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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know of a write-up for the study?

I've been looking for the last ten minutes. Having a hell of a time finding it. The author was Dacher Keltner, it was conducted at Cal (?) in the late nineties (?). Its nickname was the "Cookie Monster" study. I found a YouTube video where he described it [1]. But I can't find the actual study, or any citations of it.

I wonder how successful attempts to replicate it have been. Couldn't find anything on that either.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vvl46PmCfE

That's because it's an unpublished manuscript.

http://www.ajhepworth.yolasite.com/resources/9822-a2.pdf ha a writeup on page 277 and cites:

Ward, G., & Keltner, D. (1998). Power and the consumption of resources. Unpublished manuscript.

See: "POWER, APPROACH, AND INHIBITION" -- Keltner et al

PDF: http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/p...

Nice find. Here's some other research by Keltner:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101205211147/http://socrates.b...

And an article:

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/power_paradox

I'm reading "The Undoing Project by Lewis at the moment, finding it slow going, but interesting.

http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/p...

From that, here's the actual paper. Little methodology description, no significance testing, no indication of the number of participants or how they were selected. This has significantly diminished my belief in the proposition that power makes people more selfish in the cookie scenario. I still believe it is somewhat more likely to be true because of my priors, but this study didn't contribute much.

"From that, here's the actual paper."

I included the paper, the precise link, in my OP.

Oops! I only saw the other child, who was replying with links. My apologies. My comment will stand unedited so people don't get confused about your reply.

I also spent about 10 minutes reading the relevant section of that review. Agree with your assessment. The measure is 'number of cookies eaten' broken down by whether or not the person was a randomly chosen leader and their gender. For men, the number of cookies eaten was about the same for leaders and non-leaders. For women, leaders ate about 1.35 cookies on average and non-leaders about 0.8 cookies. I don't much care for significance testing, but it would be nice to know the number of participants and the variance in the measure. The researcher characterizes this as 'in almost every instance' the leader ate the extra cookie to some publications, and as 2/3rds of the time the leader ate the extra cookie to NPR.

Cookie Monster Study seems like the magic query? http://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-professor-dach...

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