IG NOBEL ECONOMICS PRIZE 2026 [USA, MEXICO, CANADA] Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior.
REFERENCE: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 11, 2012, pp. 4086-4091. <doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118373109> WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Paul Piff
Parasite class
I think it might be more apt to conclude that increased unethical behaviour leads to higher social class. They got there by figuratively stealing the food out of children’s mouths, so why would literally doing that bother them?
My first reaction was to think the same, but this kinda assumes class mobility. Which is rare.
I think it’s more likely that upper class kids are more likely to be entitled and grow up to become entitled adults.
Or the social norm of the wealthier class is to steal from the poorer/weaker class. They are constantly rewarded by their peers for displaying this behavior. Children are inherently poorer and weaker than they are.
It’s both, in a cyclical feedback loop. The wealthy teach their kids to be entitled, greedy, selfish, sociopaths… and extreme wealth and power corrupts the vast majority of humans — being surrounded by employees, fanboys, and other yes men who worship you 24/7 — is likely to create entitled, greedy, selfish, sociopathic behaviors; extreme wealth and power create the mental illness of narcissism, and that mental illness is passed to their children.
Couple that with an economic system that explicitly rewards narcissistic behavior with wealth and power, and you end up in a civilization crippled by a mental illness epidemic, actively spread by the propaganda of the richest mentally ill.
I think there’s a big third factor in that feedback loop, which is that weath directly affects how people behave. Research has found that priming people to feel powerful makes them less conscientious or generous. And when people are given unfair advantages, they attribute it to themselves.
yep. my sister threw up in a house with a income of about 20-30K a year, she now has about 50 million in net worth.
her main preoccupation in life how how evil the government is because it wants to tax her and give her month to poor people, who grew up like her and how awful and terrible that is. she has a psychological block now, because in her mind now it’s that she was always deserving of this and it’s everyone else who is undeserving.
she also has a victim-complex and talks the way many people here talk, it’s just she blames the poor people and minorities, the way lemmy posters blame billionaires. the rhetoric is exactly the same though, she thinks we need to eliminate the poor people/socialism, lemmy things you need to eliminate the billionaires/capitalism.
“she thinks” “lemmy thinks” What do you think? What is the solution?
Also, lemmy is not a singular hivemind monolith… Maybe try blocking .ml. Doing so was a quality of life improvement for my experience.
It’s also not necessarily conscious evil. Someone who is poor is more likely to recognize the effort required to acquire treats that are trivial for the wealthy. To the wealthy, the candy has essentially zero value, so they don’t recognize the harm caused by taking it from others.
I agree, and I think we’ve seen the same perspective blindness at a much bigger scale. Early in the covid lockdown, there was a proposal floating around to let people that had already been sick go back to working in regular contact with the public, because they would have good immunity.
It wasn’t until it made it out to public discussion that someone not rich finally pointed out that means telling people living paycheck to paycheck “Go get sick, then you can go back to providing for your family”. To people with surplus money, “stay home unless you are immune” is hardly a sacrifice at all, so there’s no motivation to put yourself in danger just to avoid that. The rich can live without going out to buy lattes for a few months, we’ll all tough it out together.
Meanwhile, the person making those lattes doesn’t have a financial safety net big enough to last a thousand years, and those same few months will be catastrophic.
It is the same thing, the callous entitlement to maintain wealth when it does obvious harm to others is the same asocial ability needed to accumulate it.
Opposite mechanisms - are they rich because they are entitled or are they entitled because they are rich.
They are distinct, entitlement is lack of emotional empathy, a mental disorder in an individual which allows the accumulation of wealth far beyond their needs while making them oblivious to any ramifications to the society from which it was drawn.
both, or neither.
everyone has different circumstances.
there are rich people who live modest middle class lives, but lemmy thinks those people don’t exist. it’s that all moderately rich people are sociopathic monsters or something…
and plenty of poor folks are sociopaths. almost as if money isn’t exactly a determining factor in any of this…
not to mention an influencing factor isn’t necessarily determining factor… but hey that’s too subtle for the fediverse genius who think we’re all noble savages and it’s society that corrupts us…
Yeah, I was being a bit facetious
Unlikely. If that was true, we would have more people of higher social class, because there are a lot of pieces of shit out there that are middle or lower class.
it isn’t though.
it’s that when you accumulate power and privileged… you tend to be more likely to exercise it indiscriminately, because temptation to do so is strong and the consequences lesser.
i know people who grew up poor and became rich… it was only after they were rich… for awhile, after their hedonistic treadmill had readjusted, that they became greedier and greedier and more sociopathic.
it’s a basic facet of human psychology you have backwards. when you don’t have power over others… you can’t abuse them. when you do have power over others, you can.
that doesn’t mean the powerless are good, it just means they have less opportunity to be evil. and there are plenty of powerful folks who aren’t evil.
I think it’s simpler then that. Humans are social animals. We keep each other accountable. If individuals reach a point where they have no peers who will shame them for being antisocial shitheads they’ll escalate. But that’s a double edged sword. Being social animals means when the rich surround themselves with sycophantic ass kissers they don’t get the socialization they need. It’s why they are all miserable lonely cunts.
I’m not sure what world you live in, but nobody gets held accountable who can avoid being held accountable. And that’s… true for everyone. Everyone is trying to avoid accountability all the time. People who seek accountability are rare.
