The oddest thing about this article is that they never quote the old line about "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." Though their research does point to that being true. Fairly short article. There are comments on the site -- and links to other interesting articles.
What is it about money that makes people do bad things?
It seems a fair question when the news is dominated by misdeeds of the rich and powerful. The Paul Manafort trial, now entering its third week, has revealed details of his alleged crimes:defrauding banksout of tens of millions of dollars, evading taxes bystashing huge sumsin offshore accounts and using riches earned through unregistered work for foreign governments to buy $15,000ostrich and python jackets.
"To researchers who study wealth and power, it's dismaying but not surprising, because it tracks so closely with our findings. The effect of power is sadly one of the most reliable laws of human behavior," said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley who has spent decades studying wealth, power and privilege.
Six years ago, Keltner and a then-graduate student in his lab, Paul Piff, published influentialinnovative experimentsthat confirmed many of our worst assumptions about the rich and the corrupting power of wealth.
Inone experiment, the researchers stationed themselves at a busy intersection with four-way stop signs and tracked the model of every car whose driver cut off others instead of waiting their turn. People driving expensive cars — like a brand-new Mercedes — were four times more likely to ignore right-of-way laws than those in cheap cars like an old beat-up Honda.
"It told us that there's something about wealth and privilege that makes you feel like you're above the law, that allows you to treat others like they don't exist," Keltner said.
Next, they had a researcher play a pedestrian trying to cross at a crosswalk and tracked which cars stopped as the law requires and which blew right past him. The results were even more stark.
Every one of the cheapest cars stopped, while half of the expensive cars ignored the pedestrian in the crosswalk — many even after making eye contact.
There have been warnings throughout the ages about the corrupting effects of wealth and power. Buddha, for example, gave up the rich life of a prince for enlightenment. Jesus warned his disciples a camel would have an easier time squeezing through the eye of a needle than a rich man trying to get into God's kingdom. Rapper Biggie Smalls reached asimilar conclusionbefore his untimely death: "Mo money, Mo problems."
In the past few decades, a growing body of psychology research has tried to capture and measure the exact effects of wealth on behavior and morality.
In one of the more surprising findings from their 2015 paper, Keltner and Piff found the rich are more likely to literally take candy from children. In that experiment, they first asked 129 subjects to compare their finances with people who had either more or less money. Then they gave their subjects a jar of candy and told them the sweets were intended for children in a nearby lab but they could take some if they wanted. Those who felt richer after comparing their finances to poorer people took significantly more candy for themselves.
The findings build on similar research in recent years that suggests wealth and power strip people of their inhibitions, increase risk taking and feelings of entitlement and invulnerability. At the same time, power makes people less empathetic and able to see others' perspectives.
"Wealth is basically a mechanism for power, and power has a freeing effect on people. It takes away the constraints of society and frees people to act according to their dominant desires," said Adam Galinsky of Columbia Business School, whose experiments have explored how poweroften propelspeople's actions. In some cases, those desires may be altruistic or helpful to society, so power heightens those goals and can give rise to effective philanthropists. Often, however, power leads to self-serving behaviors unrestrained by the usual concerns over rules or the consequences for others.
Because much of the psychological research into wealth and power is relatively new, many of the findings are still being tested and need to be confirmed by replication, researchers say. "I wouldn't say these questions are settled. There are disagreements about the exact effect of wealth and ethics and how large the effect is," said Michael Kraus, a social psychologist at Yale's School of Management. But the research has never seen such booming interest and momentum — with growing inequality in America and a multimillionaire born into wealth in the White House.
"There's a lot of reasons we should care about the ethics of wealthy people," Kraus said. "Even if research found that they were no more unethical as anyone else, their influence on the world is so much greater. If someone like me steals something, it only affects only a handful of people. But if someone like Manafort steals or lies or cheats, it affects so many more people. There are foreign governments and banks involved. You start getting into that area where it can affect the whole country and the course of democracy."
