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The Lower Your Social Class, the 'Wiser' You Are, Suggests New Study (sciencemag.org)
Wisdom -- the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise -- comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study by social psychologist Igor Grossman at the University of Waterloo in Canada and his colleagues. Science Magazine reports: To conduct the study, Grossmann and his graduate student Justin Brienza embarked on a two-part experiment. First, they asked 2145 people throughout the United States to take an online survey. Participants were asked to remember a recent conflict they had with someone, such as an argument with a spouse or a fight with a friend. They then answered 20 questions applicable to that or any conflict, including: "Did you ever consider a third-party perspective?" "How much did you try to understand the other person's viewpoint?" and "Did you consider that you might be wrong?" Grossmann and Brienza crunched the data and assigned the participants both a "wise reasoning" score based on the conflict answers and a "social class" score, then plotted the two scores against one another. They found that people with the lowest social class scores -- those with less income, less education, and more worries about money -- scored about twice as high on the wise reasoning scale as those in the highest social class. The income and education levels ranged from working class to upper middle class; neither the very wealthy nor the very poor were well represented in the study.
In the second part of the experiment, the duo recruited 200 people in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan, to take a standard IQ test and read three letters to the Dear Abby advice column. One letter, for example, asked about choosing sides in an argument between mutual friends. Each participant then discussed with an interviewer how they thought the situations outlined in the letters would play out. A panel of judges scored their responses according to various measures of wise reasoning. In the example above, thinking about how an outsider might view the conflict would earn points toward wisdom, whereas relying only on one's own perspective would not. As with the first part of the experiment, those in lower social classes consistently had higher wise-reasoning scores than those in higher social classes, the researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. IQ scores, however, weren't associated one way or another with wise reasoning.
In the second part of the experiment, the duo recruited 200 people in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan, to take a standard IQ test and read three letters to the Dear Abby advice column. One letter, for example, asked about choosing sides in an argument between mutual friends. Each participant then discussed with an interviewer how they thought the situations outlined in the letters would play out. A panel of judges scored their responses according to various measures of wise reasoning. In the example above, thinking about how an outsider might view the conflict would earn points toward wisdom, whereas relying only on one's own perspective would not. As with the first part of the experiment, those in lower social classes consistently had higher wise-reasoning scores than those in higher social classes, the researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. IQ scores, however, weren't associated one way or another with wise reasoning.
Poor people are not spoiled rotten, nor are they accustomed to be able to make every problem "go away" by application of money. This gives them a whole lot more experience dealing with problems that involves having to deal with things and situations where you just can't in various ways brute force your way.
Also, see "Cake, why don't they eat".
By virtue of having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, I'm pretty much screwed. Stuck on a low level job I hate but hope it's still there next year. My Christmas presents are a pile of bills to pay. My best years have come and gone. I'd rather be a rich fool than a wise pauper.
If you redefine wisdom to only mean a very specific aspect of it, you can correlate it with everything you like.
You are excluding the possibility that many successful people succeed because of their lack of empathy, not despite it.
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Yeah, not a surprise: Rich people can buy the answer they like or build a wall to keep the problem out; third-party perspective is irrelevant.
My country broadcasts a lot of shows about US rich people: Paris & Nicole, Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan, the Kardashians, the Versace's, C-grade, one-trick celebrities demanding their 15 minutes of fame. There aren't any shows about US poor people, unless it's that rare breed: A multiple murderer in prison. Maybe, that's why my country produces shows about poor people and refugees.
Remember Mitt Romney, who thought middle-class meant having $5 million and asking one's parents for a loan.
That's what N N Thaleb calls skin in the game: https://medium.com/incerto/on-... .
It's an important skill, and obviously part of what we call wisdom, but I don't think it's the sine qua non.
I can offer an SSI benefit letter as supporting credentials.
Wisdom -- the ability to take the perspectives of others into account
What the author describes could be many things: diplomacy, empathy, humility even. But it is not wisdom. Though I can understand that people with less money (though that has little to do with "class" or entitlement - excpet possibly in the USA) will be forced to become more skilled in the art of compromise.
Wisdom, as we all know, is not putting tomatoes in a fruit salad.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The higher your class, the less the ability to compromise is developed after a lifetime of getting whatever you want because you have money. Seems about right.
