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But psychology has only recently begun seriously investigating how having money, that major marker of status in the modern world, affects psychosocial behavior in the species Homo sapiens. No. Two things. First, taking this study and applying it to "money" is very correlative, and a decent leap considering the methods for the study. The real value of this study, if there's any at all, is about someone having huge unfair advantages in a general sense; having freedom to treat someone however you want because they don't have the means to rebel. And second, the examination of this isn't new at all. Heart of Darkness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now, King Leopold's Ghost, tons and tons of artists have examined what happens when someone has an unfair advantage without consequence; those are just some I plucked quickly, but there are so many. I'm not saying the point is completely invalid. In a lot of cases, money gives people the exact freedom, privilege, and less-restrained power that leads to this behavior. But saying "Research suggests more money makes people less human" based on a rigged monopoly game where the other person is severely relatively handicapped is...a bit of a leap, to say the least. The other studies mentioned in the article don't sound very convincing, either. quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people Quizzes/questionnaires are notoriously prone to being bullshit, like the China Study's questionnaires including "Pizza" as meat and the book going on to draw correlations between its definitions of "meat" and diseases like cancer. I'd way rather see more info on the "in-lab manipulations and field studies", it was only touched on briefly, it seemed. |