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Comment by warbaker | Hacker News Reader

The cookie study hasn't been published anywhere. Descriptions of the methodology vary (sometimes it's 4 cookies, sometimes it's 5 cookies). Super suss, and I wouldn't be surprised if the results don't reproduce. https://thenewstatistics.com/itns/2019/05/22/the-cookie-mons...

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The paper can be accessed here [0].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120915145553/https://gsbapps.s...

I see the "graph" on page 104, which shows (if anything) a slightly negative effect for men ("high power" men took slightly fewer cookies on average). I didn't see a detailed methodology anywhere.

Ugh, can't let the truth get on the way of a good story though, I guess.

The graph is also scaled awkwardly, starting at .5

That's not the point of his address though, if you read the whole thing. His cookie was getting sat next to the wife of the Salomon Brothers big shot. Whether the cookie study is apocryphal or not, his point remains.

Interesting find. But my go to research for selfishness and class is https://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.

Very interesting paper. The categorisation of upper and lower class could be problematic however. Being a paper from the US, I presume the participants' class category corresponds to assets and income, ergo upper class being simply richer. In other countries, such as the UK, one's class has a totally different meaning.

For sure, but isn't this sort of an inherent definitional challenge in such research?

It's not a methodological issue. (The methodology itself, of course, has potential issues as well, e.g. as with the "luxury car" categorization.) It's foundational: can you really say, in a culture-independent way, that "higher socioeconomic class translates to more antisocial behavior?" Not without big caveats.

I wouldn't say it has a totally different meaning - upper class people are going to be more likely to be wealthier than the average but having lots of money doesn't make you upper class - at least in the traditional UK sense where upper class means titled aristocracy.

A similar paper you might like: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-46375-012

The conclusion in that link seems to say that selfishness correlated with power only in women, in men it was inversely correlated with power.

EDIT: I read that wrong. In men is less correlated with power than in women, not inversely correlated.

Super suss, but rings so true.

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