I understand the sentiment, but are you sure about that?
Should my final report card, at the end of my life, be a record of my accumulated assets, or an archive of my virtues, achievements and reputation?
Which of these will touch my descendants?
Be careful what you wish for..
- A friend
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"Seeing the view and perspective of other people" != "Empathy"
Psychopath are often very good as seeing the view and perspective of other people... and how to abuse that knowledge for personal gain.
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That's complacency, adaptation and submisiveness.
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I would rather leave a pile of assets to my next gen, than a pile of virtue which will count for NOTHING in the grand scheme of things. Sure , don't leave a negative legacy behind you i.o.w. don't be a murderer, or a rapist, or a scammer, etc.... But virtue left to your kid/grand kid ? Pah. That sure as hell will warm their heart when the bill comes to be paid, or will help them scale social ladder.... not.
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Wisdom is "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise." It has nothing to do with being able to understand someone else's perspective, nor does it have anything to do with class.
I have a serious problem with this kind of article redefining what words mean, and then ascribing positive traits to lower-class people and negative traits to upper-class people. It's the same story as with "emotional intelligence": that was just a crutch to allow less intelligent people to feel good about themselves and to let them look down on smarter people, because those are _obviously_ not emotionally intelligent as well.
And this is the same: being poor does not make you wise. I've seen poor people make horrendously unwise decisions, and in some cases they are poor because of that.
Group living in all species is dependent on tolerance of other group members. In crab-eating macaques, successful social group living maintains postconflict resolution must occur. Usually, less dominant individuals lose to a higher-ranking individual when conflict arises. After the conflict has taken place, lower-ranking individuals tend to fear the winner of the conflict to a greater degree. In one study, this was seen by the ability to drink water together. Postconflict observations showed a staggered time between when the dominant individual begins to drink and the subordinate. Long-term studies reveal the gap in drinking time closes as the conflict moves further into the past. -- Long-tailed Macaques
tldr; All individuals depend on the group, higher ranking individuals, whose position in the group is more secure, can afford to be assholes.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
The Moneylenders in the temple say screw the libtard poor, I didn't get where I am today by not stepping on the faces of the cattle I despise so much. Evolution says the strongest survive and I am an animal, so death to the poor! Of course everyone hates me for my arrogance and arguably I am nothing to do with human civilisation but civilisation is for losers. Happy Christmas everyone!
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I had a rich uncle - muiltimillionaire self made - he worked all the time, had questionable ethics and morality (screwed over my father just because), he was hardly home, and just a dick.
He left my cousin quite a bit of money. Now, think of what happens to a kid who has a father like that and a mother who put up with it.
All the money my cousin got went up his nose and for lawyers to get him out of trouble.
He's broke now.
He's not an outlier. I see this time and time again, children of financially successful people get fucked up. Look at all the entertainment stars' kids who end up in rehab.
Donald Trump is the son of a successful guy and look how fucked up he is.
And I was once at one of those talks where some really rich guy basically gets up there and blabs about how successful he is and you can too! (It's mostly luck, btw). Five minutes in he's tearing up because he didn't have any relationships with his grown kids.
If there exists an optimal solution to any problem, then compromise is likely to be the very least effective method to discover it. By definition, any solution reached through compromise is diluted by opposing intentions.
If person A is right, and person B is wrong...any concession to deviate from person A's path results in an inferior outcome. Compromise may smooth out conflicts with one's peers, but avoiding conflict is not necessarily wise. In fact, it could be argued that conflict is the arena in which contending viewpoints are refined and gain exposure. Social psychologist Igor Grossman posited that society as a whole is getting smarter and wondered why we 'we have just as many, if not more, conflicts as before?'. The answer seems obvious: Because society as a whole is getting smarter, and having just as many, if not more, conflicts is the desired outcome.
True wisdom lay not in compromise, but in knowing when to fight and when to concede. Learn how to debate rationally and evaluate your opposition's argument. If your opponent is correct...don't insist on compromise. Instead, take up his (or her) banner without rancor or recrimination.
Wisdom is compromise?
The study is absurd at the outset because they have a ridiculous definition of wisdom.