This is a really good explanation for why Trump's followers still think not only that he is not corrupt, but that he is the solution to the problem. Medium length.
On Wednesday morning, the lead story on FoxNews.com was not Michael Cohen's admission that Donald Trump had instructed him to violate campaign-finance laws by paying hush money to two of Trump's mistresses. It was thealleged murderof a white Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant, Cristhian Rivera.
On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa murder because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Trump look bad. But dig deeper and the two stories are connected: They represent competing notions of what corruption is.
Sign up for The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily.
Learn what happened each weekday in five sentences, find out what our editors are reading, and more.
Thanks for signing up!
Cohen's admission highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Trump era. Trump's supporters say they care about corruption. During the campaign, they cheered his vow to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C. When Morning ConsultaskedAmericans in May 2016 to explain why they disliked Hillary Clinton, the second-most-common answer was that she was "corrupt." And yet, Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only14 percent of Republicanssaid yes. Even Cohen's allegation is unlikely to change that.
The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book titledHow Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. "Corruption, to the fascist politician," he suggests, "is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician's denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order."
Fox's decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen's guilty plea illustrates Stanley's point. In the eyes of many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn't ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he'd had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences.
The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that "traditional order." Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America's traditional racial and sexual norms.
Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense. Since 2014, Trump has employed the phraserule of lawnine timesin tweets. Seven of them refer to illegal immigration.
Why were Trump's supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncoveredfar more damning evidenceabout Trump's foundation than they did about Clinton's? Likely because Clinton's candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. "When female politicians were described as power-seeking,"notedthe Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, "participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust)."
Cohen's admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn't violate the law. But it doesn't really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn't the corruption of American law; it's the corruption of America's traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera—Trump isn't the problem. He's the solution.
This one is a bit long, but well worth it. It is a "must read". Luck is not everything, but it is much more of how our lives turn out than we usually acknowledge. I wish he had used more examples. read it. (I apologize if there are large gaps in the formatting -- I tried to remove them and it screwed it up royally. Had to ask for help because this stupid email program has no "undo" function. )
Recently, there was aminor uproarwhen Kardashian scion Kylie Jenner, who is all of 21, appeared on the cover of Forbes's60 richest self-made women issue. As many people pointed out, Jenner's success would have been impossible if she hadn't been born white, healthy, rich, and famous. She built a successful cosmetics company not just with hard work but on a towering foundation of good luck.
Around the same time, there wasanother minor uproarwhen Refinery29 published "A Week in New York City on $25/Hour," an online diary by someone whose rent and bills are paid for by her parents. It turns out $25 an hour goes a lot further if you have no expenses!
These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups. This is not a new theme, of course — it waxes and wanes with circumstance — but after a multi-decade rise in inequality, it has come roaring back to the fore.
Of course, socially dominant groups have every incentive to ignore luck. And they have found a patron saint in President Trump, whoonce claimed, "My father gave me a very small loan in 1975, and I built it into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars."
Neither side of that claim is true. But in this, as in so much else, Trump's brazenness serves as cover, a signal that it's still okay to cling to this myth.
These recent controversies reminded me of the fuss around a book that came out a few years ago:Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy,by economist Robert Frank. (Vox's Sean Illinginterviewed Frank last year.) It argued that luck plays a large role in every human success and failure, which ought to be a rather banal and uncontroversial point, but the reaction of many commentators wasgobsmacked outrage. On Fox Business, Stuart Varney sputtered at Frank: "Do you know how insulting that was, when I read that?"
It's not difficult to see why many people take offense when reminded of their luck, especially those who have received the most. Allowing for luck can dent our self-conception. It can diminish our sense of control. It opens up all kinds of uncomfortable questions about obligations to other, less fortunate people.
Nonetheless, this is a battle that cannot be bypassed. There can be no ceasefire. Individually, coming to terms with luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening, the first step in building any coherent universalist moral perspective. Socially, acknowledging the role of luck lays a moral foundation for humane economic, housing, and carceral policy.
Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance.
So here's a reminder.
