infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/07/nice-guys-finish-last.html
T Byram Karasu, a psychiatrist at Albert Einstein/Montefiore Medical Center who treats wealthy clients, believes all very successful people share certain fundamental character traits. They have above-average intelligence, street smarts, and a high tolerance for anxiety. "They are also competitive with anyone and have no fear of confrontations; And in contrast to their image, they are not extroverted. They become charmingly engaging when needed, but in their private world, they are private people." Earlier this year, researchers led by Timothy Judge at Notre Dame went some way toward proving Karasu's observation when they published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled "Do Nice Guys--And Gals--Really Finish Last? The paper explored, in part, the financial penalties that women suffer in the workplace for being perceived as pushovers. But it also found a strong correlation, especially dramatic in men, between disagreeableness and income. Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; Disagreeableness was also correlated to job responsibility and recommendations for the management track. Piff's most notorious research seemed to demonstrate the extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them. Last year, he spent three months hanging out at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway, near the Berkeley Marina. Piff and his research team would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs near the Sea Breeze Market and Deli, and catalogue the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a complete stop--a violation, he reminds readers in his PNAS study, of the California Vehicle Code. "Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver's perceived sex, and amount of traffic." When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers' regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering. fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. Looking at the data from the heart monitors, Stellar found a direct, negative correlation in biological terms between class and compassion. "Lower-class individuals showed greater heart-rate deceleration in response to the suffering of others," Stellar wrote. The heart rates of the upper-class subjects generally did not change. There's the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there's the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus's work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken.
T Byram Karasu, a psychiatrist at Albert Einstein/Montefiore Medical Center who treats wealthy clients, believes all very successful people share certain fundamental character traits. They have above-average intelligence, street smarts, and a high tolerance for anxiety. "They are also competitive with anyone and have no fear of confrontations; And in contrast to their image, they are not extroverted. They become charmingly engaging when needed, but in their private world, they are private people." Earlier this year, researchers led by Timothy Judge at Notre Dame went some way toward proving Karasu's observation when they published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled "Do Nice Guys--And Gals--Really Finish Last? The paper explored, in part, the financial penalties that women suffer in the workplace for being perceived as pushovers. But it also found a strong correlation, especially dramatic in men, between disagreeableness and income. Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; Disagreeableness was also correlated to job responsibility and recommendations for the management track. Piff's most notorious research seemed to demonstrate the extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them. Last year, he spent three months hanging out at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway, near the Berkeley Marina. Piff and his research team would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs near the Sea Breeze Market and Deli, and catalogue the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a complete stop--a violation, he reminds readers in his PNAS study, of the California Vehicle Code. "Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver's perceived sex, and amount of traffic." When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers' regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering. fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. Looking at the data from the heart monitors, Stellar found a direct, negative correlation in biological terms between class and compassion. "Lower-class individuals showed greater heart-rate deceleration in response to the suffering of others," Stellar wrote. The heart rates of the upper-class subjects generally did not change. There's the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there's the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus's work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken.
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