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Class Warfare, in the Air and on the Ground
From the Economist, a report on studies about how economic privilege creates corruption:
Cycling one morning over the East Bay Hills, Professor Dacher Keltner had a near-death experience. “I was riding my bike to school,” he recalls, “and I came to a four-way intersection. I had the right of way, and this black Mercedes just barreled through.”
So he decided to do some research to figure out if rich people — i.e., Mercedes drivers — really were thoughtless and nasty. Turns out, yes:
In some experiments Keltner and his collaborators put participants from a variety of income brackets to the test; in others, they “primed” subjects to feel less powerful or more powerful by asking them to think about people more or less powerful than themselves, or to think about times when they felt strong or weak. The results all stacked the same way. People who felt powerful were less likely to be empathetic; wealthy subjects were more likely to cheat in games involving small cash stakes and to dip their fists into a jar of sweets marked for the use of visiting children. When watching a video about childhood cancer they displayed fewer physiological signs of empathy.
Not so fast, comrade. Those findings may fit a particular, progressive, world view, but they aren’t truly scientific:
When Keltner and his colleagues published an influential paper on the subject in 2010, three European academics, Martin Korndörfer, Stefan Schmukle and Boris Egloff, wondered if it would be possible to reproduce the findings of small lab-based experiments using much larger sets of data from surveys carried out by the German state. The idea was to see whether this information, which documented what people said they did in everyday life, would offer the same picture of human behaviour as results produced in the lab. “We simply wanted to replicate their results,” says Boris Egloff, “which seemed very plausible to us and fine in every possible sense.” The crunched numbers, however, declined to fit the expected patterns. Taken cumulatively, they suggested the opposite. Privileged individuals, the data suggested, were proportionally more generous to charity than their poorer fellow citizens; more likely to volunteer; more likely to help a traveller struggling with a suitcase or to look after a neighbour’s cat.
Members of Ricochet, the following paragraph will not surprise you:
Egloff and his colleagues wrote up their findings and sent them to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which had also published Keltner’s work. “We thought,” says Egloff, “naive as we were, that this might be interesting for the scientific community.” The paper was rejected. They extended their analysis to data from America and other countries, and felt confident that they had identified several more pieces that didn’t fit the jigsaw being assembled by their American peers… Their paper was rejected again.
Egloff … was shocked by the hostility towards his work. “I am not on a crusade,” he says. “I am not rich. My family is not rich. My friends are not rich. We never received any money from any party for doing this research. Personally I would have loved the results of the Berkeley group to be true. That would be nice and would provide a better fit to my personal and political beliefs and my worldview. However, as a scientist…” The experience of going against this particular intellectual grain was so painful that Egloff vows never to study the topic of privilege and ethics again.
And this one really won’t surprise you:
In September 2015, five social psychologists and a sociologist published a paper in the Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences that suggested why psychology might show privileged people in a bad light. Left-wing opinion, contended Jonathan Haidt and his co-authors, was over-represented in psychology faculties. This, they suspected, might be distorting experimental findings – as well as making campus life difficult for researchers with socially conservative views. “The field of social psychology is at risk of becoming a cohesive moral community,” they warned. “Might a shared moral-historical narrative in a politically homogeneous field undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends? We think so.” So does Boris Egloff. “It was a great and timely paper,” he says. “I congratulate them on their courage.” But it came too late for him. “We spoilt the good guys’ party,” he says.
Yes, it seems likely that results that conform to a rigid, dogmatic, and (inevitably, in a university) left-wing perspective will triumph over boring old facts.
So what, exactly, to make of this, from Forbes:
Katherine DeCelles from the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management and Michael Norton from Harvard analyzed an international airline’s database of thousands of incident reports, involving millions of flights. It found that cases of “air rage” are more frequent on flights when there’s a first class cabin. And the unruly and abusive behavior is more likely to occur in both first class and economy class when economy passengers have to walk through the first class section while boarding.
Internal sirens go off at the phrase, “a new study by researchers…” And we’re starting to see a pattern here:
Taking that humbling walk past those already seated in first class becomes a clear reinforcement of their “relatively disadvantaged status,” the authors wrote, which can “prompt negative emotions and aggressive [behavior].” And the antisocial behavior can come from the haves as well as the have-nots.
And then:
The study also found that air rage among first class passengers increased when there were more first class seats, larger cabins, and delayed flights. The incidents in first class were more likely to involve a passenger being belligerent or angry. DeCelles calls this “entitled reactions.”
