Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

Studies 1 & 2 didn't examine ethical behavior by any actual determination of social class, but rather by the kind of car a person was driving.

Studies 3 & 4 were conducted entirely with undergraduate participants taking a laboratory class for course credit.

Studies 5 & 7 were done entirely online. It's not clear how participants were recruited.

Study 6 was done by recruiting volunteers through Craigslist with a "chance to win" a $50 gift card.

There's a lot more here to make me skeptical of any conclusions from this "science".

EDIT: Here are the first three tested "unethical behaviors" from study 4[1]:

1. Use office supplies, Xerox machine, and stamps for personal purposes.

2. Make personal long-distance phone calls at work.

3. Waste company time surfing on the internet, playing computer games, and socializing.

They get a little worse, but it's easy to see why some "upper class" respondents might measure as "more unethical" in this survey: Employers who predominantly hire high skill workers for high salary positions generally don't care about these behaviors and employees act and respond accordingly. Does Google consider it unethical if you photocopy a few "Lost Dog" posters?

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSu...

EDIT2: Oh god. And as the link danielweber supplies below points out, study 4 wasn't even run with real participants from different classes, instead, "We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior."

That a paper like this can be published (and funded by the NSF!) seems like an awful reflection of the state of the social sciences.

I can't help noticing that the article lacked a study of the sort where they parked an open convertible with a MacBook in the back seat in several high-class neighborhoods and in several federal housing projects and measured mean time until theft. How might those numbers look, and might they be plausibly interpreted as saying something about ethics or greed?

Or maybe a professor could divide his undergrads randomly into two groups and send them one at a time for a 10pm stroll through either a high-class neighborhood or a housing project, keeping careful statistics of how many in each group have their money taken from them by violent means. Could differences in willingness to violently rob others be construed as saying something about differences in ethics or greed?

Of course the second study would never pass the research ethics board, but that's okay because, as it turns out, the police keep mountains of such statistics from the natural laboratory social scientists are supposed to be studying. Data on per capita "theft from vehicle" by neighborhood, per capita robbery, and so on, are easily available and could be incorporated into the study, except that...they wouldn't support the desired conclusion, making the study less helpful for promoting other agendas.

While your point about small-scale violence and theft of physical goods is well taken, the ultra rich have the opportunity to steal and commit violence on a scale undreamt of by the poor -- and these crimes are rarely the subjects of police statistics.

As the old saying goes, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. The elite and ultra-rich commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries, and start wars with hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties.

They get laws written in their favor, buy off politicians and judges, hide their gains in off-shore tax havens, and hire armies of high-paid lawyers to protect them -- with the effect that few of them suffer any consequences (rarely anything like the SWAT-style raids and hard jail time routinely inflicted upon the poor for far smaller offenses).

The elite and ultra-rich commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries...

Replace the first word, "the", with "some", and I'm with you. It's undeniably true. And "some" elite and ultra-rich do more good in the world than entire towns full of poor people. This is an observation about leverage, not about differences in average ethics by class.

It's reasonable to assume that the same housing project residents who are so willing to violently assault a passerby and take his wallet or swarm around a traffic accident, stealing what they can from the injured victims, would be willing to "commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries" if only they had the means to do so. That they don't do so is probably not a sign of higher ethical standards.

Here in Brazil a street pool asked two questions:

"Are politicians corrupt and steal public money?"

and

"If you were elected yourself, would you be corrupt and steal public money?"

The first had 90% of "YES" (no surprise here).

The second had a 60% of "YES"

This mean if you put a random person in office, 60% of chance they WILL steal. And 40% of chance they might fall into the group of real honest people, or people that steal but won't admit about it.

...examine ethical behavior by... the kind of car a person was driving.

Let me guess... they found that BMWs are exclusively driven by assholes? Any cyclist could have told them that!

Regarding social class and cars, is your theory here that social class and kind of car is uncorrelated? Or just that you'd like them to demonstrate it as well?

I own two vehicles: an expensive sport sedan for commuting and a crappy old SUV for hauling stuff. I drive aggressively in the sport sedan because it's made for it, and slowly in the SUV because it doesn't respond as quickly. If I went through Study 1 in both vehicles, I might support their conclusion even though I'm the same person with the same social class.

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