How much credit do we deserve for who, and where, we end up?
How much moral credit are we due for where we end up in life, and forwhowe end up?Conversely, how much responsibility or blame do we deserve? I don't just mean Kylie Jenner or Donald Trump — all of us. Anyone.
How you answer these questions reveals a great deal about your moral worldview. To a first approximation, the more credit/responsibility you believe we are due, the more you will be inclined to accept default (often cruel and inequitable) social and economic outcomes. People basically get what they deserve.
The less credit/responsibility you believe we are due, the more you believe our trajectories are shaped by forces outside our control (and sheer chance), the more compassionate you will be toward failure and the more you will expect back from the fortunate. When luck is recognized, softening its harsh effects becomes the basic moral project.
Understanding the role of luck begins with getting past the old "nature versus nurture" debate, which has always captivated the public, not so much because of the science but because of the deeper existential questions involved.
"Nature" has come to serve roughly as code for the stuff we're stuck with, our bodies, our genes — an arrow fate has already fired, with a preset path. And "nurture" has become shorthand for our capacity for change, our ability to be shaped by circumstances, other people, and ourselves, to wiggle and move about within that path, or even escape it. It's shorthand for our range of control over our fates.
But this has always struck me as a misguided way to look at it.
Both nature and nurture happen to you
Of course it is true that you have no choice when it comes to your genes, your hair color, your basic body shape and appearance, your vulnerability to certain diseases. You're stuck with what nature gives you — and it does not distribute its blessings equitably or according to merit.
But you also have no choice when it comes to the vast bulk of the nurture that matters.
Christina Animashaun/Vox
Child development psychologiststell usthat deep and lasting shaping of neural pathways happens in the first hours, days, months, and years of life. Basic dispositions are formed that can last a lifetime. Whether you are held, spoken to, fed, made to feel safe and cared for — you have no choice in any of it, but it more or less forms your emotional skeleton. It determines how sensitive you are to threat, how open you are to new experience, your capacity to exercise empathy.
Children aren't responsible for how they spend their formative years and the permanent imprint it makes upon them. But they're stuck with it.
Legally speaking, here in the US, we don't consider people autonomous moral agents, responsible for their own decisions, until they are 18. Obviously, different cultures have different ages and markers for adulthood (moral agenthood), but all cultures mark a transition. At some point, a child, an instinctual creature not fully responsible for their decisions, becomes an adult, capable of using higher cognitive functions to shape and moderate their behavior according to shared standards, and to be held accountable if they don't.
For the purposes of this argument, it doesn't matter much where you draw the line between child and adult. What matters is that it takes place after the bulk of temperament, personality, and socioeconomic circumstance are in place.
So, then, here you are. You turn 18. You are no longer a child; you are an adult, a moral agent, responsible for who you are and what you do.
By that time, your inheritance isenormous. You've not only been granted a genetic makeup, an ethnicity and appearance, by accidents of nature and parentage. You've also had your latent genetic traits "activated" in a very specific way through a specific upbringing, in a specific environment, with a specific set of experiences.
Your basic mental and emotional wiring is in place; you have certain instincts, predilections, fears, and cravings. You have a certain amount of money, certain social connections and opportunities, a certain family lineage. You've had a certain amount and quality of education. You're a certain kind of person.
You are not responsible for any of that stuff; you weren't yet capable of being responsible. You were just a kid (or worse, a teen). You didn't choose your genesoryour experiences. Both nature and the vast bulk of the nurture that mattershappened to you.
And yet when you turn 18, it's all yours — the whole inheritance, warts and all. By the time you are an autonomous, responsible moral agent, you have effectively been fired out of a cannon, on a particular trajectory. You wake up, morally speaking, midflight.
All of us, basically.Javier Zarracina/Vox
Bettering ourselves frequently means overcoming our own inheritances
How capable are we altering our trajectories? How much can we change ourselves?
