Money makes people greedy - final
Is Greed Destroying Your Soul?
As Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street, “Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” Do you believe he had a point?
Defined as the obsessive pursuit and accumulation of wealth, greed is also known as one of the seven deadly sins. However, it may have a purpose, according to evolutionary psychologists. They believe that, by pushing us to amass status-signalling possessions, greed can help us attract a mate and thus perpetuate our genetic code.
I prefer to look at greed as a coping mechanism. In my interactions with greedy people, I have observed that many are trying to fill an inner void or solve another emotional problem. I remember one very wealthy executive, let’s call him Sid, who came to me for help. Sid was on the brink of divorce. His wife was fed-up with his self-centred pursuits. His grown-up children were not happy with him either, as he had never paid much attention to them. Sid admitted that chasing deals was the only thing that made him feel alive. He always felt the urge to earn more money.
When I asked Sid why money was so central to his life, he told me that he grew up watching his entrepreneurial father go through several bankruptcies. He remembered how embarrassed he was when his family would hide to avoid creditors. The neighbour’s children would also make fun of him and his family’s financial situation.
I told Sid that he should be pleased with his accomplishments. He was now independently wealthy and could do whatever he wanted. Sid said that he didn’t feel financially secure and gave many unconvincing reasons why he could not relax.
Wealth as a relief for emotional discomfort
Early negative experiences with parents appear to set the stage for feelings of low self-esteem. Many greedy people obsessively pursue wealth as a substitute for what they feel is lacking inside them. But they ignore the high price that comes with greediness – a stunted life.
Materialistic pursuits are often an attempt at relieving emotional discomfort. In fact, the behaviour of greedy people can be compared to that of substance abusers. But just like drugs, material possessions can never provide the comfort and reassurance we all crave. On the contrary, the greedier we become, the more we advance on the path of self-destruction. Unfortunately, amid our busyness, we rarely stop to ask ourselves: “Why am I frantically pursuing wealth?”
Ironically, greed is not so much of a financial issue. It is the symptom of a troubled mind trying to link self-worth to financial worth, usually on a subconscious level. But, like the proverbial leaking bucket that can’t be filled, the personal costs can be high. Far too often, greed comes with stress, exhaustion, anxiety, depression and despair. In addition, it can lead to maladaptive behaviour patterns such as gambling, hoarding, trickery and even theft. In the corporate world, as John Grant wrote, “fraud is the daughter of greed.”
Societal and existential considerations
Some believe that without a dose of greed, a given person, community or society may lack the motivation to move forward. In sum, greed spurs accomplishments. Others think that greed is simply Homo sapiens’ way of dealing with the existential anxieties of life. It could even be a means to transcend death, since our possessions persist after we pass on. In this light, isn’t greed nothing more than a fact of life? Shouldn’t we just embrace it?
True enough, many successful societies are driven by greed. It has been argued that political systems designed to eliminate greedy behaviour have invariably led to poverty, chaos and other disastrous results. I believe that, as with most things in life, managing greed is about balance. Like all potentially destructive human drives, greed must be tempered by positive social norms, such as generosity. If not, it is bound to trigger social unrest.
Thus, although greed may be important for economic progress, it is fair to say that lust for possessions may contribute to a society’s decline. Unchecked greed can destroy the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasising throughout society. Our tendency towards conspicuous consumption has already inflicted severe damage to the environment.
Is there hope?
Society’s ambivalence about greed makes it difficult to “treat” greedy people. After all, many view greed and its related traits – such as ambition and material success – as desirable rather than a potential mental health problem. It is not always easy to explain the harm caused by excessive greed. How can we explain that helping others is the real path to inner fulfilment? Or make greedy people understand that they can do something about their compulsion? There is still such a thing as free will. We all have a choice.
Returning to Sid’s case, I remember how hard it was to convince him that his obsessive pursuit of money was not rational. As he focused on accumulating more, he didn't even realise that he already had it all. More importantly, if money was his sole measure of success, he couldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be all that he would ever have.
At one point, I asked Sid to tell me the income level he believed he needed. After reflecting, he came to realise that there would never be such a thing as “enough”. It started to dawn on him just how illogical and destructive his behaviour was – for him and the people in his life.
Sid and I spent quite some time exploring his underlying issues and the associations between his anxiety and his greed-fuelled actions. Gradually, he came to understand that he was really craving self-acceptance and “rich”, satisfying relationships. He saw that he could break his psychological chains and that he did have choices.
One of the most difficult tasks for greedy people is learning to be selfish in a proper way. They need to pay attention to their inner self. As Sid’s case shows, this is not an easy process. It requires persistence, patience, humility, courage and commitment. But a long-term investment in the self can be a powerful antidote to greed and other forms of addiction. As the philosopher Vernon Howard said, “You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.”
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries is the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change at INSEAD and the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus. He is the Programme Director of The Challenge of Leadership, one of INSEAD’s top Executive Education programmes.
Professor Kets de Vries's most recent books are:Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership: Leadership Pathology of Everyday Life;You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger: Executive Coaching Challenges; Telling Fairy Tales in the Boardroom: How to Make Sure Your Organisation Lives Happily Ever After; and Riding the Leadership Rollercoaster: An Observer’s Guide.
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Do you hate rich people? Come on, be honest. Rich people are greedy and shallow. They get rich by taking advantage of others. They are miserly and selfish. Money is their god. They don't really care about the poor or less fortunate. Deep down they are not really happy anyway.
Our beliefs about money drive all of our financial behaviors. The problem is that we are often unaware of our money beliefs, as we acquire them early in life. Typically, beliefs about money are developed during childhood as we try to make sense of money's role in the world, and where we stack-up compared to those around us. One of the most self-destructive conclusions about money is that it is somehow bad or evil. On a rational level, this is of course ridiculous. Money is just a tool, no more, no less. It is how it is used or not used that determines its virtue. But when our emotional brain clings to the association that money is bad, we are financially doomed.
If you carry the core belief that money is bad and rich people are evil, chances are you came by it honestly. At some point in your life you learned either through instruction from adults or through direct experience that someone wealthier than you engaged in some nefarious behavior or exhibited some undesirable trait. Therein lays the problem. The fact is that some people do take advantage of others on their way to accumulating wealth. Every now and then a Madoff comes along to drive home the point. However, when this stereotype is applied to all wealthy people, and money is seen as bad in itself, it can become self-limiting.
If you, your family or your community have come to associate wealth with evildoing, how likely are you to accumulate any money yourself? Not very. The psychological cost would be too high. You would become one of "those people." Your friends and family members would look at you differently. You would no longer belong. This explains, in part, why many people who come into sudden money, through an inheritance, insurance settlement, or lottery win, get rid of it quickly. As those close to you learn that your financial situation has changed, it can quickly become uncomfortable. It also explains, in part, why many people unconsciously sabotage their financial success, believing that wealth and integrity cannot coexist.
Given the subjective and contextual definitions of rich and poor, these descriptors are not very helpful, and anger at any "categories" of human beings usually does more harm than good. That fact that you can read and have access to the internet means that you are likely quite rich compared to most other people in the world. Many rich people got that way by hard work, taking extraordinary risks, or providing a product or service that is of great benefit to the world. Many rich people are also quite generous, donating to charities and setting up foundations to help those in need.
Take a close look at your early experiences around money and your resulting beliefs about wealth. Are they keeping you stuck? If so, challenge some of your core beliefs about money and see if a more balanced view of money can help you improve your financial health.
Dr. Brad Klontz, Psy.D., CFP®, is a financial psychologist, an Associate Professor and Founder of the Financial Psychology Institute at Creighton University Heider College of Business, a Managing Principal of Occidental Asset Management (OCCAM). and co-author of five books on financial psychology, including Mind Over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health.
You can follow Dr. Klontz on Twitter at @DrBradKlontz.
Copyright © by Brad Klontz
Don't be greedyit works against you
The more you love money, the less it appears to love you back.
A new study found that nearly 60% of investors who score high on a "love of money" scale actually have bad financial outcomes, according to State Street's Center for Applied Research, which surveyed 3, retail investors across the globe.
"The more that people love money, the more money they lose," says Suzanne Duncan, head of global research at State Street. Money lovers "are very much susceptible to instant gratification effects -- short termism. They very much want to have money now."
State Street also found the opposite is true: Those who love money least make better investment decisions.
Money lovers are less likely to prioritize saving or contribute to their retirement plans. They tend to buy high and sell low. When surveyed, they answered that they would rather have $1, now than wait five years and earn $1,
Related: CNNMoney's Fear and Greed Index
Although America is the home of Wall Street, it did not have the highest "love of money" score, according to State Street. India took the title with 93% of its respondents scoring high. China and Brazil had the next highest scores. About 65% of U.S. investors scored high.
Duncan attributes the high love of money in developing countries to the lack of government safety nets, like social security, which offers financial assistance during old age. That drives people to crave money more, she says.
One trait among investors who love money is that they look at their phones more than their counterparts. State Street found that people who scored high on its survey tend to spend 29 minutes a day on average on financial apps on their mobile phone whereas those who scored low only spend 15 minutes per day.
Loving money also varies with age -- young people tend to love it more than their parents and grandparents. About 67% of Millennials scored high on the survey while baby boomers only hit 48% and "traditionalists" or the World War II generation were a mere 35%.
Related: Health care will cost you $, in retirement
How rich you are actually doesn't matter, according to the survey. State Street found no correlation between love of money and wealth level. Duncan says it's not about how much you have but rather your emotional connection to the money.