In a recent feature on This American Life, Betsy DeVos was depicted as being a very compassionate and generous person (she helped individual students to get private schooling), but lacking empathy (she didn't understand the multiple issues with public schools and the diverse population and the regulatory frameworks for the public school system in the US. Also, she didn't appreciate the need for scalable solutions). MORE: https://www.thisamericanlife.o...
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
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Seems plausible. An empathetic business owner experiencing a slowdown might be less willing to lay off employees, for example. That alone would serve as a filter, making less empathetic people more likely to be financially successful.
Making money by treating people like shit doesn't make you successful in my book. It just makes you an asshole.
The 'study' can be reframed as 'People who have to compromise, compromise, people who don't have to, don't necessarily compromise'.
Leaving aside whether that's actually "wisdom", or whether compromise is always "wise", or even whether we can really trust self-reporting so uncritically, a better controlled study would try to change the lower class's situation and see whether they still have "wisdom", or seek out people who've advanced and compare their scoring.
Judging by a millennia of fairy tales, where whenever the lower classes improve their situation never look back - I suspect they'll find that as social status improves, self-reported willingness to compromise is reduced. That is, the result is a factor of social class, not an actual difference in personality.
What does it matter?
You're dead. Sure, it might be comforting to know that the legacy you leave behind is one of joy instead of one of misery, but given the choice of leaving a legacy of joy and living a life in misery, or leaving a legacy of misery after living a life of joy, I choose the latter. Because screw you, I got mine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Give it time. We're working on a scenario again where we create a critical mass of people with nothing to lose.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So... educating poor people leads to Communism?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think this has a lot to do with it -- with less empathy you're less likely to question your own goals and methods. (*cough* Jobs *cough*)
If true (a big "if"), it would play to stereotypes that the poor view the rich as successful criminals, and the rich see the poor as weak and shiftless.
We have at least some confirmation of this in that a number of successful conservatives have changed from anti-LGBTQ to pro-LGBTQ when their daughter or son came out. Their empathy simply doesn't extend beyond their close associations, while "bleeding heart liberals" empathize with people in far away countries whom they've never met, and possibly never heard of until recently.
I'm pretty sure -- no, make that REALLY SURE -- that's not the definition of Communism.
Not only that, but the most dedicated Communists have always been the educated children of the middle and upper classes.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Is an issue of perception; it has nothing to do with intelligence quotients or any other measurable tests. The "sapiophile" is losing ground and in times like these, people lean more towards ideology ("--ism") rather than objectivity. In other words, scientists are trying to be perceived in the same light as Confucius or Socrates and taking advantage of the grey areas of Multiple Intelligence Theory (Gardner) when wisdom is existential, even if ironically that means having to realize it's in the same class as logical fallacy.
The study is invalid. The participants are recruited from Mechanical Turk. Just how many rich and successful people are looking for work on there?
Moreover, the effect seems to be much stronger for those with some college than a bachelors. Which the authors didn't address at all.
Not to mention the ridiculous definition of "wise".
"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. "
As a poll worker ("volunteer": they paid us, about 1/10 of a day's pay for an 18-hour day), I totally agree with the idea of consistent and reliable ID methods.
So you are half right. But it's the thin and weak half.
Those of us who were born into families with the basic resources to give us a good start were able to spend the effort to set up drivers licenses (the typical ID) which are trivial to renew once set up. To us, it does not appear to be a very high bar.
"Conservatives" are careful to avoid, and have largely successfully avoided an important point: There are many people who would otherwise be fully capable were born to families so far down that they could not get that start. And from that position, they often do not have the resources to get the legal documents that get the ball rolling.
Countries with good quality voter ID laws/practices do not erect the legal impediments to getting that initial start, and their citizens do not experience the disenfranchisement that we see in too many places in the U.S.
because he can't say 'Rich people become assholes'. For one thing odds are good he works for a corporation run by rich people. For another thing, anything that would suggest class warfare exists in America (it does) is taboo. So he dances around the issue, rather poorly I might add.
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"First, they asked 2145 people throughout the United States to take an online survey"
This is a survey of people who have nothing better to do.
The Moneylenders in the temple say screw the libtard poor
They were money CHANGERS, not money lenders.