In economy class, the incidents tended to emotional outbursts, the result of stress, fear or frustration.
Which sounds, frankly, like the ways progressives talk about crime, too. Rich people are evil. Poor people are disadvantaged. And to cap it off:
With first class cabins getting more lush and larger, the risk of air rage could grow. “As both inequality and class-based airplane seating continue to rise, incidents of air rage may similarly climb in frequency,” the authors note.
Inequality! That’s what’s underneath it all!
Before I get too worked up about it, though, I’d like Dr. Egloff to run the numbers again, just to double-check.
Published in Culture
My father taught me as a kid that the most wealthy people achieve their success by making the lives of other people better.
As far as their assessment of power goes, it depends on how they arrived at that “power”; sons of successful capitalists tend to be less agreeable than their fathers. Handing out meaningless chips of wealth isn’t going to take into account the discipline and wisdom gained while in pursuit of greatness through competition and cooperation that occurs irl.
However, these new jobs of fluff provided by the government may be pushing a bunch of people into “Mercedes status” without putting in the work. I’m assuming that these fallacious studies are meant to generate ill will towards capitalism not towards rich people per se. I doubt celebrities and athletes are being questioned as to the existence of their altruism and courtesy.
What is the standard for economic affluence?
A lot of my friends drive luxury cars but still live with their parents. If I had the level of debt the majority of them have, I’d be a jerk on the road too.
This post makes me sad. There are too many things in the “study” that grind my gears that if I write it all my post will just be a disjointed mess of words.
Has the majority of the last generation just gone nuts all at once?
Why are fallacies their bread and butter?
I spend about 10 hours a week riding my bicycle over the roads in my area. Earlier in my life, when I lived in urban Seattle, I rode as much as 27 hour a week. I have a lot of experience with rude, potentially dangerous drivers. It would be very difficult to categorize them according to their particular wealth. More often, I would say that their rudeness was a by-product of their innate stupidity.
More recently, I have noted that people driving pick-up trucks seem to be the most intolerant and most willing to risk injury to a cyclist by stupidly driving too close when they have plenty of road to move over and nothing coming in the oncoming lane. I have tended to think of them as Trump supporters because they seem to bear a resemblance to that stereotyped, middle income, angry, White male we associate with Trump’s supporters. I don’t know if that is fair or not. I haven’t seen any Trump bumperstickers on any of the trucks that have chosen to drive too close when other cars have given me a wide berth. However, I would definitely not associate rude, self-centered behaviors on the road with anything having to do with wealth or the driving of a high end car. Like the researcher noted in the beginning, I have been at a lot of 4-way stops, and there I have found few understand the rules of the road.
In my life experience I have found that it is not the truly wealthy who express a sense of noblesse oblige but rather those who have newly acquired what they think of as wealth. They come in all shades. When teaching I met people whose income was not particularly impressive to anyone but themselves, but their attitudes projected a sense that they were somehow “better.” The acquisition of expensive “toys” seemed to bestow on them a sense of “having arrived.” There is a lot of that going around. The standards by which one attained the status of nouveau riche have definitely dropped.
We all think there is some truth in this because we’ve all know out of control rich kids, but it can’t be got at with these kinds of experiments or with statistics because it’s capturing other variables, obviously not income, such a notion is absurd. One of the unmeasured variables is accountability. If a kid is so rich or his rich parents so busy or poor parents so absent, or so drugged out, that the child isn’t held accountable for his behavior you get a brat, perhaps a dangerous brat. (For a rich dad contrast listen to the uncommon knowledge Robinson interview with Koch.) Kids have to be civilized by their parents. It helps to have at least one parent in the home so that sufficient income to allow a full time parent should work to improve statistical results with a large sample. Being abandoned by a father works in the other direction but there are always exceptions, think Dr. Carson’s heroic mom, or Justice Thomas grandfather. But income?
I was discussing this article with my driver and I asked him, “Juan, do we ever come close to hitting these bicycle people?” He replied, “Never close, sir, we are right on the money, every time.”
To which I said, “Quite.”
If you miss with the bumper, you can always get ’em with the door.
You don’t often find a ‘Juan’ who talks like Jeeves. The agency that provides your domestic service needs must be really good.
I take it you three are supporters of the Great Pumpkin. I would expect no less. That is why I carry a small auto in the backpocket of my jersey. When decency fails to rule the day, lead is a good negotiator.