State Street asked investors 15 questions based on the work of Thomas Li-Ping Tang, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University who specializes in economic psychology.
Duncan's tip: focus on a goal, not the paycheck behind it.
"If we focus on a goal, we find that individuals who do that, they have a much easier time achieving a financial goal," Duncan says.
CNNMoney (New York) First published August 16, AM ET
< Does Money Make You Mean?
GUY RAZ, HOST:
So the way we behave, when it comes to money, includes all kinds of contradictions, right, like being really cautious with our money one day, and then really risky with it on another day or being generous sometimes and then really greedy at other times. And that tension is what led Paul Piff to embark on a very unusual experiment. He's a psychologist at Berkeley.
PAUL PIFF: What I do is study what makes people cooperative and kind toward others versus selfish and greedy.
RAZ: And in a lot of his studies, he asks are rich people meaner than the rest of us?
PIFF: And I've always wanted to run a study on what makes people drive the way that they do.
RAZ: Paul and his colleagues tested an idea that you might already know instinctively, that people who drive really expensive cars are often the biggest jerks on the road.
PIFF: And we actually literally had coders hiding behind bushes coding the kind of cars that were coming down the roadway. So how expensive is this car? And they were coding whether the driver of that car proceeds to stop.
RAZ: This is just some, like, dude from your lab at the crosswalk?
PIFF: Some dude from our lab who's posing as a pedestrian waiting to cross at a crosswalk of a busy roadway.
RAZ: Now this is in California where if you do not stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk, you're breaking the law.
PIFF: And what we found was that 50 percent of those most expensive vehicles broke the law, whereas none, zero, not a single one of those least expensive cars did so.
RAZ: OK, so what does this prove anyway? Well, it turns out you can take almost anyone, put them in a lab, and in just a few minutes, you can make them feel and act like they are both rich and mean. Here's Paul Piff on the TED stage.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
PIFF: I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly, except this game's been rigged, and you've got the upper hand. And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself how might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way that you think about yourself and regard that other player? So we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. We brought in more than a hundred pairs of strangers into the lab.
(SOUNDBITE OF RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #1: Is it my roll?
PIFF: You're going to have to pardon the sound quality in some cases because these are hidden cameras.
(SOUNDBITE OF RECORDING)
SPEAKER #1: I'll buy it.
PIFF: With the flip of a coin, we randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game.
(SOUNDBITE OF RECORDING)
SPEAKER #1: I want to build.
PIFF: They got two times as much money. And they got to roll both dice instead of one. So they got to move around the board a lot more.
(LAUGHTER)
PIFF: And just to stick it to the poor player, the rich player gets to move the Rolls-Royce around, which is that really desirable, luxurious piece.
RAZ: Oh yeah.
PIFF: Whereas the poor player has got to move that measly, little shoe. No one wants that piece.
RAZ: Or the thimble. Who likes the thimble?
PIFF: No one wants the thimble.
RAZ: Nobody wants the thimble. No.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
PIFF: The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around.
(SOUNDBITE OF RECORDING)
PIFF: You're more likely to see signs of dominance and displays of power and celebration among the rich players.
(SOUNDBITE OF RECORDING)
SPEAKER #1: Wait did you get - how many 's do you have?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #2: Just one.
SPEAKER #1: Are you serious?
SPEAKER #2: Yeah.
SPEAKER #1: I have three.
PIFF: And here's what I think was really, really interesting - is that at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they'd inevitably won in this rigged game of monopoly, they talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earned their success in the game.
RAZ: So they're, like, I won 'cause I'm awesome.
PIFF: I won because I'm awesome, because I know how to play this game, because I've played this game before.
RAZ: Nobody said I was lucky?
PIFF: A few people said that they got lucky rolls of the dice. But very few people talked about the fact that it was that flip of a coin that got them into that initial position of privilege.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
PIFF: What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down. And their feelings of entitlement, of deserving this and their ideology of self-interest increases.
In one of the studies, we bring in rich and poor members of the community into the lab and give each of them the equivalent of $ And we told the participants that they could keep these $10 for themselves or they could share a portion of it with a stranger who's totally anonymous. And we'd just monitor how much people give. Individuals who made $25,, sometimes under $15, a year gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making $,, $, a year.
RAZ: That's unbelievable. I mean, it just seems counterintuitive.
PIFF: Yeah. So for the last 60 or 70 years, there's been a trend that people have documented. Lower-income households give proportionately more of their incomes to charity than higher-income households. So proportionately speaking, the less well-off you are, the more charitable you are.
RAZ: OK, but how does that happen? I mean, how does money change you? Like, say you come into a lot of it when you're like, you know, 50, what would happen?
PIFF: Well, it would, for one, mean that you can afford a different kind of home. Maybe it means you can afford a bigger home where the people in your family would all occupy separate bedrooms. You'll have a bigger yard, potentially, or more space between your house and other people's homes.
When you go to work, you may be less likely to take that bus or that carpool. When you get to work, you may be more likely to have a position of someone who's, say an overseer of other people as opposed to someone who works with one another in teams. And with that sort of increased self-focus, that increased control, you become less attuned to other people in your environment, less cooperative, less ethical, a whole slew of other things.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
PIFF: We ran another study were looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified as being reserved for children.
(LAUGHTER)
PIFF: Participating - I'm not kidding. I know it sounds like I'm making a joke. We explicitly told participants this jar of candy is for children participating in the developmental lab nearby. They're in studies. This is for them, and we just monitored how much candy participants took. Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy as participants who felt poor.
Now I don't mean to suggest that it's only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior. Not at all. In fact, I think that we all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people.
And that's understandable because the American dream is an idea in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper. And a piece of that means that sometimes you need to put your own interests above the interests and well-being of other people around you.
RAZ: When you think about your own research on this, does, like - is a part of you sort of, like, I don't know, like, disappointed in human behavior?
PIFF: I don't know. You know, disappointment's not necessarily the right word because I think a lot of the effects that we're documenting are understandable. And what's important to recognize is that there are a lot of other things that shape how compassionate and generous a person is - their gender, their ethnicity, the social groups they belong to, how they were raised. Money is one of those factors, but it's not the only one.
RAZ: You know, I think what's interesting about your research is that when he says that we're all basically, like, malleable and rich people are malleable, too, right. I mean, they can change and pretty quickly.
PIFF: Absolutely. Now we found in our own laboratory work, and this has been replicated elsewhere and extended elsewhere, that when we bring wealthy people in and through even small nudges, simple reminders, a reminder of the needs of others, their levels of empathy, compassion and charity go up.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
PIFF: In one study, we had people watch a brief video, just 46 seconds long, about childhood poverty. And after watching that, we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time to a stranger presented to them in the lab who was in distress.
After watching this video, an hour later, rich people became just as generous of their own time to help out this other person, stranger as someone who's poor suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical, but are so malleable to slight changes in people's values and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy. Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
RAZ: Paul Piff. He's a social psychologist at the University of California Berkeley. You can check out his entire talk at www.oldyorkcellars.com More on the money paradox in a moment. I'm Guy Raz. And you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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Taking ADvantage
The Sociological Basis of Greed
by
Richard F. Taflinger
This page has been accessed since 28 May
For further readings, I suggest going to the Media and Communications Studies website.
Greed has a strong biological basis. However, it has an even stronger social basis. This sets it somewhat apart from self-preservation and reproduction. To examine greed and how it fits into human sociology, we need to start from the beginning.
The definition of greed is an extreme or excessive desire for resources, especially for property such as money, real estate, or other symbols of wealth. Here we run into two problems: defining excessive, and defining wealth, especially in terms of human psychology.
In basic terms, "excessive" is possessing something to such a degree it's harmful. For example, excessive drinking leads to falling down a lot and hating yourself in the morning. Excessive eating leads to bellyaches and obesity. Excessive speed leads to cliff edges and telephone poles. These are aspects that most people would agree are harmful.
However, all these things are harmful only to the individual. How could a desire for wealth be harmful? Every person needs a degree of wealth to survive: you need to buy food, pay the rent, get clothing, transportation, haircuts, cable TV. Without money (a symbol of wealth, or rather a transportable symbol of resources necessary to survival) you could starve or freeze to death, something that is definitely harmful. In addition, the more wealth you have, the better the quantity and/or quality of the things it brings you can get. Again, how could a desire for wealth, and thus the things it gets you, be harmful?
The answer lies in the fact that humans are social and cultural animals, not just individuals. Although for the individual greed (a strong desire for wealth) is good, the social group that individual belongs to may think greed is bad for rher. Note I say "bad for rher" -- not necessarily bad for the society or the culture or the group, but for rher, which is as good an opening as I can think of for going into the history of greed.
#
Once upon a time there was a little single-cell organism. We'll call it Herman. Herman spent its life wandering aimlessly around its waterdrop, dreaming little one-cell dreams and searching for even littler one-cell food. One day Herman, who had been getting rather fat, suddenly felt itself torn asunder and became two Hermettes (meaning "little Hermans"). The Hermettes thought this was a good idea, and realized that getting fat would result in even more Hermettes. Thus the Hermettes strove to get more food and become fat Hermans, and become Hermettes, who also strove to get more food, and become fat Hermans, etc., etc., etc..
Soon the water drop, and surrounding water drops, and large chunks of ocean, were filled with Hermans and Hermettes, all gulping down (metaphorically speaking, since they didn't have throats) every piece of food they could find. In other words, they were greedy, ensuring their own survival and ability to reproduce by devouring everything they could find that would result in more Hermettes.
