Does Having Money Make One Insensitive?

An article excerpted from New York Magazine - It explains to me a lot of things....

In a windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, two undergrads are playing a Monopoly game that one of them has no chance of winning. A team of psychologists has rigged it so that skill, brains, savvy, and luck—those ingredients that ineffably combine to create success in games as in life—have been made immaterial. Here, the only thing that matters is money.

One of the players, a brown-haired guy in a striped T-shirt, has been made “rich.” He got $2,000 from the Monopoly bank at the start of the game and receives $200 each time he passes Go. The second player, a chubby young man in glasses, is comparatively impoverished. He was given $1,000 at the start and collects $100 for passing Go. T-Shirt can roll two dice, but Glasses can only roll one, limiting how fast he can advance. The students play for fifteen minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall in another windowless room, the researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording in a giant spreadsheet the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.

T-Shirt isn’t just winning; he’s crushing Glasses. Initially, he reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. “Hey,” his expression seemed to say, “this is weird and unfair, but whatever.” Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate. He’s a skinny kid, but he balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece (in the experiment, the wealthy player gets the Rolls-Royce) as he makes the circuit—smack, smack, smack—­ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang! Four minutes in, he picks up Glasses’s piece, the little elf shoe, and moves it for him. As the game nears its finish, T-Shirt moves his Rolls faster. The taunting is over now: He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet Glasses’s gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash.

.... Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people."

Piff’s most notorious research seemed to demonstrate the extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them. Last year, he spent three months hanging out at the ­intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway, near the Berkeley Marina. It’s a gritty, busy corner with a four-way stop that might be anywhere, if “anywhere” were in Northern California. On the brilliant day that I visited this spring, purple wildflowers were clustered along the highway’s shoulder, and a bike path meandered through them. Piff and his research team would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs near the Sea Breeze Market and Deli, and catalogue the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (Five would be a new-model Mercedes, say, and one would be an old, battered Honda like the one Piff drives.) Then the researchers would observe the drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a complete stop—a violation, he reminds readers in his PNAS study, of the ­California ­Vehicle Code. “Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex, and amount of traffic.” When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers’ regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering. Like New Yorkers rushing past that stroller mom on their way to work, fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. “It’s like they didn’t even see them,” Piff told me.

Two thousand miles away, in her lab at the University of Minnesota, Vohs does experiments indicating that merely thinking about money can decrease empathy. Vohs is a 38-year-old psychologist who was inspired to study the effects of money on social behavior nine years ago, when she left a junior faculty position where she was making $32,000 a year, and started working at a Canadian business school, where she earned five times that much. Suddenly she was no longer asking her friends for rides to the airport. She hired a personal shopper. “I was becoming more independent and less interdependent,” she says. This led her to the next thought: “We need to understand at a theoretical level what happens to people’s minds in the context of wealth.”


In experiments she published in the journal Science in 2006, Vohs “primed” her subjects to think about money, which is to say she planted the idea of money in their minds without their knowledge before observing their social interactions compared with a control group. In one case, she asked participants to wait alone in a room at a big table, which happened to be strewn with gold, green, and burnt-orange Monopoly bills. After ten minutes, she’d get the subject, take him to a different room, and ask him to fill out piles of questionnaires seeking detailed psychological ­information. The point was to muddle the subject’s mind: He knew he was ­participating in an experiment but had no idea what he was being tested for.
 
Vohs got her result only after the ­subject believed the session was over. Heading for the door, he would bump into a person whose arms were piled ­precariously high with books and office supplies. That person (who worked for Vohs) would drop 27 tiny yellow pencils, like those you get at a mini-golf course. Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group. In a conversation in her office in May, Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious—just disinterested. “It’s not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic,” she said. “I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.”

New Articles

Sugya for Teruma here .
Tetzave here.
Geshmak!

New Blog - Check It Out!