Here, a distinction made famous by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his seminalThinking, Fast and Slowis helpful. Kahneman argues that humans have two modes of thinking: "system one," which is fast, instinctual, automatic, and often unconscious, and "system two," which is slower, more deliberative, and emotionally "cooler" (generallytraced to the prefrontal cortex).
Our system one reactions are largely hardwired by the time we become adults. But what about system two?
We do seem to have some control over it. We can use it, to some extent, to shape, channel, or even change our system one reactions over time — to change ourselves.
Everyone is familiar with that struggle; indeed, the battle between systems one and two tends to be the central drama in most human lives. When we step back and reflect, we know we need to exercise more and eat less, to be more generous and less grumpy, to manage time better and be more productive. System two recognizes those as the right decisions; they make sense; the numbers work out.
But then the moment comes and we're sitting on the couch and system one feelsvery stronglythat it doesn't want to put on running shoes. It wants greasy takeout food. It wants to snap at the delivery guy for being late. Where is system two when it's needed? It shows up later, full of regret and self-recrimination. Thanks a lot, system two.
To become a better person is, at least to some degree, to consciously decide what kind of person one wants to be, what kind of life one wants to lead, and to enforce that meta-decision through day-to-day smaller decisions. They say you are what you do repeatedly; our choices become habit and habit becomes character. So forming a good character, becoming a good person, means repeatedly choosing to do the right thing until it becomes habit.
To make this more concrete, an example: For whatever reason, I hate waiting on people. I can barely stand to walk behind people on the sidewalk. Driving behind people leaves me in constant, low-level seething rage. Watching the people ahead of me in line at the store bumble through their slow transactions makes me want to claw my eyes out.
When I use system-two thinking, I understand that this instinctual reaction of mine is both irrational and uncharitable — irrational because we're all always waiting for one another and there's no way to avoid it; uncharitable because I expect alacrity from others than I don't always display myself. I make others wait just as much or more than anyone, but I absolutely can't wait for others.
To put it more bluntly, I tend to be kind of an asshole in that particular way. And I don't want to be! It makes other people tense. It makes me miserable. It serves absolutely no purpose.
Me, basically.Christina Animashaun/Vox
The only way to change it is to use system-two thinking to override system one — to intervene in my own anger — again and again, until a different, better reaction becomes habitual and I become, in a literal sense, a different, better person. (That project is, uh, ongoing.)
The same is true for being a good parent, saving money, making more friends, or any other long-term life goal; it often involves overriding our own instincts — many of which are grossly maladaptive.
Do people deserve moral credit for what they do with their system-two thinking? Perhaps that's the mechanism through which meritocracy works, through which people really do get what they deserve?
If you are a go-getter, lucky for you! No, really — that's luck too.
There are two reasons why system-two thinking can't get us out of the luck trap: Both the capacity and the need for system-two thinking are inequitably distributed.
First, the capacity.
Using system two to regulate system one isdifficult. Exercising the kind of self-discipline necessary to override system one reactions with deliberative, system-two choices is effortful. It drains energy. (See Brian Resnick'sfascinating discussion of the famous "marshmallow test"for more on this.)
Doing it requires certain conditions: a degree of self-possession, a degree of freedom from more basic physical needs like food and shelter, some training and habituation. Even with those advantages, it's difficult. There's an entire "life hacking" genre devoted to tricks and techniques that system-two thinking can use to counteract system one's predilections for salty snacks and procrastination.
And the thing is, not everyone has equal access to those conditions. Whether and how much you have the ability to exercise system two in this way is largely — you guessed it — part of your inheritance. It too depends on where you were born, how you were raised, the resources to which you had access.
Even our desire and ability to alter our trajectory is largely determined by our trajectory.
Second, the need.
Some people don't much need the ability to self-regulate, because their failures of self-regulation are forgiven and forgotten. If you are, say, a white male born to wealth, like Donald Trump, you can blunder about and fuck upover and over again. You'll always have access to more money and social connections; the justice system will always go easy on you; you'll always get more second chances. You could even be president someday, without being required to learn anything or develop any skills relevant to the job.