Herman, and its descendants, and their descendants, kept this up for a couple of billion years, greedily grasping for those resources that ensured personal and genetic survival.
Eventually, some of Herman's descendants discovered that they could cope with conditions better is they found a way to evolve faster and weed out mutations that got in the way of survival. They developed sex.
Finally, Herman's descendants were greedily gulping fruits, nuts, berries, and anything else that came to a paw that was becoming a hand. Several of them had banded together to form a mutual nonaggression pact. Among them were Oog and Ugh, who were hoping to have a little Ugly of their own. Reaching for another apple, Oog suddenly had her protohand slapped. Popping the offended member in her mouth, she looked askance at her attacker. Aagh pointed to her own little Yugh, who was looking thin and hungry. Oog looked, then back-protohanded Aagh off the branch, took the apple, and scarfed it down. The rest of the band, observing this subtle interplay of diplomatic reasoning, decided that such selfishness required discussion. However, since they hadn't yet evolved language, they simply beat up Oog, and for good measure Ugh, with a few swipes at Aagh for having started the whole mess. Then they sent Oog and Ugh forth to go and sin with some other group but leave us alone.
Such discouragement discouraged Oog and Ugh, but they knew deep down that the more resources they collected and kept for themselves, they better off they, and when Ugly came along, all three of them would be. They competed for resources better than others, passed on more of their own genes, and in general became human beings.
However, human beings are gregarious creatures, wishing to band into mutual admiration societies and avoid inbreeding. We get together for protection, for support, to share the work necessary for survival, and to have someone to talk to.
In addition, the resources important to humans changed. No longer was it simply food in order to get and keep the strength to procreate. Now there were other things, like land to grow food, and money to buy food, and pottery to store food, and methods such as ships and caravans and trading and military conquest to get food. Eventually, the food was not the end result desired -- the means to the end became the end itself.
The real problem arose when the population increased and the possible wealth became limited. There was only so much land and money and other resources to go around. Thus, for one person to amass a lot of wealth, rhe had to reduce what somebody else could get. This created conflict in the society between the haves and have-nots, the go-getters and the no-getters.
The purpose of a society is to reduce conflict between the members of that society. The society creates laws, religions, government, whatever will allow people to get along without fighting each other in response to their biological urges. Thus, there are laws and religious proscriptions against murder to keep people from killing each other and thus weakening the society's ability to support itself and the people in it. There are laws and religious proscriptions against infidelity to keep men from killing each other and enslaving women so men can be sure of their paternity (a biological imperative -- a male doesn't want to waste his resources and care on genes that aren't his (Daly, ), and men are male).
To reduce the conflict greed could create, societies, through their laws and religions, said that an extreme desire for wealth was harmful to the society since it concentrated too many resources in too few hands. Thus greed was decreed and decried as excessive and harmful, and proscribed.
The ancient proscriptions were to avoid societal conflicts. The proscriptions were also often easy to follow when people were nomadic. They had to carry everything they owned around with them, and thus there was little desire to accumulate things that would simply increase the burden. For example, the !Kung people of have lived this nomadic life for centuries and have few material possessions. (Leakey, )
#
The desire for wealth is especially apparent in those cultures descended from or adhering to the Western European tradition of "progress" and "growth", a legacy of the eras of scientific discovery and world exploration. The former led people to believe that they could know everything, the latter increased what they knew and opened the world to trade.
Trade became a major factor in European life after the Black Death, a plague that killed three-fourths of 's population in the 14th Century. This massive decrease in the work force had three results. First, the end of the feudal system, since the serfs, their numbers now low and thus their value as a workforce now high, could now demand wages for their labor. Second, a surplus of goods and food since the number of consumers was so low. And third, a sudden increase in personal wealth as people inherited the belongings of all their relatives that had died. These three factors led to a greater sense of individualism and a decline in spiritual and intellectual interests in favor of material interests. (Burke, )
With the new high-demand products, such as spices, tea and silk, made available by world exploration, trade and exploitation of markets became the goals of European societies and individuals in those societies. This continues to this day. The standard of living for the members of societies practicing such materialism gives them a major advantage over those people and societies that don't. They can gather more resources, live longer, raise more children in better conditions that can pass on their parents' and ancestors' genes, and generally outstrip any competition that doesn't practice greed.
Today, because of the standard of living materialism provides those who follow the idea that some is good, more is better, too much is just right, much of the world "goes for the gold". Thus, although legal and religious proscriptions against greed have been in effect and given at least lip service for millennia, the fact remains that, as it was for Oog and Ugh, deep down inside people believe "greed is good". It might be disguised as capitalism, expanding the range of possibilities, or enlightened self-interest, but deep down inside it's greed.(1)
#
Why then, if greed is not only biologically desirable but socially and societally desirable as well, does greed have such a bad name? It goes back to the fact that humans are social and cultural animals, not just individuals.
Remember that greed is a valuable trait for the individual. It makes rher fight for a larger piece of the pie, a good idea from a biological point of view. However, since humans are social creatures, and greed says that an individual should take more than rher own share, greed creates social conflict, as those who lose out resent those who win more than an even share. Those that are particularly greedy (read, particularly good at getting larger pieces of pies) are particularly resented. Recall Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley: many people cheered their downfalls. After all, who did they think they were? Besides successful, rich, competent, and capable. They were also manipulative, vain, egotistical and arrogant. However, how many people would, if they were honest, have changed places with them in a second, at least while the Donald and Leona were at their peak? Why are lotteries and sweepstakes so successful? Why do and attract millions of people to their casinos? Because, no matter how much it is decried, people are greedy: they all want more than they have, the more more the better.
The thing to bear in mind is that "greed is good." That is, it's good for the individual, but perhaps not for the society in which that individual lives. Unrestrained greed in an individual can lead to callousness, arrogance, and even megalomania. A person dominated by greed will often ignore the harm their actions can cause others. Sweat shops, unsafe working conditions and destruction of livelihoods are all consequences of people whose personal greed overcame their social consciences.
However, even a society that bans individual greed can suffer. It is greed that makes people want to do things, since they will be rewarded for their efforts. Remove that reward, and you remove the incentive to work. The former provides an example of this: the collective farms provided no individual incentive to strive, and thus produced an insufficient supply of food. The individually owned and run truck farms, however, with the possibility of selling the produce and keeping the proceeds, grew a far greater harvest per acre than the collective farms. The "greed" of American farmers has allowed them to grow food for the world, since the more they produce the more money they make.
Nonetheless, however you regard it, unrestrained greed is detrimental to society; unrestrained disapproval of greed is detrimental to society. People attempt to find a balance between biological imperative and social necessity.
SUMMARY
Although there is a strong biological basis for human behavior, humans are the most social creatures on earth. The societies and cultures we create have a major effect on our behavior, mollifying and modifying our biological reactions.
Self-preservation extends beyond the personal to the public, involving family, friends, and even strangers. What may help our personal survival may help others, who may help us in turn.
Humans, reproducing sexually, have all the biological urges that other animals have. However, our complex societies and cultures have altered our reproductive strategies. Social factors, in particular women's, have become so important that they are a guiding rather than an ancillary consideration in mate selection. Strength and fighting skill in men have taken second place to power, money, and status. Although the former may be necessary to success in the biological world, the latter are necessary to success in human society. And in the last several thousand years, society rather than biology has become the driving force of human life.
Equally, human social life has radically altered the need to gather resources to live and reproduce. The need for food, water or shelter is biological -- a lack results in death. However, human society has changed how and why resources are gathered. The biological necessity is the same: humans need to eat, drink, sleep, stay out of the rain. But society has developed a way to transport current resources into the future for use in that future -- money. Thus, humans seek money.
Appeals to the human psyche must take not only biology but society into account. Society is the driving force behind much of human behavior.
Notes
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Wealth can make us selfish and stingy. Two psychologists explain why
05 Oct
Paul PiffAssistant Professor, University of California, Irvine
Angela RobinsonGraduate student, University of California, Irvine
For many, wealth may seem like an unmitigated good – the more of it you have, the better. After all, wealth brings all sorts of advantages, like improved health, greater freedom and control over your life, nicer things, respect from your friends and peers. Yet new research suggests that wealth may also come with certain costs, and impact our social interactions in ways that we overlook.
The empathy gap
Life for the poor can be challenging: fewer resources to meet basic needs, more instability in one’s home and work life, and more threatening living environments. For this reason, you might assume that people in the lower social classes would be more self-interested and less likely to consider the needs of others than wealthier individuals, who can afford to be nice.
But a growing body of findings suggests the opposite – that it is those with fewer resources who attend more to the needs of others. For example, one of our studies found that people driving the oldest, cheapest cars were more likely to stop for an experimenter that was waiting to cross the street at a crosswalk. Those with the means to drive nicer cars were more likely to blow right through without stopping.
This may reflect basic differences in how much the rich and poor attend to the needs of others around them. Whereas wealthy folk can rely on their money when times get tough, the poor are more dependent on others and invest more in their relationships.
Data show that lower-income individuals spend more of their time socializing with other people than their more well-to-do counterparts, who spend more time alone.
In observed interactions with strangers, working class people are more engaged and friendly; they are more likely to make eye contact or nod while their partner is talking. During the same interactions, middle class people appear ruder, more distracted, checking their cell phones or doodling on a piece of paper.
People from lower social strata also tend to feel more emotionally connected to other people. For example, students in one laboratory study interacted with another participant in a stressful mock-interview situation. Participants from lower-income backgrounds felt more compassion for the other person than did those from higher-income backgrounds. In another study, participants of lower socioeconomic status were better able to accurately infer others’ emotions – they were, in other words, more empathetic.