I enthusiastically promote the new blog [not that he needs my promotion] of a prominent talmid chacham and mechanech in Yerushalayim [and now my relative through marriage] , HaRav Zave Rudman, who was a Rebbi of mine [no I didn't study in Michlala or Tomer Dvorah, they pashut wouldn't accept me - he also taught in Yeshiva and was a Rosh Kollel], in my early years. It can be found  here.

Stay Away

Parents-in-law: please stay away. Work on your own relationship instead of meddling in your child’s. Countless marriages get dissolved, or are at least soured, by in-laws who offer free advice. Parents need to stay away and children need to have the strength to tell their parents, “thanks, but no thanks.”


From "Klal Perspectives"

More On Women's Issues

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_funny.html#02MCsWobJwzHxts1.99

"Gets your facts straight first.
Then distort them as you wish"

Mark Twain

More on tefillin donning women here.

A general thought. When the Bnos Tzlafchad requested a portion in Eretz Yisrael, their request was granted. It is often not the request that makes the difference but the people asking. The Bnos Tzlafchad were holy pious women.

My daughter is a 12th grader in a Beis Yaakov in Yerushalayim. She and her friends have no desire to: Wear tfillin, learn gemara, make kiddush, read from the Torah etc. etc. etc. Are they spiritually deficient?

No. They are merely serving Hashem as they were taught and are not influenced by external feminist ideals. If they would come out of the blue and say "We daven every day, say tehillim, dress bi-tzniyus, perform chesed, help at home etc. etc. but there is something missing. Maybe when no one is watching we can taste a little of the gemara that gets boys so excited as maybe it will help us better serve Hashem" then I would perk up. When a girl is completely detached from Facebook, Internet, Iphones, secular newspapers and magazines etc. etc. and has a pure desire for kirvas Elokim then she is on the right road, But strangely enough, the last 40 years of feminist rancor demanding increased religious practice for women comes primarily [if not completely] from women [and the no less vocal men] who don't even keep what they are obligated in.



If I were a principal and a girl asked to wear tfillin I would tell her, first סור מרע - if you have a sincere desire to get close to Hashem then stop using Internet [unless you are checking R' Ehrman's blog], wear stockings, daven at least twice a day and stop attending coed activities. A girl will have a bat mitzvah and read from the Torah. Then for the party she and her friends will be on the dance floor with boys at a discotheque. But their parents will claim and even convince the girls that everything is completely halachic. Hmmmmmm. A Beis Yaakov [or similar minded] girl isn't so holy. She doesn't read from the Torah or even get an aliyah - but she is also not boogeying with the boys. Ahhhhhhh.



Sweetest friends, my vocabulary is far too inadequate to describe how [often innocently] misguided people are. I include the many who go on vacations described in the advertisements as complete immersions in olam ha-zeh including many issurim ..... with a daily daf yomi. Can't forget the daf yomi. I am happy that yidden learn daf yomi. I am less happy that they don't perceive the internal contradiction that they are living. It is not only that frum people go to these places that bothers me - it is that they are not embarrassed.



[Note - If someone wants to disagree, then feel free to do so. But I don't obligate myself to answer every email. Life is too short for fruitless arguments. What I do suggest is that a person immerse him or herself in kdusha for a few years, divorced from filth of this world and then see if their attitudes change. A person in the [spiritual] mud often doesn't realize how dirty he is. וד"ל. ]

Love and blessings:-).

New Shiurim!

Getting close to Hashem  - tradition and personal effort, here.
Phenomenal study in diyukei Rashi here.
Deeep insights into tfilla, here.

Is Now Good?

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

We live in a "now" generation. Everything has to be right now. Lunch? 15 seconds in the micro. A phone call? The phone is in my pocket and I will call my friend whose phone is in his pocket. NOW! Even Moshiach is NOW. We want Moshiach now!

A secret beloved friends: Good things don't come NOW. They come after long, hard work and often suffering. There are no short-cuts.

The geulah, both personal and global, will come. But only when we are good and ready.