Unfortunately, I work in a court where social scientists (or counselors, more specifically) are treated like royalty. It is extremely frustrating, especially for one with my philosophical outlook…
I doubt it. But if you’ve done a study…
I know I was a more generous person when we barely could make ends meet than I became after I had a decent income and assets to look after.
I’ve noticed that nasty pickup drivers are more frequent the closer I ride to East Lansing (a university town). There are several possible explanations.
I agree about wealth not dictating, and certainly if I see a cycle or any other pedestrian I move as far over as I can…
But I also think the most idiotic thing a person can do is ride a bicycle on a road full of heavy cars. And Seattle cyclists are the worst. It’s like me walking into a hockey rink and complaining because people don’t think I should be there.
We should go for safety and security instead of living a life of joy and risks. We should vote for Hillary. It’s the conservative way.
Drivers give everything driven by a woman more room.
:-0
Cyclists should, in a just and moral world, have their fingers and toes removed and then sold to zoos to feed small carnivorous reptiles.
You have just disqualified much of what passes for “hard” science these days. See Climate Change. And the 50% or so irreproducible result rate.
Depends on whether the driver has good eyesight, and whether the woman in question is easy on the eyes.
Indeed. Indeed…
What would we use then to signal to drivers? (SUVs are for security-maniac Democrats; bicycles are for free-enterprise conservatives.)
Ryan, I pay taxes the same as you do for the roads. I own two motor vehicles, though I put a lot more miles on my bike these days than on my two other vehicles combined. I would admit that Seattle seems to have given rise to some pretty absurd young people. However, there are a lot of us, very likely, the vast majority who both ride bicycles and drive cars, so we are quite aware of the rules of the road and obey them. There are quite a few drivers who, convinced of your particular view, think that they justified in driving aggressively around cyclists rather than sharing the road as the law stipulates. The roads aren’t a hockey match. They are for the use of ALL vehicles, motor and human powered, and have rules governing that use. Where I ride in rural Pierce county there are rarely more than a very few cars, but, despite that, some drivers still feel it is their right to be rude and dangerous toward cyclists whenever the opportunity arises. Most have no more reason to hate cyclists than do racists to hate minorities.
Are you a Trump supporter? Just asking!
Nope, they ride tricycles.
We prefer unicycles actually – helps us fit in better in the GOP circus.
Irrespective of privilege, had that been a Saab, Professor Keltner would be fully dead. Saab drivers are without question the worst, and have better aim.
No. Does he ride a bicycle?
This is pretty harsh. I think my anti-bicyclist bias has a firm grounding in reality. I have seen more bicyclists run red lights and stop signs in the past year than I have seen cars do the same in my entire life. And if you cast that in terms of percentages, it’s not even close. Of course there are plenty of bicyclists who obey traffic laws, myself included. But there are such a high proportion who don’t.
I would say that you need to keep in mind that the average age of cyclists is a factor in your subjective data along with such things as location. Younger riders are more likely to be scofflaws than more mature riders. I would guess that there are likely more young riders than older riders (here I am referring to serious cyclists, not the occasional weekend rider). Whatever the case, however, it is simply prejudicial to judge cyclists as a group by the action of a few. Making inherently stupid statements about hitting them or opening your car door, even said in kidding, isn’t particularly bright. There are those out there, certainly a small minority, but enough who might actually think that is a suggestion worth trying out. In an accident with a car, a bike rider is going to be much worse for wear than a driver of a car.
Not to belabor the point too much, but I ride over a hundred and twenty-five miles a week. I see a lot of stupid behavior by drivers. I see a lot of really good driving skills as well. I see very considerate people, and those who need to have their noses pushed in, and would if they weren’t surrounded by several tons of steel.
I can’t answer for stupid riders. I only ask that you judge each rider on his/her own merits the same way you judge other drivers. I used to commute by car 50 miles each way to go to work. I saw incredible stupidity on a daily basis. A lot of those cyclists you are complaining about may well display the same behaviors behind the wheel of a car that they do on a bike. It isn’t the vehicle. It is the person running it. However, keep in mind that in almost any accident involving a bicycle and a car, the driver of the car is going to be held responsible. In even a very minor accident the damages can be enormous financially. The replacement cost for my bike is $10K. Physical injuries can be a large multiple of that. I have probably ridden in excess of 150,000 miles on my bikes. I have had close calls with unobservant drivers or just rude ones, but I have never had an accident. How many car drivers can say the same?