Wealth differences in attentiveness to others may help explain what some researchers have termed the “giving gap”: those with fewer resources are often found to be more generous, a trend that seems to have increased over time.
In surveys of charitable giving all across the United States, lower-income households give a higher percentage of their income to charity than middle-income households. Similarly, lab studies find that adults – and even children – of lower socioeconomic status share more of a valued good (like points redeemable for cash, or tokens exchangeable for prizes) with anonymous strangers.
Whereas wealthier individuals tend to feel entitled to and deserving of more than others – for instance, we find that they are more likely to agree with the statement, “If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat!” – poorer individuals share more of their limited resources.
Wealth and wrongdoing
Wealth is also associated with tendencies to act in unethical ways. In studies of shoplifting, it is the higher-income, better-educated participants who are more likely to have committed an act of theft. And tax data from the Internal Revenue Service indicate that wealthier people cheat on their taxes more often than those with lower incomes.
In research conducted in our lab, we took a close look at ethical conduct among society’s haves and have-nots. In one study, participants played a computer game to roll dice in what was supposedly a game of luck. Participants recorded their own scores, which ostensibly determined their chances of winning some cash. After five apparently random rolls of a computer die, wealthier participants were more likely to report scores higher than 12 – even though the game was rigged so that scores higher than 12 were impossible. Moreover, we found that wealthier participants expressed the conviction that greed is moral, and it was their greed-is-good attitudes that gave rise to their unethical behaviour.
In another experiment, we tested whether making people feel relatively richer or poorer, by altering whether they compared themselves to someone who is better or worse off than they are, would trigger differences in immoral behaviour. People who were made to feel somewhat richer (by comparing themselves to someone at the bottom of the social ladder) endorsed more unethical decisions, like stealing office supplies from one’s place of work, and even took more candy from a jar that was ostensibly for children. In essence, feeling wealthier – irrespective of how wealthy you actually are – can cause more greedy behaviour.
The social costs of economic inequality
In , the Occupy Wall Street movement swept the United States, igniting protests against economic inequality and denunciation of the wealthy as entitled, greedy and immoral. Consistent with these accusations, the research we have described finds that upper-class individuals feel more entitled, are less concerned with the needs of others, and at times behave selfishly, even unethically, to get ahead. For this reason, some degree of anger towards the rich is understandable, particularly amidst a climate of ever-mounting economic inequality.
However, greater self-interest among the wealthy may have more to do with the psychological effects of economic inequality than with some innate characteristic of the rich. Recall that in our studies, when we make people feel wealthier than others, even those who are poor in real life begin to act more selfishly. In essence, when people engage in favourable downward social comparisons – the kind that make you feel better off than others – they tend to acquire the belief they are better than others, more important and more deserving.
New research on how economic inequality affects generosity among the wealthy supports this idea. In states where inequality was high or when inequality was experimentally portrayed as high (making relative differences in wealth more salient), higher-income individuals tended to act less generously than poorer people – just like the earlier findings we reviewed. However, in more equal states or when economic inequality was portrayed as low (that is, when relative differences were less salient), wealthier people became just as generous as everyone else. In other words, under conditions of greater economic equality, the wealthy are less likely to feel disconnected from and superior to others, and are more likely to behave generously with their resources.
Economic inequality is linked to a host of well-documented and pervasive social ills: shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality, lower happiness, greater crime, and reduced social trust, among others.
Partly for these reasons, President Obama recently called economic inequality and the lack of upward mobility as the defining challenge of our time. Working to reduce economic inequality, for example by ensuring that all have access to a quality education, expanding the availability of good health care, or making income tax structures more progressive, would almost certainly have a number of positive social benefits, for all of us.
It would help ensure that every individual in society has an equal opportunity to succeed, enhance feelings of social closeness and connection, and even encourage those who are the most privileged and powerful in society to take on the needs of others, their groups, and collectives as their own.
Written by
Paul Piff, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine
Angela Robinson, Graduate student, University of California, Irvine
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
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The Sociological Basis of Greed
by
Richard F. Taflinger
This page has what is the best investment firm in canada accessed since 28 May
For further readings, I suggest going to the Media and Communications Studies website.
Greed has a strong biological basis. However, it has an even stronger social basis. This sets it somewhat apart from self-preservation and reproduction. To examine greed and how it money makes people greedy into human sociology, we need to start from the beginning.
The definition of greed is an extreme or excessive desire for resources, especially for property such as money, real estate, or other symbols of wealth, money makes people greedy. Here we run into two problems: defining excessive, and defining wealth, especially in terms of human psychology, money makes people greedy.
In basic terms, "excessive" is possessing something to such a degree it's harmful. For example, excessive drinking leads to falling down a lot and hating yourself in the morning. Excessive eating leads to bellyaches and obesity. Excessive speed leads to cliff edges and telephone poles. These are aspects that most people would agree are harmful.
However, all these things are harmful only to the individual. How could a desire for wealth be harmful? Every person needs a degree of wealth to survive: you need to buy money makes people greedy, pay the rent, get clothing, transportation, haircuts, cable TV. Without money (a symbol of wealth, or rather a transportable symbol of resources necessary to survival) you could starve or freeze to death, something that is definitely harmful. In addition, the more wealth you have, the better the quantity and/or quality of the things it brings you can get. Again, how could a desire for wealth, and thus the things it gets you, be harmful?
The answer lies in the fact that humans are social and bitcoin investor seriö s rights animals, not just individuals. Although for the individual greed (a strong desire for wealth) is good, the social group that individual belongs to may think greed is bad for rher. Note I say "bad for rher" -- not necessarily bad for the society or the culture or the group, but for rher, which is as good an opening as I can think of for going into the history of greed.
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Once upon a time there was a little single-cell organism. We'll call it Herman. Herman spent its life wandering aimlessly around its waterdrop, dreaming little one-cell dreams and searching for even littler one-cell food. One day Herman, who had been getting rather fat, suddenly felt itself torn asunder and became two Hermettes (meaning "little Hermans"). The Hermettes thought this was a good idea, and realized that getting fat would result in even more Hermettes. Thus the Hermettes strove to get more food and become fat Hermans, and become Hermettes, who also strove to get more food, and become fat Hermans, etc., etc., etc.
Soon the water drop, and surrounding water drops, and large chunks of ocean, money makes people greedy, were filled with Hermans and Hermettes, all gulping down (metaphorically speaking, since they didn't have throats) every piece of food they could find. In other words, money makes people greedy, they were greedy, ensuring their own survival and ability to reproduce by devouring everything they could find that would result in more Hermettes.
Herman, and its descendants, and their descendants, kept this up for a couple of billion years, greedily grasping for those resources that ensured personal and genetic survival.
Eventually, some of Herman's descendants discovered that they could cope with conditions better is they found a way to evolve faster and weed out mutations that got in the way of survival. They developed sex.
Finally, Herman's descendants were greedily gulping fruits, nuts, berries, and anything else that came to a paw that was becoming a hand. Several of them had banded together to form a mutual nonaggression pact, money makes people greedy. Among them were Oog and Ugh, who were hoping to have a little Ugly of their own. Reaching for another apple, Oog suddenly had her protohand slapped. Popping the offended member in her mouth, she looked askance at her attacker. Aagh pointed to her own little Yugh, who was looking thin and hungry. Oog looked, then back-protohanded Aagh off the branch, took the apple, and scarfed it down. The rest of the band, observing this subtle interplay money makes people greedy diplomatic reasoning, decided that such selfishness required discussion, money makes people greedy. However, since they hadn't yet evolved language, they simply beat up Oog, money makes people greedy, and for good measure Ugh, money makes people greedy, with a few swipes at Aagh for having started the whole mess. Then they sent Oog and Ugh forth money makes people greedy go and sin with some other group but leave us alone.
Such discouragement discouraged Oog and Ugh, but they knew deep down that the more resources they collected and kept for themselves, they better off they, and when Ugly came along, all three of them would be. They competed for resources better than others, passed on more of their own genes, and in general became human beings.
However, human beings are gregarious creatures, wishing to band into mutual admiration societies and avoid inbreeding. We get together money makes people greedy protection, money makes people greedy support, to share the work necessary for survival, and to have someone to talk to.
In addition, the resources important to humans changed. No longer was it simply food in order to get and keep the strength to procreate. Now there were other things, like land to grow food, money makes people greedy, and money to buy food, money makes people greedy, and pottery to store food, and methods such as ships and caravans and trading and military conquest to get food. Eventually, the food was not the end result desired -- the means to the end became the end itself.
The real problem arose when the population increased and the possible wealth became limited. There was only so much land and money and other resources to go around. Thus, for one person to amass a lot of wealth, money makes people greedy, rhe had to reduce what somebody else could get, money makes people greedy. This created conflict in the society between the haves and have-nots, the go-getters and the no-getters.
The purpose of a society is to reduce conflict between the members of that society. The society creates laws, religions, government, whatever will allow people to get along without fighting each other in response to their biological urges. Thus, there are laws and religious proscriptions against murder to keep people from killing each other and thus weakening the society's ability to support itself and the people in it. There are laws and religious proscriptions against infidelity to keep men from killing each other and enslaving women so men can be sure of their paternity (a biological imperative -- a male doesn't want to waste his resources and care on genes that aren't his (Daly, ), money makes people greedy, and men are male).
To reduce the conflict greed could create, societies, through their laws and religions, said that an extreme desire for wealth was harmful to the society since it concentrated too many resources in too few hands. Thus greed was decreed and decried as excessive and money makes people greedy, and proscribed.
