Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Defined as the obsessive pursuit and accumulation of wealth, greed is also known as one of the seven deadly sins. However, it may have a purpose, according to evolutionary psychologists. They believe that, by pushing us to amass status-signalling possessions, greed can help us attract a mate and thus perpetuate our genetic code.
I prefer to look at greed as a coping mechanism. In my interactions with greedy people, I have observed that many are trying to fill an inner void or solve another emotional problem. Sid was on the brink of divorce. His wife was fed-up with his self-centred pursuits. His grown-up children were not happy with him either, as he had never paid much attention to them. Sid admitted that chasing deals was the only thing that made him feel alive. He always felt the urge to earn more money. When I asked Sid why money was so central to his life, he told me that he grew up watching his entrepreneurial father go through several bankruptcies.
He remembered how embarrassed he was when his family would hide to avoid creditors. I told Sid that he should be pleased with his accomplishments. He was now independently wealthy and could do whatever he wanted. Early negative experiences with parents appear to set the stage for feelings of low self-esteem. Many greedy people obsessively pursue wealth as a substitute for what they feel is lacking inside them.
But they ignore the high price that comes with greediness — a stunted life. Materialistic pursuits are often an attempt at relieving emotional discomfort. In fact, the behaviour of greedy people can be compared to that of substance abusers. But just like drugs, material possessions can never provide the comfort and reassurance we all crave.
On the contrary, the greedier we become, the more we advance on the path of self-destruction. Ironically, greed is not so much of a financial issue. It is the symptom of a troubled mind trying to link self-worth to financial worth, usually on a subconscious level. Far too often, greed comes with stress, exhaustion, anxiety, depression and despair.
In addition, it can lead to maladaptive behaviour patterns such as gambling, hoarding, trickery and even theft. Finally, we examined the hypothesized model using latent variable path analyses with structural equation modeling SEM. The mediating role of perceived distributive justice and need for social status was tested using the bootstrap option bootstrap samples. Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and correlations among variables. Table 1.
First, we tested every measurement model of the study variables. The factor loadings of all items measuring study variables ranged between 0.
To ensure that common method variance was not a problem, we tested an alternative model with all factors collapsed into one latent factor Podsakoff et al. Hence, our hypothesized measurement model showed a better fit to the data. We finally tested a hypothesized structural model controlling the effects of demographic variables on task performance and contextual performance. Figure 1.
Results of the empirical model test. The results support both Hypotheses 1a and 1b. The results support both Hypotheses 2a and 2b. Greed has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. Specifically, greed could motivate individuals to work hard but also could diminish their desire to demonstrate good performance. In addition, we found that greed promoted performance through the intermediary effect of the need for social status but simultaneously inhibited performance through perceived distributive justice.
The pattern of the relationship generally held for both task and contextual performance. The findings of the current study provide some empirical evidence that the greedier an individual is, the stronger his or her need for social status, and the higher his or her level of performance.
These results are also consistent with previous research findings that greedy individuals are more productivity-oriented and have a stronger desire to win Krekels and Pandelaere, Although some researchers have claimed that greed is socially harmful Krekels et al.
In other words, the dissatisfaction experienced by greedy people casts doubt on the distributive justice of organizations. Although the effect size is small, the findings of the current study provide some empirical evidence that the greedier an individual is, the lower his or her perceived distributive justice and the poorer his or her level of performance. The results of the current study contribute to the literature on equity sensitivity Huseman et al.
Differing attitudes toward greed remain in the literature. Although some researchers have argued the dual effects of greed, they often have developed their propositions from an interpersonal perspective, i. This idea is consistent with Hume claim that greed, on the one hand, encourages people to do better and, on the other hand, has devastating consequences for society.
The current study extends the double-edged nature of greed to the intrapersonal domain. We found that even for greedy people themselves, greed could simultaneously facilitate and impede their performance. These findings are important contributions to the field because they suggest that greed is not necessarily good or bad. Its valence depends on what is motivating greedy people.
If the desire for social status is stimulated, greedy people could contribute to organizations by improving not only their task performance but also their contextual performance.
However, if greedy people are haunted by the perceived distributive injustice of an organization, their performance might be negatively affected. For organizations, the conditions under which greed could generate beneficial outcomes is a more meaningful question than whether greed is good or bad or should be encouraged or curbed. First, given that the current study employed a cross-sectional design, further longitudinal study is needed before any causal relationships can be established.
For example, the current study proposed that greed is a determinant of the need for social status. However, it is also possible that the need for social status might make people greedy. A cross-lagged panel design would help researchers to confirm the causality relations in our model.
However, following Podsakoff et al. Meanwhile, researchers have found that self-rated performance is highly positively related to peer-rated performance Demerouti et al. Third, future studies could explore the boundary condition of this two-pathway model. The current study found that both mediators existed between greed and job performance, and it is reasonable to speculate that some key contextual factors may influence which path plays a more important role.
For instance, Knight and Mehta found a joint effect of social status and hierarchy stability on performance. Specifically, higher status individuals performed better than lower status individuals when hierarchy stability was high.
This finding suggests that the effect of the need for social status may exist only when hierarchy stability is low, under which circumstance people with low status have more access to higher status. Finally, the generalizability of the current results could be examined in different cultures.
The cultural context of the current study, China, emphasizes social status much more than many other countries Xi, Although the desire for status is fundamental and universal Anderson et al. Huberman et al. They found that Chinese people pay more attention to social status and show more status-seeking behaviors than people from the other countries Huberman et al.
In addition, traditional Chinese values encourage people to improve their social status through their efforts and to pursue their wealth and status in moral ways Xi, Future studies in different cultures are necessary to provide supporting evidence for the dual effect model of greed. The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the American Psychological Association Ethics Guidelines and the Committee on Human Protection and Ethics in Psychology. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. YZ developed the study concept, and performed the data analysis and interpretation.
