In this video, two Berkeley Psychology professors (Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff) demonstrate the psychology of wealth. The video starts with a speculation that a person in a luxurious car is less likely to stop for pedestrians than a person in an "average" car. In the video Paul Piff guides us through some social experiments.The first was having students from a variety of income brackets wait in a room and have someone tell the person to wait in the room and tell them to feel free to have some candy on the table meant for children in another study. In this mini experiment, it was seen that the student from higher income brackets would take more candy from the bowl than students from lower income brackets.
In another experiment, Paul Piff has 2 subjects play a game of monopoly. However, the game is fixed so that one person will be wealthier and have an obvious advantage over the other. The "wealthier" subject would begin to act more arrogantly, they would eat more the pretzels in the table, talk more directly to the other player. The most significant finding was that the person who was wealthier would feel more entitled to their winnings even though they were given an advantage over their opponent.
In my PE I will be working with Summer Bridge, this video helps me recognize the reason why injustices keep occur so that people of color continue to be marginalized. The social psychology of wealth makes wealthier people act so, so that they can continue their enjoy their wealth while marginalizing others.
http://www.upworthy.com/take-two-normal-people-add-money-to-just-one-of-them-and-watch-what-happens-next?c=ufb3
Thank you for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI definitely remembered the study about the cars. I think it was Professor Roy who talked about the study in GPP 115. However, I have not heard of the other two studies before. Reading the different studies made me think about my experience of playing poker with my partner's family. I am a newbie to poker and do not play it very much at all. Thus, I have no experience in what betting was and how much. However, I do realize that the players who tend to win more and have more chips are more careless about the amount of chips that they have; they make more bets and they bet much more than the players who do not have a lot of chips. I just thought that this was very interesting and is very much related to the topic that you brought up here, in terms of how the wealthier enjoys their wealth. I think that a lot of their behavior comes from the notion of having power, meaning that the more chips they have, the more power they have in the game. For example, a player with a lot of chips may bet a lot just to discourage the players with fewer chips from betting. This is indicative of how they take advantage of their wealth and use it to marginalize the poor.
I have also heard of this study before and the element of entitlement that this study associates with the more wealthy. In one of the other courses I am taking this semester we attribute much of this sense of entitlement rooting in upbringing. One of our readings Unequal Childhoods, by Annette Lareau, presented the idea of how cultural capital is respective to the family and surrounding community an individual is brought up in. Cultural capital is defined as the "tools" and attitude, such as speech, dress, appearance, and other non-financial factors that promote social mobility. The book focuses on the differences in how children from poor backgrounds and middle class backgrounds fair differently that one another as a result of differences in cultural capital. In conclusion, Lareau found that the children of wealthier families were equipped with the cultural capital that proved to more beneficial in most mainstream formal and sometimes informal institutions.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to this study, while I do not believe that all wealthier people aim to marginalize others, I do recognize there is a degree of lacking awareness in terms of how some of these self-betterment actions can in turn hurt or disadvantage another person. I believe that there is more of encompassing bubble that certain individuals lack the interactions of those outside of those with similar status that the stunts understanding. This also reminds me to an extent of Professor Talwalker's piece we read, What Kind of Global Citizen is the Student Volunteer?, in which she delineates the types of individuals that tend to become the volunteers that she writes her observations about. The wealthy student is not the focus, as it is much more likely that individuals from middle and poor level homes will be much more likely to relate to the target group and hence feel more apt to help.