challenging, since it cuts to the core of many of the most important issues, both at a personal and a cultural level - how we should live our lives and run our societies. As the ancient greek aphorism suggests, to know what to do, first know thyself, and these studies show science can help us in this, even in such seemingly unlikely and intangible fields as morality.

note : Haidt has an online website where you can complete a survey to determine one's own settings of these 5 moral channels : http://www.yourmorals.org/  

Socialists and conservatives may be born not made

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jan/31/socialists-conservatives-born-not-made

This is not the first study I've read about which correlates political leanings to certain dispositions, but it's one that fits into a pet (and half in jest!) stereotyping of mine that people on the right worry more about the undeserving being treated too fairly, and people on the left worry more about the deserving being treated unfairly.

Both of these concerns are valid, since the drives to support and help those we feel as part of our society, and the drives to punish those who we feel act against it, are both I think equally important (and necessary) strands in a moral community. Doing good is not enough, for the system to work we need to also act against 'the bad', and there seems to be a lot of evidence that we have been hard wired by evolution for both these dispositions. While most people will agree about the former (that some people will and should help others despite cost to themselves), it is perhaps less widely known that studies show people will also accept a cost to themselves just to punish other people, and from similar righteous reasons (the classic example of this is the 'ultimatum' game ).

For me it's a bit like worrying which is worse - that nine guilty men go free, or one innocent man goes to jail. My view is that a lot of right wing politics is focused most on the travesty of the nine guilty escaping punishment, or as is more likely the case, nine welfare cheats  getting away with excessive benefits. Of course no one can disagree with being angry about this, and these are real problems which society has to work on, but the question is how important they are. In contrast, I would think it a more left-wing approach to focus most instead on what happens the one innocent, or the deserving welfare recipient who might lose out due to new 'tough' policies.  Of course no one on the right disagrees with this either, the point is not that one side is 'nasty' or the other 'soft' , both agree in principle, but disagree in priority.

The study mentioned in this article seem to indicate that right-leaning/left-leaning people differ in the magnitude of their responses to negative and positive stimuli, and I think this fits in with the theory above, namely that if one gets more charged up about negative things, e.g. moral outrage about cheats, one is more likely to favour a conservative platform, since these issues provoke a deeper response, and hence raise their relative priority. The converse is harder to show, since it's not clear absence of unfair punishment is really a sort of 'positive' stimulus, but my impression is there is something valid in this direction as well.

Given how passionate people can be about politics then the more psychological information we can gather the better, and studies such as this provide promising initial insights.

extract:

"The results showed those with right-wing beliefs had a relatively increased response to disgust and threat, whereas those who vote left-of-centre had a relatively increased response to pleasurable images.

This suggests that left-wing people are relatively more responsive to appetitive than aversive stimuli and that people who are right-of-centre are more responsive to aversive stimuli. Put another way, conservatives are more responsive to negative stimuli whereas those on the left are more responsive to positive stimuli.
The implication is that the same stimuli will evoke polarised responses depending on where you are on the aversive-appetitive spectrum. These different reactions to shared experiences will mean those of politically opposing viewpoints will automatically judge the other as wrong, and no amount of arguing in the House of Commons can change that."