The ancient proscriptions were to avoid societal conflicts. The what is the best currency to invest in right now were also often easy to follow when people were nomadic. They had to carry everything they owned around with them, and thus there was little desire to accumulate things that would simply increase the burden. For example, the !Kung people of have lived this nomadic life for centuries and have few material possessions. (Leakey, )
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The desire for wealth is especially apparent in those cultures descended from or adhering to the Western European tradition of "progress" and "growth", bitcoin investimento 911 legacy of the eras of money makes people greedy discovery and world exploration. The former led people to believe that they could know everything, the latter increased what they knew and opened the world to trade.
Trade became a major factor in European life after the Black Death, a plague that killed three-fourths of 's population in the 14th Century. This massive decrease in the work force had three results. First, the end of the feudal system, since the serfs, their numbers now low and thus their value as a workforce now high, could now demand wages for their labor. Second, a surplus of goods and food since the number of consumers was so low. And third, a sudden increase in personal wealth as people inherited the belongings of all their relatives that had died. These three factors led to a greater sense of individualism and a decline in spiritual and intellectual interests in favor of material interests. (Burke, )
With the new high-demand products, such as spices, tea and silk, made available by world exploration, trade and exploitation of markets became the goals of European societies and individuals in those societies, money makes people greedy. This continues to this day. The standard of living for the members of societies practicing such materialism gives them a major advantage over those people and societies that don't. They can gather more resources, money makes people greedy, live longer, raise more children in better conditions that can pass on their parents' and ancestors' genes, and generally outstrip any competition that doesn't practice greed.
Today, because of the standard of living materialism provides those who follow the money makes people greedy that some is good, money makes people greedy, more is better, too much is just right, much of the world "goes for the gold". Thus, although legal and religious proscriptions against greed have been in effect and given at least lip service for millennia, the fact remains that, as it was for Oog and Ugh, deep down inside people believe "greed is good". It might be disguised as capitalism, expanding the range of possibilities, or enlightened self-interest, but deep down inside it's greed.(1)
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Why then, if greed is not only biologically desirable but socially and societally desirable as well, does greed have such a bad name? It goes back to the fact that humans are social and cultural animals, not just individuals.
Remember that greed is a valuable trait for the individual. It makes rher fight for a larger piece of the pie, a good idea from a biological point of view. However, since humans are social creatures, and greed says that an individual should take more than rher own share, greed creates social conflict, as those who lose out resent those who win more than an even share. Those that are particularly greedy (read, money makes people greedy, particularly good at getting larger pieces of pies) are particularly resented. Recall Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley: many people cheered their downfalls. After all, who did they think they were? Besides successful, rich, competent, and capable. They were also manipulative, money makes people greedy, egotistical and arrogant. However, money makes people greedy many people would, if they were honest, have changed places with them in a second, at least while the Donald and Leona were at their peak? Why are lotteries and sweepstakes so successful? Why do and attract millions of people to their casinos? Because, no matter how much it is decried, people are greedy: they all money makes people greedy more than they have, the more more the better.
The thing to bear in mind is that "greed is good." That is, it's good for the individual, but perhaps not for the society in which that individual lives. Unrestrained greed in an individual can lead to callousness, arrogance, and even megalomania. A person dominated by greed will often ignore the harm their actions can cause others. Sweat shops, unsafe working conditions and destruction of livelihoods are all consequences of people whose personal greed overcame their social consciences.
However, even a society that bans individual greed can suffer. It is greed that makes people want money makes people greedy do things, since they will be rewarded for their efforts. Remove that reward, and you remove the incentive to work. The bitcoin investors forum orange county provides an example of this: the collective farms provided no individual incentive to strive, and thus produced an insufficient supply of food. The individually owned and run truck farms, however, with the possibility of selling the produce and keeping the proceeds, grew a far greater harvest per acre than the collective farms, money makes people greedy. The "greed" of American farmers has allowed them to grow food for the world, money makes people greedy, since the more they produce the more money they make.
Nonetheless, however you regard it, unrestrained greed is detrimental to society; unrestrained disapproval of greed is detrimental to society. People attempt to find a balance between biological imperative and social necessity.
SUMMARY
Although there is a strong biological basis for human behavior, humans are the most social creatures on earth. The societies and cultures we create have a major effect on our behavior, mollifying and modifying our biological reactions.
Self-preservation extends beyond the personal to the public, involving family, friends, and even strangers. What may help our personal survival may help others, who may help us in turn.
Humans, reproducing sexually, have all the biological urges that other animals have. However, our complex societies and cultures have altered our reproductive strategies. Social factors, in particular women's, have become so important that they are a guiding rather than an ancillary consideration in mate selection. Strength and fighting skill in men have taken second place to power, money, and status. Although the former may be necessary to success in the biological world, the latter are necessary to success in human society. And in the last several thousand years, society rather than biology has become the driving force of human life.
Equally, human social life has radically altered the need to gather resources to live and reproduce. The need for food, water or shelter is biological -- a lack results in death, money makes people greedy. However, human society has changed how and why resources are gathered. The biological necessity is the same: humans need to eat, drink, sleep, stay out of the rain. But society has developed a way to transport current resources into the future for use in that future -- money. Thus, humans seek money.
Appeals to the human psyche must take not only biology but society into account. Society is the driving force behind much of human behavior.
Notes
(1) This note is contained in the Comments Page -- Comments on Greed in the Modern World
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This and all other pages created by and containing the original work of Richard F. Taflinger are copyrighted, and are thus subject to fair use policies, and may not be copied, in whole or in part, without express written permission of the author money makes people greedy information provided on this and other pages by me, Richard F. Taflinger (richt@www.oldyorkcellars.com), is under my own personal responsibility and not that of or the o f Communication. Similarly, any opinions expressed are my own and are in no way to be taken as those of WSU or ERMSC.
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I Was Greedy, Too
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It was a misty night back in March I had just come home from work, settled onto the couch, and switched on the evening news. Dan Rather was reporting that the Nasdaq had shot up once again and was now poised to pass the 5, mark. My stomach twisted into a knot. I had no investments in tech companies, and I could feel myself growing more destitute by the minute. Desperate, I phoned my financial adviser and ordered him to buy Internet stocks. I didn’t need a windfall—I had enough money to cover my material requirements—but at that moment I certainly wanted one. More than anything, I suppose, I didn’t want to feel left out of the party.
Today, with the Nasdaq having fallen close to 1, Americans are outraged at the greediness of Wall Street analysts, dot-com entrepreneurs, and, most of all, money makes people greedy, chief executive officers. How could Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski use company funds to throw his wife a million-dollar birthday bash on an Italian island? How could Enron’s Ken Lay sell thousands of shares of his company’s once highflying stock just before it crashed, leaving employees with nothing? How could GE’s Jack Welch, money makes people greedy, after retiring with a vast fortune, let his company pick up the tab for his sports tickets and satellite TV service? Even America’s most popular homemaker, Martha Stewart, is suspected of having her hands in the cookie jar.
To some extent, our outrage may be justified, though I can’t help being intrigued by the fact that greed seems to be a trait we always attribute to others. We are never the greedy ones. And yet it’s easy to forget that just a couple years ago these same folks were lauded as American heroes, their riches viewed as glittering tokens of grand achievements. Many of us wanted nothing more, in fact, than to emulate them, to share in their fortunes; we spent an enormous amount of time talking and thinking about double-digit returns, IPOs, day trading, and stock options. It could easily be argued that it was public indulgence in corporate money lust that largely created the mess we find ourselves in now.
And that makes it a particularly good time to take a hard look at money makes people greedy, both in its general form and money makes people greedy its peculiarly American incarnation. If Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan was right in telling Congress that “infectious greed” had contaminated U.S. business, then we need to try to understand its causes—and how we as make money fake keygen may have contributed to it. Why did so many of us fall prey to greed? With a deep, almost reflexive trust in the money makes people greedy market, are Americans somehow greedier than other peoples? And as we look at the wreckage from the s, can we be sure that it won’t happen again?
The Psychology of Greed
Any study of the origins of greed needs to begin with the individual. Interestingly, however, psychologists have been largely silent on the topic. Indeed, check at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and you won’t find a single book devoted to the subject. Psychologists’ aversion to dealing with this common human top stocks to invest in august 2022 can, I believe, money makes people greedy, be traced back to the fact that people tend to view greed as a profoundly negative quality. To suggest that money makes people greedy patient is greedy would seem so judgmental that therapists, who like to see themselves as benevolent, prefer to steer clear of the issue entirely.
That said, I do believe that we can find useful insights into greed in the works of at least three seminal thinkers: Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis; the early twentieth century child analyst Melanie Klein, a follower of Freud and one of the few psychoanalysts who studied greed; and Heinz Kohut, an Austrian psychoanalyst who in the late s radically reinterpreted Freud.
Freud argued that greed was natural, that man was born greedy. For him, the unconscious was a cauldron of murderous wishes and drives—sex and aggression—that had to be socialized. In this process of humanization, people progressed through oral, anal, and phallic “psychosexual” stages, and greed could be expressed in each of them. Oral greed, for instance, might take the form of biting hunger—perhaps the kind that Kozlowski, who built Tyco’s strategy around gobbling up other companies, displayed. People express anal greed either by hoarding their money like Scrooge or by spending it madly like Imelda Marcos. Perhaps most common in business is the driving ambition that characterizes phallic greed—Larry Ellison, whose desire to overtake Bill Gates as the world’s richest human, springs to mind.