Like, have you ever had a job or been in a school? Everyone blames somebody else for their issues. Very few folks say ‘it was my fault I failed the test/project’.
Hell most of our social structures are specifically design to avoid accountability.
Why would this deserve an Ig Nobel prize? The implications of this study are important and highly relevant to the social predicament that western societies face. This is science getting directly to the root of the problem with humanity. If we want to hand out prizes ridiculing useless science, maybe consider baldness treatments etc. (hats already exist).
The stated goal of the Ig Nobel prize is to highlight science that first makes people laugh then makes them think. Its not the razzies. Its not laughing at science its having fun with it.
They do select ‘funny’ science, but not in any way to ridicule it, I think, but to highlight that science can be useful and goofy at the same time. And also because it’s fun, I guess :)
If that is their intention, I can dig it. I thought it was straight-up ridicule.
entitlement is a hell of a drug.
Practice beats theory in ethical behavior too. I grew comfortably in a house with very woke principles (before “woke” was turned into a pejorative). My partner just grew up in a large, poor family.
She is a much better person than I am.
“Those candies are for the children” for her is now like muscle memory. Her instinct, carved by years in a big family, is to mentally count the children and the candies in the jar and to split the candies in two if there are more children than candies. Because that’s what her elders used to do for her as a child.
For me it’s more hit and miss. I do a lot of things semi-consciously before I can stop to think “oh, those were supposed to be for the children”. I do know the theory. In theory I am not a bad person, I promise.
I agree that it’s something that needs to be practiced, like a muscle.
Very little wealth is created, it is more commonly amassed by taking it from others and more importantly it is hoarded by an ability in the individual to override the feelings of immorality that arise from seeing the effects of its grossly uneven distribution. This coarse lack of empathy is scalable and holds from impoverishing entire societies to stealing candy from babies.
a lot of rich people are rich because that way you don’t have to see any affects of a lack of wealth.
that’s the point. that’s why they social isolate themselves in gated communities and exclusive resorts.
being subject to having to look at poor people suffering is a thing only poor people have to suffer.
your idea that rich people have ‘feelings of immorality’ makes me laugh, because you clearly dont’ know any rich people, they don’t have these feelings at all. that 'feeling 'is a projection of the poor onto the wealthy who think they know how the wealthier live and feel… you don’t. they live in another plane of existence and the concept of ‘uneven distribution’ doesn’t exist to them.
you can’t care about stealing candy from babies if you don’t even know the babies exist. that’s the element you are missing.
TittyFrog, or perhaps if I could call you Titty, I cannot accept your analysis, I was very clearly making the point that a greatly atrophied morality was one of the primary prerequisites to the accumulation of a superabundance of wealth. Physical removal from poverty is minor Titty compared to the cognitive removal.
you realize rich people are human beings right?
they aren’t aliens from another planet. they have all the same emotions and desires as you do. they just have more money than you do, so they have more ability to fulfill their desires.
It’s ironic, you expect them to have empathy for you, but you have none for them. You here, demonstrate yourself, that you have ‘othered’ them, and yet you think they shouldn’t ‘other’ people who aren’t rich.
Why do you do this? because you are cognitively removed from knowing wealthy people and they exist entirely in your imagination as these psychopathic monsters. further, I doubt you have any more empathy for the impoverished in Africa, than they do.
You think people all have an identical range of emotions and innate responses, but I mistook you for a different sort of mind, so that is enough of that.
they do… just like they can’t breathe nitrogen.
Do you know anyone who breathes nitrogen?
The problem with higher classes is they keep exploring the limits of what they can do, and start treating other classes like how humans generally treat animals.
I treat my dog better than most parents treat their crotch goblins.
Ok???
Dogs are exceptional. Consider how humans generally treat the crotch goblins of chickens.
The link to the paper is broken. Here it is. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
Thanks, fixed
“Upper class” AKA filthy rich.
And, it’s no surprise at all. Greed, apathy, and selfishness all increase the more money/power one acquires. But, before that, no one gets rich by giving anything away, ever.
TIL Improbable Research and also their podcast. Thank you for the content
I’ve been snatching from kids candy jars forever. So when does the upper class bank account show up?
Steal candy from a few kids and you’re a monster. Steal candy from every kid and you’re a god.
TiL that by definition kissing does NOT involve the transfer of food.
So that scene with the egg yolk, not kissing. Which is fine because it’s clearly oval sex.
The whole ceremony was absolutely incredible, would airplane again
People from all economic classes can feel those below them don’t deserve more than they have. Even between to objectively poor people.
upper class people are more likely
WOOSH
yep, and they all see the class above them as ‘rich’ and themselves as ‘working-class/normal/struggling’.
i remember my own parents going on about ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ in our town, and the income differential was like, maybe a factor of 4-6x. the poor people made 20k, we made 30k and the ‘rich’ people made like 50k. but this was in a rural area where we had no exposure to people making 100K+ let alone millions.
people don’t get how the psychology of wealth is all relativistic. where i live now people making 300K+ think they are ‘poor’ because they compare themselves to people making millions. and the people making millions think they are poor because they compare themselves to people making 10s of millions.
my sister makes 500K a year, lives in a 5million dollar house, and endless talks about the people living in 10 or 20 million dollar homes and how she is ‘just a normal working person’, and she thinks those are the ‘rich’ and she is the ‘poor’. the place she lives the ‘poor’ people make like 150-200K, and well people making under 100K just don’t exist.
