Monday, May 14, 2012

Capitalists and Other Psychopaths


According to a recent article in published by the CFA Institute, a study shows that one out of ten Wall Street employees is a clinical psychopath, as compared with one in one hundred in the population at large.

Another abstract below summarizes another seven studies:

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

There is a nice little article about this in The Week magazine and an essay published in the NY Times, from which I have cribbed the title of this post, that asks, essentially, "why is everyone so surprised?"

2 comments:

Bob Peterson said...

This is amazing. Finally, my psychoses can be traced to my upper class background...errrr, maybe not. Maybe just my love of greed. Yep, that's it.

Sounds like something we should run by Snopes.

Gerald Martin said...

Or read the studies.