by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Alienation & Mental Health, Worker Exploitation
By Agence France-Presse
People from the wealthy upper classes are more likely than poorer folks to break laws while driving, take candy from children and lie for financial gain, said a US study on Monday.
The seven-part study by psychologists at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Toronto analyzed people’s behavior through a series of experiments.
For instance, drivers of expensive vehicles such as Mercedes, BMW and Toyota’s Prius hybrid were seen breaking the rules more often at four-way intersections than people who drove a Camry or Corolla.
They were also more likely to cut off pedestrians trying to cross the street than drivers of cheaper cars.
In another test using a game of dice, given the opportunity to win a $50 prize, people who self-reported high socio-economic status were more likely to lie and say that they had rolled higher numbers than they actually had.
“Even in people for whom $50 is a relatively small amount of money, cheating was three times as high,” said lead author Paul Piff of UC Berkeley.
“It really shows the extreme lengths to which wealth and upper rank status in society can shape patterns of self-interest and unethicality,” he told AFP.
In other studies, people with higher status were less likely to tell the truth in a hypothetical job negotiation in which they were the employer trying to hire someone for a job they knew was soon to be eliminated.
And when given a jar of candy that they were told was for children in a nearby lab — though they could take some if they wanted — the richest people took more candy than anyone else.
Even Piff, who has studied the impact of wealth on people’s morality and charitable giving in the past — finding that rich people tend to give less to charity than poor people — was surprised to see them taking sweets from kids.
“I was astonished,” Piff said. “On average, people in the upper rank condition took two times as much (candy), so it was a pretty sizeable effect.”
Also, in that particular study, researchers conditioned some of the subjects first to think of themselves as of a higher social rank by asking them to compare themselves to others with less.
The exercise showed that people could be trained to think more highly of themselves, and that they would in turn act with more greed and less ethicality, demonstrating that status drives greed.
“We also got them to increase their likelihood of saying ‘I’d do all these unethical things,’” such as keeping the change without saying a word if a coffee shop cashier returned them too much money.
The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, theorizes that a series of factors “may give rise to a set of culturally shared norms among upper class individuals.”
For instance, richer people are more independent from others, have more resources and are therefore less concerned with what others think of their actions than poorer people, the authors suggested.
According to Piff, people with more money tend to look more positively on greed and rely less on family and friend networks for support in times of need, and this elevated status tends to disconnect them from society.
“It is that very different level of privilege in your everyday life that gives rise to this independence from others, this reduced sensitivity to the impact of your behavior on others’ welfare, and the prioritization of your self-interest,” he said.
Certainly there are exceptions, said the study, pointing to famous upper-class whistleblowers at Worldcom and Enron; and wealthy philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
Previous research linking poverty and violent crime also disproves the notion that all poor people are more ethical than the rich, it added.
However, self-interest is “a more fundamental motive among society’s elite, and the increased want associated with greater wealth and status can promote wrongdoing,” it said.
Although the study focused on US subjects, with each of the seven parts measuring between 100 and 200 participants, Piff said the findings are likely to be relevant to societies outside America, too.
“These patterns are going to be particularly salient in societies where wealth is as unequally distributed as it is here,” he said.
From The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/27/upper-class-people-more-likely-to-cheat-study/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2012 | Male Supremacy, Worker Exploitation
By Gail Dines
I usually like watching Meryl Streep, but I seriously hope that she doesn’t win an Oscar on Sunday for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. I couldn’t stand the thought of more people going to see such a dreadful piece of right-wing propaganda. I actually paid money to see The Iron Lady, a new film that is ostensibly about the life of Thatcher (nicknamed “the milk snatcher” for ending free school milk). All I could think about during the torturous 100 minutes, was what great timing this film is for the Republicans. Just as they try to sell neoliberal ideology to an increasingly impoverished working class, here comes a movie that celebrates one of their most ardent proponents. From the reviews, I expected a sanitized version of Thatcher’s hideously destructive policies, but this was so sanitized that you would have thought that this poor, misunderstood woman was in fact the best thing that ever happened to Britain since Marmite.
The film is mainly focused on the last few years where Thatcher’s increasing dementia makes her a kinder and gentler neoliberal. This was a clever ploy by the filmmakers since it would have been difficult to generate any empathy for Thatcher had it centered on her glory days of dismantling Britain’s welfare state. In place of the mean spirited, vicious shill of the elite that she was, we get a doddering old woman who has heart-warming conversations with deceased Denis. In flashbacks, she is depicted as the only Tory “man” enough to destroy the money-grabbing unions.
When we do get a glimpse, and mind you it is just a glimpse, of the hell she put the country through – from the miners’ strike to the Falkland’s war – the next scenes show her being celebrated, because tough as she was, and however bitter the medicine, we are assured that her policies delivered Britain from socialist decay to prosperity. When the filmmakers show her critics, it is either hapless Michael Foot frothing at the mouth, or angry strikers screaming in her face as poor Maggie looks on pained and scared. The working class is reduced to a band of nameless thugs who are busy burning buildings, and too stupid to understand how her draconian cuts will, in the long run, save them. To be fair, there are scenes of police brutality, but these are overwhelmed by images of Thatcher shuffling around in her slippers talking to Denis.
One of the more interesting themes in the film is the idea that Thatcher saw herself as a trailblazer for women. Much has been written about her dislike of feminism, and the fact that women and children suffered disproportionally from her policies, and that during her time in office, she appointed just one woman to her cabinet. Of course, few feminists want to own Thatcher as a kindred sister, but in a way, Thatcher should be seen as an example of what happens when feminism adopts Thatcherism.
In a bizarre way, Thatcher’s “feminism” was prescient in that today’s popular feminism, with its celebration of individual empowerment and personal choices, indeed makes Thatcher a Third Wave feminist success story. The movie celebrates her tough decisions, and her obstinate agency, whatever the consequences. Similarly, today’s feminism-lite is all about the elite women who get to enjoy the goodies that capitalism hands out to a few of us, devoid of any political understanding of how economic, political and legal institutions operate to limit the life chances of poor white women and women of color. These elite women run the mainstream blogs, journals and publishing houses, and it is their experiences that become normalized and celebrated as feminism.
That these women may be working in institutions that reproduce gender, class and racial inequality, and hence are now part of the problem, is ignored, and those who do point this out are smacked down for denying women “agency.” Equally problematic is the inability of elite feminists to understand that, just because they themselves have class and race privileges, this does not change the conditions of life for most women on the planet. Developing theory from the experiences of the most privileged individuals makes for a feminist movement that is popular with the boys, but irrelevant to most women. Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society; no structure, no collectivity, only individuals. She was wrong, but how awful that much of what passes for feminism today has embraced such an idea.
GAIL DINES is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. Her latest book is Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality (Beacon Press)
From Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/24/the-feminism-of-maggie-thatcher/