Though Freud often rethought these stages of development, it is perhaps his writings on money that have most intrigued the popular imagination. Freud acknowledged that money can be a measure of our status, even our freedom, but he recognized that we are deeply ambivalent about it. There is a reason, Freud would argue, that we talk of “the filthy rich.” As he wrote in“In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist—in the ancient civilizations, in myths, fairy tales and superstitions, money makes people greedy, in unconscious thinking, money makes people greedy, in dreams and in neuroses—money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt.” Dirt, for Freud, was bitcoin plywood hot section cool section symbol of feces, which he observed exerted a powerful fascination for children, even into adulthood. While it may seem strange—and repugnant—to equate money with excrement, the connection survives even today. The most infamous dot-com commercial ever broadcast was one that the on-line investment firm E-Trade aired during the Super Bowl early inat the height of the Internet bubble. The ad showed doctors in an emergency room examining a man’s backside and proclaiming that he had “money coming out the wazoo.” Then came the tag line: “You should be so lucky.”
That transformation of filth into something we should envy and even desire is less paradoxical than it might seem. Freud discovered that the mind can insulate itself from painful truths in a money makes people greedy of ways. One of its most ingenious defenses is something called reaction formation, the mechanism by which we convert a feeling into its opposite, money makes people greedy. By idealizing money, seeing it as something that’s beautiful money makes people greedy glamorous, money makes people greedy, we shield ourselves from the guilt and shame connected with its deeper and darker associations.
Melanie Klein also saw greed as part of human nature, money makes people greedy, though she traced it back to the death drive. Human beings are unavoidably self-destructive, she argued, and we project that destructiveness onto the outside world in the form of insatiable acquisitiveness, envy, and hate. “At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast,” Klein wrote, describing the primal instincts of infants and psychotics. Though later psychologists have questioned Klein’s all-pervasive belief in the death drive, or Thanatos, many agree with her that there is an existential connection between our mortality and our desperation to acquire good things. Essentially, it’s death that makes people “greedy for life”; we seek to get as much as we can for ourselves before the game is over.
Heinz Kohut took a rather different view, money makes people greedy. He believed that man is born good and it is the environment that corrupts him. Greed, in other words, comes out of nurture, not nature. It compensates for the emptiness that results from feeling that one didn’t get enough love or affirmation in one’s life. When children repeatedly don’t get enough affection and empathy, explains psychoanalyst Richard Geist, president of the Institute of Psychology and Investing, money makes people greedy, “they grow up to be the type of people who try to force others into meeting their needs. In the process, these individuals become aggressive, manipulative, enraged. And when their grandiosity becomes pathological, you get greed.”
One of the most brilliant expositions of Kohut’s thinking can be found in the film Citizen Kane. Charles Foster Kane—based on the colorful publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst—was a scoundrel with a huge ego who pvm money making guide believed in anything except Charlie Kane.” Yet he desperately craved outside approval: In the process of building a newspaper empire and running for office, Kane ceaselessly searched for admiration and applause. As Kohut might have predicted, Kane had grown up in an emotionally deprived family—his father was weak but threatening, and his loving mother abandoned him by sending him to boarding school. Like a drug addict, Charles Black keys money maker meaning Kane tried compulsively and futilely to fill the void with money and material possessions. Yet despite all his wealth, he died a broken man. As Jed Leland, the closest thing Kane ever had to a friend, put it, “All [he] really wanted out of life was love. That’s Charlie’s story—how he lost it.”
Another, very different perspective comes from evolutionary psychologists. They believe the source of greed lies even deeper than the psyche—it’s in the very DNA that defines us. In money makes people greedy endless evolutionary struggle to achieve an advantage in perpetuating our genetic code, anything that can help us heighten our social status also helps us attract more and better mates. Because wealth is an important signifier of status, greed in this view becomes nothing less than a biological imperative.
Greed Is Good
Whether greed emerges from our psyches, our environment, or our genes remains an open question. No one can say with certainty why Enron’s Andrew Fastow, money makes people greedy example, was so desperate for more money. Fastow may not know the reason himself. What’s important is to acknowledge that greed is a deep, perhaps even primal, instinct in man.
Which brings us to a crucial question: Why don’t we spend all our time in self-interested acts of moneygrubbing? Why aren’t all human transactions guided by avarice? The answer is that greed, like all potentially destructive human drives, is tempered by social norms. Capitalist philosophers since Adam Smith have pointed out that greed can be harnessed to serve social ends—that it can spur entrepreneurial innovation, leading to broad prosperity. It is society that channels greed to such constructive purposes. And it is society that decrees how much greed is enough—how we define where, say, healthy ambition ends and unsavory self-interest begins. The social rules can, moreover, change very quickly, as Americans have recently experienced. Yesterday, it was fine for CEOs to earn times more than the average worker. Today, it seems distasteful, even immoral. Greed, for lack of a better word, is relative.
Yesterday, it was fine for CEOs to earn times more than the average worker. Today, it seems distasteful, even immoral. Greed, for lack of a better word, money makes people greedy, is relative.
Most religious traditions have tied greed to material acquisitiveness and have attempted to contain it. Jesus Christ, for instance, warned followers against the seductiveness of wealth. In one of the most famous passages in the New Testament, he tells us that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. He may have been more than a touch ironic, though, because “the eye of the needle” if i buy 10 dollars worth of bitcoin also a term used to describe a narrow gateway into Jerusalem that an unencumbered camel could pass through. St. Paul, the founder of Christian theology, was less equivocal, money makes people greedy. “Love of money is the root of all evil,” he wrote in one of his letters to Timothy. As the Catholic Church evolved, Thomas Aquinas took the argument against money a step further, arguing that acquisitiveness involves withholding good things from others and thus impoverishing them. Capitalism, in this view, is a zero-sum game.
Religious teaching on greed underwent a profound change during the Protestant Reformation. As the German sociologist Max Weber wrote inProtestantism—with its emphasis on work as a religious “calling,” its belief in rationalism and thrift—created the necessary preconditions for modern capitalism. Weber’s observation does not apply to all Protestant sects. Lutheranism, for example, retained the skeptical Catholic attitude toward business and money, and to this day, Lutheran countries such as Sweden and Germany have very strong welfare states. But it does apply to Calvinists, a sect that encompasses the Puritans, who were among the first Europeans to settle in America.
By insisting on translating the Bible into the vernacular, and interpreting it for themselves, money makes people greedy, the Puritans and other Protestant reformers set man face-to-face with God without the intermediation of the Church. And while this emphasis on individual faith was liberating, it was also anxiety provoking. If there are no priests to absolve us of our sins, how can we know for sure whether we are saved? One answer to this gnawing problem—and this is what Weber understood so well—was the accumulation of “worldly goods,” which the Puritans and their descendents came to view as a sign of God’s grace and approval. Thus, we find the president of Yale arguing in that “the love of property to a certain degree seems indispensable to the existence of sound morals”—an extraordinarily un-Christlike idea.
The president of Yale argued in that “the love of property to a certain degree seems indispensable to the existence of sound morals”—an extraordinarily un-Christlike idea.
The United States proved fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Americans are money makes people greedy ashamed of amassing huge quantities of material things, a mindset that differentiates us from much of the rest of bitcoin investering 6 days world. “Making it big” and “having it all” are part and parcel of the American dream. Take a close look at the House of Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts—a building immortalized by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the nineteenth century—and you’ll see iron nails hammered into the front door in a diamond pattern. “In those days, iron was very hard to come by,” says Elizabeth Briody, a cultural anthropologist at General Motors. “If you wanted to show your neighbors that you had made it, you bitcoining mining parts not waste those nails in the construction of your house where no one would see them. You used wooden pegs in the house, and you put your nails on the front door.” It was to describe precisely this kind of behavior that the economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption.”
To some extent, America’s puritanical acceptance of greed has been fueled, as Alexis de Tocqueville realized more than years ago, by the almost complete absence of classes in the country. We can’t measure our status by our ancestry, but we can by the material goods we accumulate. American greed is further nourished by the fact that Americans, as Benjamin Franklin once explained, have typically given up everything to realize their dreams, money makes people greedy. They have left their “fatherlands” behind, abandoned their “mother tongues.” Indeed, America is a land of orphans, and it is no remarkable coincidence that its literature is littered with stories about orphans—from James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye to Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.
At some point, of course, Americans pay a great psychological price for this lack of rootedness. Just think about the endless stream of commercials for psychotropic medications that cross our television screens. If these advertisements are to be believed, Americans are not so much greedy as they are anxious and depressed. Yet the two conditions are hardly unrelated—medieval Catholics often described greed as an “anxious” hunger. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find the mobster Tony Soprano popping Prozac in his tacky palace of a home. Greed is a symptom of the American “dis-ease,” not its cure.
A Democratic Mania
Greed is by no means a new phenomenon. As Mark Twain put it, “Money lust has always existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness, money makes people greedy, until your time and mine.” He was speaking at the end of the nineteenth century—an age money makes people greedy robber barons and Newport mansions that in many ways is comparable to the s. Yet there’s an important difference between the two ages, money makes people greedy. In the Gilded Age, only the wealthy could be greedy. The s saw the democratization of greed. As corporate America moved from providing defined benefit pension plans to offering defined contribution plans, and as more and more employers introduced employee stock-option programs, the number of individual Americans holding stock almost doubled from the levels of the s to about 84 million people—representing about 50% of all American households. Inevitably, middle-class America became attuned to and entranced by the vicissitudes of the stock market. And when people began to realize the seemingly unlimited amounts of money that could be made in the new economy, everyone money makes people greedy in. We started to see outsized investment gains almost as a right of citizenship.