The story of JC driving the "money lenders" from the temple is TOTALLY MISUNDERSTOOD by most people, and even many theologists. The lesson they take away is that JC wanted to "keep the temple holy", but the actual point was the exact opposite. At the time, mainstream Judaism was obsessed with "purity" rituals, and people would change their soiled and worn money for clean and polished money (paying a premium to do so) so they could make an offering with "clean" money. But JC was objecting to the "purity" rather than the "commerce", and was expressing the Essene philosophy of getting back to basics, and doing away with purity and ritual. He wanted to make the temple more accessible to the common people.
but that's not why he won. He won on economic populism; by promising the government would solve people's problems. His speeches where chock full of socialist rhetoric. Those ideas are overwhelmingly popular, it's just people don't like to admit to them. It's like this: get a room full of people together and ask them what kind of coffee they like and they'll tell you they want a bold, rich roast. But look at coffee says and what people actually drink and, well, you've got Starbucks frappachinnos and the like. See here. Yeah, it's a Ted Talk, and worse Malcolm Gladwell, but his points are solid (also not his).
tl;dr; It's not racism, it's the economy stupid. That's important because if you start thinking it's racism you'll try to solve the wrong problem, and Trump and his ilk will keep on winning.
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Making money by treating people like shit doesn't make you successful in my book. It just makes you an asshole.
When a recession hits, the "asshole" CED will immediately lay off 10% of his workforce.
The "nice" CEO will delay and dither while his finances deteriorate, and eventually have to lay off 20-30%, or possibly go bankrupt.
Not putting off hard decisions out of empathy is one reason that psychopaths often make better leaders.
It does make people successful in the economy's book though, and that's the book that keeps track of who can afford what. Our economic system is completely indifferent to assholery or suffering.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The end of next year, most likely.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Captain Stoic was glad to help.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
W.T.F.? From the article: "Participants were asked to remember a recent conflict they had with someone, such as an argument with a spouse or a fight with a friend. ... or any conflict."
Conflict can be anything from arguing about what t.v. show to watch to your neighbor jumping the hedge and beating the crap out of you because he doesn`t like the way you rake your leaves. (Or anything else).
Data was collected via online poll! ...really? LOL.
Is this really "the cutting edge in wisdom research"?
This is not science. It's a sad joke.
You are excluding the possibility that many successful people succeed because of their lack of empathy, not despite it.
Get off your moral high horse. It's not that they don't have empathy, it's that they don't allow their decision making process to be exclusively dominated by it. People who make decisions exclusively based on emotions do not fare as well as those who also mix in rational thinking. Rational thinking coupled with extensive knowledge and experience can do remarkable things that emotions alone cannot.
We still live in a world of economic scarcity unfortunately and as such you must make decisions according to that. When we arrive at a utopia, which I sincerely hope we do, it will fundamentally alter the decision making and it will be rational to behave the way you ideally think we should. We are not your enemy.
We'll make great pets
Seems plausible. An empathetic business owner experiencing a slowdown might be less willing to lay off employees, for example. That alone would serve as a filter, making less empathetic people more likely to be financially successful.
And that's the filter that helps to select which businesses actually stay in business, keeping people employed - even if not all of them, in a down-turn - rather than everyone losing their jobs and the company going under. Ask the majority of people still working at National Geographic if they'd rather have the paycheck they're currently getting from Evil Awful Murdoch who bailed them out and kept the company alive, or have watched NatGeo go completely down in flames and be gone for good along with ALL of the jobs it supported.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Not quite right. As I understand it, they were required to pay in the coinage accepted by the temple, which meant they had to give gifts in Jewish currency, not Roman or Greek currency. It had nothing to do with making the money pure, but rather with converting it to a form that the church would accept. And because they were far from home and did not have the advantage of knowing where to find good conversion rates, those money changers cheated them massively.
So it was, indeed, about making the temple pure from those who would prey upon the naïveté of foreigners, while at the same time sending their soldiers to attack other nations for theft and barbarity. The hypocrisy was what Jesus wanted to cleanse from the temple, along with the unethical commerce.
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...dumbasses aren't coddled. They end up on the streets and die of that. It's the last bastion of natural selection in humans.