But if you are, say, a black male, you are called upon to exercise an extraordinary degree of self-regulation. You will frequently be surrounded by people on a hair trigger, prone to suspect or fear you, to turn down your rental application or deny you a loan or pass you over for a "safer" job applicant, prone to calling the cops on you, prone, if they are cops, to target and abuse you.
And, especially if you are poor, one step out of line — one incident at school, one brush with the justice system, one stupid teenage prank — can mean years or even a lifetime of consequences. Subaltern groups have to self-regulate twice as much to have half a chance.
Neither the capacity nor the need for self-regulation is distributed evenly or fairly. In a dark irony, we demand much more of it from those — the poor, the hungry, the homeless or housing-insecure — likely to have the least access to the conditions that make it possible. (Just one more way it'sexpensive to be poor.)
Your capacity for self-regulation and self-improvement, and your need for them, are both part of your inheritance. They come to you via life's lottery. Via luck.
Acknowledging luck is profoundly threatening to the lucky
I get why people bridle at this point. They want credit for their achievements and for their better qualities. As Varney said, it can be insulting to be told that one's success is in large part a lucky roll of the dice.
Of course, people aren't nearly as eager to take credit for their failures and flaws. Psychologists have shown that all humans are subject to "fundamental attribution error." When we assess others, we tend to attribute successes to circumstance and failures to character — and when we assess our own lives, it is the opposite. Everyone's relationship with luck is somewhat self-interested and opportunistic.
Christina Animashaun/Vox
And the more one benefits from life's lottery, the greater the incentives to deny it. As a class, the lucky have every political incentive to frame social and economic outcomes as reflective of a natural order. Life's winners have been telling stories about why they're special since civilization began.
But that's my point about the moral implications of luck: They are radical and inevitably corrosive to the established order. They cast doubt on every form of privilege and light on every mechanism by which privilege perpetuates itself.
Acknowledging luck — or, more broadly, the pervasive influence on our lives of factors we did not choose and for which we deserve no credit or blame — does not mean denying all agency. It doesn't mean people are nothing more than the sum of their inheritances, or that merit hasnorole in outcomes. It doesn't mean people shouldn't be held responsible for bad things they do or rewarded for good things. Nor does it necessarily mean going full socialist. These are all familiar straw men in this debate.
No, it just means that no one "deserves" hunger, homelessness, ill health, or subjugation — and ultimately, no one "deserves" giant fortunes either. All such outcomes involve a large portion of luck.
The promise of great financial reward spurs risk-taking, market competition, and innovation. Markets, properly regulated, are a socially healthy form of gambling. There's no reason to try to completely equalize market outcomes. But there's also no reason to allow hunger, homelessness, ill health, or subjugation.
And there's no reason we shouldn't ask everyone, especially those who have benefited most from luck — from being born a certain place, a certain color, to certain people in a certain economic bracket, sent to certain schools, introduced to certain people — to chip in to help those upon whom life's lottery bestowed fewer gifts.
And it isentirely possible to do both, to harness market competition while using the wealth it generates to raise up the unlucky and give them greater access to that very competition.
"If you want meritocracy," Chris Hayes argued in his seminal bookTwilight of the Elites, "work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."
Or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist firebrand who won her House Democratic primary in New York's 14th District, isfond of saying, "in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person should be too poor to live."
Neither human genes nor human societies distribute life's gifts according to any principle we would recognize as fair or humane, given the extraordinary role of luck in our lives. We all become adults with wildly different inheritances, starting our lives in radically different places, propelled toward dramatically different destinations.
We cannot eliminate luck, nor achieve total equality, but it is easily within our grasp to soften luck's harsher effects, to ensure that no one falls too far, that everyone has access to a life of dignity. Before that can happen, though, we must look luck square in the face.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60963669/lead_art_draft.0.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/12323139/nurture_secondary.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/12323439/cannon2.gif)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/12323231/roadrage_secondary.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/12323171/such_is_life_secondary.jpg)
Posts