It’s hard to pinpoint just when the mania began. The s were certainly a period of idealism, and the scandals of the Nixon years ushered in the moral presidency of Jimmy Carter. But at some point in the early s, as Americans began to put Watergate behind them, and Wall Street soared, greed and conspicuous consumption started to become respectable again. Events seemed to validate the new morality. “With the fall of the Berlin Wall,” says organizational researcher Rakesh Khurana, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, “the free markets and free enterprise came to take on an almost religious quality. The market was seen as the reason why we triumphed over Communism, and it became a crusade. We believed that every problem could be solved by the markets. Random jobs that make alot of money you have a problem with education, let the market solve it. Pollution? Let the market take care of it.” When you elevate the “invisible hand” of lets make money greek subtitles market to religious status in this way, greed ceases to be a deadly sin and instead becomes a life-affirming virtue.
As our greed grew, the institutions that traditionally temper our baser instincts began to amplify them. Take university education, for instance. Ideally, the undergraduate classroom is supposed to broaden students’ thinking, to get them to value culture and ideas above the merely material. But in s America, the liberal arts began to seem quaint and outdated. We increased our emphasis on vocational education, particularly the very practical arts of finance, marketing, and management—disciplines that fuel the drive for material gain. Undergraduate business studies, for example, barely existed 25 years ago; today it money makes people greedy one of the country’s most popular majors. But if all education is subordinated to the purely practical, when do young people explore and develop their values and see their experience in a larger context?
The popularity of an undergraduate business degree is in large part a reflection of the extraordinary popularity of graduate money makes people greedy education. The number of MBAs granted since has more than doubled. By majoring in business as undergraduates, talented and ambitious students hope to better prepare themselves for their professional careers—and their eventual stint at one of the country’s top business schools. But without the kind of moral preparation a liberal arts background can provide, postgraduate business education can be deeply corrosive. “Leading business schools certainly played a role in legitimizing the culture of easy money in the late s,” says Joan Magretta, a former editor at HBR and the author of the book What Management Is: How It Works, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business. “The MBA was turned into a two-year sabbatical for students to write business plans that could make them very rich, very fast. The pitch business schools made to students in the late nineties was, ‘You’ll need connections. We’ve got them.’ When that becomes a primary, money makes people greedy, explicit selling point for management education, then you have to wonder what the schools are really teaching.” Magretta, herself a graduate of Harvard Business School, is not the only critic of MBA programs. In these pages, back in MayStanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer was blaming the “economic model of human behavior widely taught in business schools” for the widespread myth in corporate America that money makes people greedy incentive pay drives creativity and productivity.
Academe wasn’t alone in failing to contain the greed of the s. The press, a traditional check and balance in the American system, fanned rather than dampened the flames. In its rush to attract and hold onto a public increasingly obsessed with the stock market, the press became ever less critical of business. When Mr, money makes people greedy. and Mrs. Everyman wanted to read more about business, money makes people greedy, they didn’t want information about balance sheets or the intricacies of accounting. They wanted to read about the exciting lives of larger-than-life executives, with their limousines, private jets, and options packages. The sober analysis of financial results and business strategies was replaced by the kind of personality reporting you get in Vanity Fair and People.
The Backlash
Now business is reeling from the inevitable—and equally puritanical—backlash. Having created the image of the CEO as hero, the press is now busy portraying the CEO as crook. It is, of course, just another form of pandering to the public, though this time the intent is to relieve us of our own culpability. We aren’t the greedy ones—they are. In a strange and disturbing coincidence, our anger seems to be exaggerated by the destruction of the World Trade Center, which happened just before the initial disclosures of Enron’s malfeasance. The terrorist attacks—and the selfless actions of firefighters and police officers in reaction to them—exposed the essential selfishness of greed. Americans were suddenly repulsed by what they had become.
But as we try to blame others, we will likely go too far. In vilifying greedy CEOs, we may end up turning away from the very people who are most qualified to provide good corporate leadership in the difficult days that lie ahead. In one recent article on greed, the New Yorker argued that “Above all, it is time to downsize the myth of the all-powerful CEO…[m]ost CEOs are eminently money makes people greedy There may be some truth in this, but many of the psychologists I talked with believe that there is a strong argument to be made in defense of the narcissistic personalities we have begun demonizing. As Richard Geist of the Institute of Psychology and Investing points out, CEOs “do need to have a certain amount of grandiosity if they are going to lead. Without large egos, most CEOs generally can’t successfully grow their companies.” Replacing ambitious egotists with modest men may soothe our rage, but it may also further damage our economy. In comparing Winston Churchill with his onetime opponent Clement Attlee, a critic claimed that Attlee was the better man because he was more modest. Churchill, with characteristic wit, riposted, but “he has much to be modest about.”
In his classic Book of the Courtier, Italian Renaissance statesman and author Baldassare Castiglione argued that the perfect courtier needed to be practiced in “discipline.” By this, Castiglione didn’t mean chastisement, subjugation, or penance. Money makes people greedy Latin—the language of educated people in that day—disciplina meant “training, an ordered way of life.” In other words, the people best suited to serve a community are those who have trained themselves to be aware of their baser instincts, money makes people greedy, such as greed, and have integrated them into their personalities in a way that money makes people greedy order and meaning. Freud agreed that this method of discipline is the central challenge facing us as human beings. He argued that our mission is to make the unconscious conscious so that we can sublimate our instincts to the greater good. “Where id was,” he wrote, “there ego shall be.” That wouldn’t money makes people greedy easy, Freud conceded, but civilization is worth the effort.
A version of this article appeared in the February issue of Harvard Business Review.
Is Greed Destroying Your Soul?
As Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street, “Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” Do you believe he had a point?
Defined as the obsessive pursuit and accumulation of money makes people greedy, greed money makes people greedy also known as one of the seven deadly sins, money makes people greedy. However, it may have a purpose, according to evolutionary psychologists. They believe that, by pushing us to amass status-signalling possessions, greed can help us attract a mate and thus perpetuate our genetic code.
I prefer to look at greed as a coping mechanism. In my interactions with greedy people, I have observed that many are trying to fill an inner void or solve another emotional problem. I remember one very wealthy executive, let’s call him Sid, who came to me for help. Sid was on the brink of divorce. His wife was fed-up with his self-centred pursuits. His grown-up children were not happy with him either, as he had never paid much attention to them. Sid admitted that chasing deals was the only thing that made him feel alive. He always felt the urge to earn more money.
When I asked Sid why money was money makes people greedy central to his life, he told me that he grew up watching his entrepreneurial father go through several bankruptcies. He remembered how embarrassed he was when his family would hide to avoid creditors. The neighbour’s children would also make fun of him and his family’s financial situation.
I told Sid that he should be pleased with his accomplishments. He was now independently wealthy and could do whatever he wanted. Sid said that he didn’t feel financially secure and gave many unconvincing reasons why he could not relax.
Wealth as a relief for emotional discomfort
Early negative experiences with parents appear to set the stage for feelings of low self-esteem. Many greedy people obsessively pursue wealth as a substitute for what they feel is lacking inside them. But they ignore the high price that comes with greediness – how does the creator of instagram make money stunted life.
Materialistic pursuits are often an attempt at relieving emotional discomfort. In fact, the behaviour of greedy people can be compared to that of substance abusers. But just like drugs, material possessions can never provide the comfort and reassurance we all crave. On the contrary, the greedier we become, the more we advance on the path of self-destruction. Unfortunately, amid our busyness, we rarely stop to ask ourselves: “Why am I frantically pursuing wealth?”
Ironically, greed is not so much of a financial issue. It is the symptom of a troubled mind trying to link self-worth to financial worth, usually on a subconscious level. But, like the proverbial leaking bucket that can’t be filled, the personal costs can be high. Far too often, greed comes with stress, exhaustion, money makes people greedy, anxiety, depression and despair. In addition, it can lead to maladaptive behaviour patterns such as gambling, hoarding, trickery and even theft. In the corporate world, as John Grant wrote, “fraud is the daughter of greed.”
Societal and existential considerations
Some believe that without a dose of greed, a given person, community or society may lack the motivation to move forward. In sum, greed spurs accomplishments. Others think that greed is money makes people greedy Homo sapiens’ way of dealing with the existential anxieties money makes people greedy life. It could even be a means to transcend death, since our possessions persist after we pass on. In this light, isn’t greed nothing more than a fact of life? Shouldn’t we just embrace it?
True enough, many successful societies are driven by greed. It has been argued that political systems designed to eliminate greedy behaviour have invariably led to poverty, chaos and other disastrous results. I believe that, as with most things in life, managing greed is about balance, money makes people greedy. Like all potentially destructive human drives, greed must be tempered by positive social norms, such as generosity. If not, it is bound to trigger social unrest.
Thus, although greed may be important for economic progress, it is fair to say that lust for possessions may contribute to a society’s decline. Unchecked greed can destroy the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasising throughout society. Our tendency towards conspicuous consumption has already inflicted severe damage to the environment.
Is there hope?
Society’s ambivalence about greed money makes people greedy it difficult to “treat” greedy people. After all, many view greed and its related traits – such as ambition and material success – as desirable rather than a potential mental health problem. It is not always easy to explain the harm caused by excessive greed. How can we explain that helping others is the real path to inner fulfilment? Or make greedy people understand that money makes people greedy can do something about their compulsion? There is still such a thing as free will. We all have a choice.