When you have money, regardless of the amount, just that you're better off than someone else, the money gives you options others don't have. Go way far up the spectrum, and you see wealthy people living in sealed enclaves with security to protect them from having to deal with anyone. Way down the spectrum, you get people scratching and hustling just to get by from day to day...and they have to navigate their way around situations. Wealthy people apply the amount of money necessary to make a situation disappear. Pierce Harrington III will probably get off with a warning if the police find a brick of cocaine in his car, but a poor person would really have to do some fancy dancing just to get a shorter prison sentence.
Even 20 years ago I saw this in academia as well. State university students (like me) had to deal with 20,000 person campuses and courses with 400 students in them. It was only when I got into the upper division of my major that class sizes started reaching sane levels. And on top of that, no one cares but you if you fail, don't go to class, etc...you also need to become good at navigating a bureaucracy similar to a state agency. The situation is a little different at small, $60K/year private schools...basically, getting into one of these elite schools is the prize and the ride is a lot smoother from that point on for students. IMO, coming from experience working with both types, I think the private school grads may have a broader education, but lack the ability to deal with people and day-to-day situations because a lot of this is abstracted away.
It's basically the difference between book smart and street smart. I interact with a lot of faculty and Ph. D. students (live in a college town,) and street smarts for some of these folks is extremely low.
I don't think we need a study to tell us that rich people are some of the most awful human beings on the planet. I mean, even the bible says that rich people suck ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The study defined wisdom as a characteristic of followers rather than leaders and than found that underlings rather than boses posess it. If one is constantly vaccilating between points of view based on every conversation with others, it's impossible to commit to one course of action for long enough to succeed, let alone organize others to assist you. Of course, society needs both kinds of people to function. But that's a separate question of what constitutes wisdom.
Making money by treating people like shit doesn't make you successful in my book. It just makes you an asshole.
Why can't it be both?
Rearing it's ugly head again.
Sorry, but being poor isn't a virtue. Nor is it something to condemn someone for.
It just is.
Yet some boob wants to claim that the poorer you are, the wiser you are.
Never mind that one has NOTHING to do with the other.
There are dumbasses in EVERY social strata.
Just like there are intelligent and caring people in every social strata.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
A wise man learns from other people's mistakes.
Tell yourself anything to justify your behavior. If you do something that increases suffering in the world, you are evil. Loaning money improves the world, but charging exorbitant interest from a poor person or making somebody starve who needed money for an emergency increases suffering.
It's called empathy. Who the hell is writing these articles?
Age is not a guarantee of wisdom, but it is a prerequisite.
Wisdom is not just knowledge. It goes far deeper than that. There are a lot of people who know a lot, but they're not necessarily wise. At the very least you have to know yourself and fully understand who you are.
I grew up dirt poor and now I'm old. According to this "study", I should be a very wise man. I'm not, but I do recognize wisdom when I see it. It's sad that I see so very little of it.
Khalil Gibran said something that I've always kept in my mind and tried to live by for most of my life. "Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children."
Marie Antoinette died over two hundred years ago. The aristocracy of France is even less similar to modern wealthy people than Andrew Jackson's duel is to modern presidential debates. (Then again, I suppose Dick Cheney did shoot somebody....)
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I believe this academic is confusing empathy with wisdom, not the same thing. Of course, the chronic psychopaths usually occupy the highest positions: hence the labor history throughout America and the planet of murdering labor organizers, union organizers and protesters and journalists, etc.
Exactly!!!!!!!
No, I'm speaking psychologically, not morally. CEOs, especially at the biggest companies, have much higher concentrations of sociopathy than the general public. It's a neurology that has many advantages, but also plenty of disadvantages. However, because politics tends to attract a similar level of sociopathy, the immediate effects of those disadvantages can be deferred.
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Yeah, but screwing over other people to get on top plays out more often. The way more empathetic cultures handle that is that the EXECUTIVES take pay cuts, but even thinking that will get you thrown out of a boardroom.
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This study is beneath notice, but I do have one thing to add.
In The Baroque Cycle Stephenson satirizes the myopic culture of Versailles. The higher up one goes in status, the smaller the tea leaf microscope required.
While a few of the noblemen (and women) are relative dunderheads, there's no shortage of nested-plot mastermind decoders.
Studies of adolescent culture have determined that the kids with the highest social status experience the most severe anxiety about committing a social blunder.
Just like Versailles.
(Also, remember that result next time you chuckle mindlessly about scientists doing a study which only managed to confirm the patently obvious.)
The Fonz might seem cool to those around him, but deep down he's mainly driven by hair gel OCD.
Wise people don't answer surveys. That explains these stupid findings.
Just another day in Paradise
> Not quite right.
You simply understand nothing about Judaism. The bit about purity is pretty spot on and even is relevant to modern Conservative and Orthodox practice.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
NO solution "scales". All human systems and systems in general scale poorly. So you are better of not trying to make them huge, unmanageable, inefficient, and prone to corruption.
In practice, education is very much highly distributed in this country.
It makes someone like DeVos far less relevant than the media tries to make her. She is pretty much the first "celebrity" to run that department since it was founded by Carter.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Successful people are much more likely to see the view and perspective of other people.
Don't kid yourself snowflake.
You just think you're smarter than everyone else and it annoys the hell out of people. It also amuses those of us who have a wider set of life experiences.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You are pushing the classical modernist fallacy.
People don't change. It's the same shit over and over again. Fancy new toys and technology really don't change anything. The same basic things that drive people now drove them 5000 years ago.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In the USA, Obamacaid (Medicaid as expanded by the ACA) and SNAP (food aid, formerly the Food Stamp Program) are available to the underemployed as well as to the unemployed.
No, rational thinking would lead you to cut the military budget and corporate subsidies, since they have far less utility to society. All that's needed to maintain Social Security's stability is to raise the cap, making it less of a regressive tax. The reason Republicans and Centrist Dems want to cut or "reform" Social Security is to cover for the money they've wasted elsewhere.
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It's awfully (in)convenient that Jesus never seem to clearly spell out what the fuck he means or tries to accomplish, in the New Testament. So fucking ambiguous the whole thing, no wonder it's the source of so many wars and strife.
Not to mention, none of it really happened.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Get off your moral high horse. It's not that they don't have empathy,
Actually, I read several research papers, a few years ago, which found that richer people are indeed less empathetic than poor ones.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
At a fundamental human level, yes, but that doesn't mean the society is similar, and the discussion is, IMO, more about the nature of society than about the nature of people. These days, there isn't a ruling class that is completely isolated from the rest of society by layers of servants. Now there might be a few people who are rich enough and choose to isolate themselves like that, but those folks for the most part aren't running things; they're just nuisances, and aren't the norm among the wealthy by any means.
And in that era, only the rich were educated at all, typically. These days, although there are educational differences between the rich and the poor, the education level of even the average poor person today in most ways vastly exceeds the education level of the richest people in that era. It's an entirely different society in a lot of critical ways.
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Let me clarify that. They wouldn't except non-Jewish coinage because of purity reasons, but it wasn't that the money was unclean, but rather that they considered that form of currency to be inherently unclean (graven images). My point is that they didn't screw the locals who used the local currency—only the foreigners. It's a subtle, but IMO important distinction.
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Not that this movie proves anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Trading Places is a 1983 American comedy film directed by John Landis, starring Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. It tells the story of an upper-class commodities broker and a homeless street hustler whose lives cross paths when they are unknowingly made part of an elaborate bet."
But it is suggestive that when financial stress is added or removed from a life, some stress-related behavior may change.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I respectfully disagree with this paper's definition of Wisdom.
This study is measuring empathy, not Wisdom. Empathy is being able to place yourself in someone else' shoes. Wisdom is being able to predict the consequences of decisions in advance and use those predictions to make decisions.
Given the preposterous number of tote-the-note car lots, payday loan shops, and Tobacco/Beer/Crackpipe stores one can reasonably infer that wisdom strongly negatively correlates with decreases in social class.
Perhaps the word "wisdom" means something different in Canadian English?
And the weak do what they must.