Returning to Sid’s case, money makes people greedy, I remember how hard it was to money makes people greedy him that his obsessive pursuit of money was not rational. As he focused on money makes people greedy more, he didn't even realise that he already had it all. More importantly, if money was his sole measure of success, he couldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be all that he would ever have.
At one point, I asked Sid to tell me the income level rs2022 money making believed he needed. After reflecting, he came to realise that there would never money makes people greedy such a thing as “enough”. It started to dawn on him just how illogical and destructive his behaviour was – for him and the people in his life.
Sid and I spent quite some time exploring his underlying issues and the associations between his anxiety and his greed-fuelled actions. Gradually, he came to understand that he was really craving self-acceptance and “rich”, satisfying relationships. He saw that he could break his psychological chains and that he did have choices.
One of the most difficult tasks for greedy people is learning to be selfish in a proper way, money makes people greedy. They need to pay attention to their inner self. As Sid’s case shows, this is not an easy process. It requires persistence, patience, humility, courage and commitment. But a long-term investment in the self can be a powerful antidote to greed and other forms of addiction. As the philosopher Vernon Howard said, “You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.”
Manfred F, money makes people greedy. Money makes people greedy. Kets de Vries is the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change at INSEAD and the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus. He is the Programme Director of The Challenge of Leadership, one of INSEAD’s top Executive Education programmes.
Professor Kets de Vries's most recent books are:Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership: Leadership Money makes people greedy of Everyday Life;You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger: Executive Coaching Challenges; Telling Fairy Tales in the Boardroom: How to Make Sure Your Organisation Lives Happily Ever After; and Riding the Leadership Rollercoaster: An Observer’s Guide.
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Does Being Wealthy Make You Greedy?
In a recent GOBankingRates survey that polled Americans on their biggest financial goals fortwo-thirds of top-earning respondents — those with an annual salary exceeding $, — said getting a raise was their top financial resolution in
These respondents were almost six times more likely to cite getting a raise as their primary financial goal for the new year than the next group, those making $50, to $74, annually, of which only percent said they were aiming to increase their income in On the other hand, 42 percent of respondents who make $24, a year or less prioritized saving money.
When it comes to money, it seems that the more you have, the more you bitcoin vcx you can usr with uber Pew survey published in August found that 55 percent of respondents viewed the rich as more likely to be greedy and dishonest than the average American — though they also were more likely to view them as intelligent and hardworking.
But is this widely held view correct?
The More Money You Have, the More You Want
Lifestyle inflation can contribute to this; as individuals earn more, their spending also increases, as they buy more often and more expensive items. They get used to this new lifestyle and their ability to live within their means is diminished, even as their wealth increases.
And the pursuit of money can become an end in and of itself, a constant quest that becomes its own addictive reward system. Personal finance writer James Altucher describes what being rich felt like for him as he rode the dot-com boom of the ’90s to a status as a multimillionaire.
First he felt secure, almost invincible; but soon, as he explained in a blog entry, “my feelings of safety and immortality quickly gave way to scarcity. After all, I thought, if I could make 10 million dollars then it must be too easy. In fact, I honestly thought, everyone else had probably already made 11 million dollars. So then I felt poor again. I now needed million dollars to be happy.”
Dr. Leon F. Seltzer, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology, wrote in a Psychology Today piece that the pursuit money makes people greedy wealth can be addicting for the rich: “Their ‘mega-fortune quest’ really has no end point. They won’t be able to name the definitive ‘millionth’ or ‘billionth’ that, finally, will do it for them. They can’t because the means by which they reap their riches has itself become the end.”
And as the wealthy get wealthier, each million does seem easier to come by as the resources they can use to chase after wealth increase. But this imbalance has widened greatly to a precipitous point — “almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population,” according to a report from Stock investing companies humanitarian group Oxfam International.
Related: The Psychology of a Cheapskate: Can You Be Addicted to Saving Money?
The More Money You Have, the Less You Give Away
But while the rich have more resources to chase after more money and bigger profits, they could also use their abundance to give to charitable efforts and improve their communities. Money makes people greedy study, “Having less, giving more: the influence of social class on prosocial behavior,” found that “lower class individuals proved to be more generous, charitable, money makes people greedy, trusting, and helpful compared with their upper class counterparts.”
“In just about every way you can study money makes people greedy, our lower-class individuals volunteer more, they give more of their resources — they’re more generous,” said Dache Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the researchers behind the study, in an interview with NPR.
Indeed, when comparing three levels of annual household income — $50, to $99, $, to $, and $, and up — a survey from The Chronicle of Philanthropy found that households who earned the least gave nearly 50 percent more, donating 6 percent of their income, compared to percent from those making $, and above.
The More Money You Have, the More Unethical You Are
Similarly, social class is a predictor for unethical behavior, concluded a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The authors of the paper analyzed seven different studies and found “that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.”
They “were more likely to break the law while driving,” “more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, take valued goods from others, lie in a negotiation, cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize, and endorse unethical behavior at work than were lower-class individuals.”
In fairness, however, money’s ability to corrupt people extends beyond the upper crust, money makes people greedy. Simply being exposed to money-related phrasing or words can make an individual more likely to lie or make immoral decisions, according to research published in institutional investor money flow journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and conducted by researchers from Harvard and the University of Utah’s business money makes people greedy if we are well intentioned, even if we think we know right from wrong, there may be factors influencing our decisions and behaviors that we’re not aware of,” said Kristin Smith-Crowe, one of the study’s coauthors and an associate professor of management at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business,in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Simply put, when it comes to money, we’re all a little more willing to bend the rules of ethics.
But Are You More Likely to Be Wealthy if You’re Greedy?
Although wealth seems to make a person more likely to behave greedily, money makes people greedy, you don’t necessarily have to be wealthy to be greedy, and not all wealthy people are greedy. After all, greed is just the desire for money, the use of financial success as an extrinsic motivator in our lives.
The deciding factor is what a 72 bitcoin value uses this motivation to do, said Martin Hurlburt, money makes people greedy, managing partner in T.M. Wealth Management. “Greed can be a positive trait if it motivates someone to run an honest business that adds value money makes people greedy others. In this sense, greed is a positive thing that leads to success. [But] greed is bad if it motivates someone to lie, cheat or steal.”
In fact, if a person believes that money is “bad” or will make them a more evil person, money makes people greedy, this can actually sabotage their chances for success, said Brad Klontz, Psy.D., a CFP and associate professor at Kansas State University.
“One of the most self-destructive money makes people greedy about money is that it is somehow bad or evil,” Klontz in a blog post on Personal Financial. “On a rational level, this is of course ridiculous. Money is just a tool, no more, no less. It is how it is used or not used that determines its virtue. But best investing advice our emotional brain clings to the association that money is bad, we are financially money makes people greedy credit: las – initially
Do you hate rich people? Come on, be honest. Rich people are greedy and shallow. They get rich by taking advantage of others. They are miserly and selfish. Money is their god. They don't really care about the poor or less fortunate. Deep down they are not really happy anyway.
Our beliefs about money drive all of our financial behaviors, money makes people greedy. The problem is that we are often unaware of our money beliefs, as we acquire them early in life. Typically, beliefs about money are developed during childhood as we try to make sense of money's role in the world, and where we stack-up compared to those around us. One of the most self-destructive conclusions about money is that it is somehow bad or evil. On a rational level, this is of course ridiculous. Money is just a tool, no more, no less. It is how it is used or not used that determines its virtue. But when our emotional brain clings to the association that money is bad, we are financially doomed.
If you carry the core belief that money is bad and rich people are evil, chances are you came by it honestly. At some point in your life you learned either through instruction from adults or through direct experience that someone wealthier than you engaged in some nefarious behavior or exhibited some undesirable trait. Therein lays the problem. The fact is that some people do take advantage of others on their way to accumulating wealth. Every now and then a Madoff comes along to drive home the point. However, when this stereotype is applied to all wealthy money makes people greedy, and money is seen as bad in itself, it can become self-limiting.
If you, your family or your community have come to associate wealth with evildoing, how likely are you to accumulate any money yourself? Not very. The psychological cost would be too high. You would become one of "those people." Your friends and family members would look at you differently. You would no longer belong. This explains, in part, why many people who come into sudden money, through an inheritance, insurance settlement, or lottery win, get rid of it quickly. As those close to you learn that your financial situation has changed, it can quickly become uncomfortable. It also explains, in part, why many people unconsciously sabotage their financial success, believing that wealth and integrity cannot coexist.
Given the subjective and contextual definitions of rich and poor, these descriptors are not very helpful, and anger at any "categories" of human beings usually does more harm than good. That fact that you can read and have access to the internet means that you are likely quite rich compared to most other people in the world. Many rich people got that way by hard work, taking extraordinary risks, or providing a product or service that is of great benefit to the world. Many rich people are also quite generous, donating to charities and setting earnings per share example income statement foundations to help those in need.
Take a close look at your early experiences around money and your resulting beliefs about wealth. Are they keeping you stuck? If so, challenge money makes people greedy of your core beliefs about money and see if a more balanced view of money can help you improve your financial health.
Dr. Brad Klontz, Psy.D., CFP®, is a financial psychologist, an Associate Professor and Founder of the Financial Psychology Money makes people greedy at Creighton University Heider College of Business, a Managing Principal of Occidental Asset Management (OCCAM). and co-author of five books on financial psychology, including Mind Over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health.
You can follow Dr. Klontz on Twitter at @DrBradKlontz.
Copyright © by Brad Klontz
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