At my college, I became friendly with one of the security guards after he saved my life. He found me unconscious and laying on the ground. Turned out I had a life threatening infection and never knew. Well, we were talking one day and I had it out with my dad. I swore I would never make the same mistakes with my child when I have one. I swore that I would be a better father. Officer Joe looked me in the eye and said, "You won't make the same mistakes. You're right about that. You'll make all new ones. Have gratitude, not hate in your heart." 20 years later, after health issues, personal and professional failure, and heart ache, I'm now working as a security guard. I decided to become a security guard after thinking of Officer Joe. It's a hand to mouth existence but I've never felt more wealthy and freer. It took me 20 years of lost time that I won't ever get back, but I learned a lesson most never learn in their life times.
This research comports with other research that shows the more wealth a person has, the less empathy they exhibit. So, "considering the opinion of others" seems to resonate with higher empathy scores for poor people. In a way, this research is supporting research showing wealth accumulation reduces empathy for those of lesser means.
is a much better teacher than any other college!
"It seemed like a good idea at the time"
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
This is so incredibly stupid that only someone with a Ph.D. could have come up with it. Someone, I might add, who's never actually spent any time in the company of the "lower classes." And most of the commentators here are just as bad. BTW, I grew up in a household that lived in one room for much of my first decade. I've actually worked and lived with the people you talk about. Trust me, there are so very hard nosed practical people out there, but there are a bunch and not a minority that are as ignorant as the day is long.
If you're rich enough, you can afford proxies to handle purchases for you to avoid retaliation for your assholery. See: Donald Trump and his secret fast-food gofers.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, I'm speaking psychologically, not morally.
Yes it's psychological. Just because it's psychological doesn't mean it's not being rationally and purposefully chosen. If you were a rational thinker that was in complete control of their decision making process you would already know this is possible. People like me can choose anything we like based on any reasoning. Our minds are fully under our control and what I'm telling you is that when everything is considered in an unbiased, rational way, the choices that get made, based on the circumstances, are what makes the most sense. It's not the people that are usually the problem (that does happen sometimes though). It's the circumstances. If you change the circumstances, everything will change organically around it. The problem is primarily the circumstances. Attack the problem, not the people.
We'll make great pets
No, rational thinking would lead you to cut the military budget and corporate subsidies, since they have far less utility to society.
If we gave society everything they wanted with zero regard for how much it cost to provide those benefits, the country would disintegrate very quickly and no one would get anything. That's not a good rational choice or a good outcome. You need to look at the big picture from a macro-economic point of view. You need to ask yourself a fundamental question "What does it take in order for a country to continue to functional without either being taken over, revolution or something else that would cause the country to cease to be." When you start looking at macro-economics you realize countries like China own a significant portion of our debt. If we default on our debt, our credit rating gets lowered (again). This has ripple effects throughout the global economy and often not in a favorable way to us.
We'll make great pets
Actually, I read several research papers, a few years ago, which found that richer people are indeed less empathetic than poor ones.
It's more along the lines of people who realize what "kindness that can kill" is. I'd say the people you are speaking of are quite charitable probably more so than your average citizen, you just hold them to higher standards really for arbitrary reasons. This is when you declare they are not "empathetic enough" but they probably have more empathy and give more than you do.
We'll make great pets
lol, thanks for the laugh. Successful people get their success by cutting others off, stepping on them, sabotaging, etc.
Welcome to reality. I'm sorry you're disappointed with it but it's always been survival of the fittest. Competition for mates and resources. Your complaint is not with your fellow humans but with reality itself. If you figure out where to register such a complaint, let me know. I wish to complain about a great many things myself. I do really hope we arrive at utopia some day. It's never happened in the history of human civilization yet so complaining about that is quite irrational. You have it better today than any humans have had it ever in our entire history. It's ironic that no one seems to be the least bit thankful for that. I wish they would invent time machines so people like you could live a week or do in Medieval Europe and see how you like it compared to your life now.
We'll make great pets
http://www.newser.com/story/17... ...
Unwise to leap from correlation to causality without further investigation. The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure. - William Blake
How the hell did you jump from "stop the most blatant corruption" to "gave society everything they wanted with zero regard for how much it cost to provide those benefits?" I'm talking about the stuff that has the lowest cost-to-benefit ratio being the rational thing to cut.
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Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you suffered from such enormous delusions that you actually think that "homo economicus" exists instead of emotional bald apes in suits.
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