YZ and XS created the study design and drafted the manuscript. SL performed the testing and data collection. GX provided the revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Adams, J. Akkermans, J. Alesina, A. Inequality and happiness: are europeans and americans different? Public Econ. Ambrose, M. Sabotage in the workplace: the role of organizational injustice.
Anderson, C. Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? Why do dominant personalities attain influence in face-to-face groups? We get together for protection, for support, to share the work necessary for survival, and to have someone to talk to.
In addition, the resources important to humans changed. No longer was it simply food in order to get and keep the strength to procreate. Now there were other things, like land to grow food, and money to buy food, and pottery to store food, and methods such as ships and caravans and trading and military conquest to get food. Eventually, the food was not the end result desired -- the means to the end became the end itself. The real problem arose when the population increased and the possible wealth became limited.
There was only so much land and money and other resources to go around. Thus, for one person to amass a lot of wealth, rhe had to reduce what somebody else could get. This created conflict in the society between the haves and have-nots, the go-getters and the no-getters. The purpose of a society is to reduce conflict between the members of that society. The society creates laws, religions, government, whatever will allow people to get along without fighting each other in response to their biological urges.
Thus, there are laws and religious proscriptions against murder to keep people from killing each other and thus weakening the society's ability to support itself and the people in it.
There are laws and religious proscriptions against infidelity to keep men from killing each other and enslaving women so men can be sure of their paternity a biological imperative -- a male doesn't want to waste his resources and care on genes that aren't his Daly, , and men are male. To reduce the conflict greed could create, societies, through their laws and religions, said that an extreme desire for wealth was harmful to the society since it concentrated too many resources in too few hands.
Thus greed was decreed and decried as excessive and harmful, and proscribed. The ancient proscriptions were to avoid societal conflicts. The proscriptions were also often easy to follow when people were nomadic. They had to carry everything they owned around with them, and thus there was little desire to accumulate things that would simply increase the burden. For example, the! Kung people of Africa have lived this nomadic life for centuries and have few material possessions.
Leakey, The desire for wealth is especially apparent in those cultures descended from or adhering to the Western European tradition of "progress" and "growth", a legacy of the eras of scientific discovery and world exploration. The former led people to believe that they could know everything, the latter increased what they knew and opened the world to trade. Trade became a major factor in European life after the Black Death, a plague that killed three-fourths of Europe 's population in the 14th Century.
This massive decrease in the work force had three results. First, the end of the feudal system, since the serfs, their numbers now low and thus their value as a workforce now high, could now demand wages for their labor.
Second, a surplus of goods and food since the number of consumers was so low. And third, a sudden increase in personal wealth as people inherited the belongings of all their relatives that had died. These three factors led to a greater sense of individualism and a decline in spiritual and intellectual interests in favor of material interests.
Burke, With the new high-demand products, such as spices, tea and silk, made available by world exploration, trade and exploitation of markets became the goals of European societies and individuals in those societies.
This continues to this day. The standard of living for the members of societies practicing such materialism gives them a major advantage over those people and societies that don't. They can gather more resources, live longer, raise more children in better conditions that can pass on their parents' and ancestors' genes, and generally outstrip any competition that doesn't practice greed.
Today, because of the standard of living materialism provides those who follow the idea that some is good, more is better, too much is just right, much of the world "goes for the gold". The concept of money is a central element of scientific 13 as well as lay conceptions 14 of greed. This notion is also supported by empirical evidence. For example, measures of greed have been found to be highly correlated with materialism 6 , Thus, individuals with high compared to low levels of greed will especially strive for obtaining real money, as compared to points.
We predicted an interaction between trait greed and stakes, which corresponds to the hypothesis that the effect of trait greed on selfish behavior in the resource dilemma will be stronger when playing for real money, as compared to points. Our second moderator, partner, relates to the interaction partner. As outlined above, greed can be defined as the desire to get more at all costs 2 ; thus, greedy individuals might strive for personal gains even if their striving may be at the expense of others 4.
In this regard, greed has also been associated with excessively self-interested behavior that goes against prevailing norms, and as unfair behavior, harming the rules of competition In line with these arguments, greed has been found to be correlated with psychopathy, especially with the factor meanness 2. Contrary, for individuals with low levels of greed the prospect of harming another person might refrain them from taking a personal enrichment We predicted an interaction between trait greed and partner, which corresponds to the hypothesis that the effect of greed on selfish behavior in the resource dilemma will be stronger when playing against another person that is personally known, as compared to a computer.
Investigating neural correlates of personality is at the core of current attempts to arrive at a more fine-grained understanding of personality and its underlying mechanisms It allows for an additional level of analysis and has the potential of unveiling potential mechanisms that underly personality traits and behavioral effects. Here, we investigate neural responses to the decision of the partner.
Same as the participant, the partner has also the choice to either stick to a pre-defined agreement and, thus, make a fair decision, or to defect and, thus, make a selfish decision at the expense of his or her partner i. Therefore, the decision of the partner can be interpreted as feedback that indicates a favorable vs.
Such feedback stimuli have been shown to elicit two prominent components, the feedback related negativity 18 and the P3 19 in the EEG. The FRN has been interpreted within the framework of reinforcement learning theory 20 , which posits that individuals have expectations regarding upcoming events in the future, and that deviations from these expectations are used to learn from experience and, subsequently, adapt behavior.
The negative temporal difference error has been related to a phasic decrease in dopaminergic signaling in basal ganglia, followed by a disinhibition of apical dendrites of the motor neurons of the anterior cingulate cortex, which elicits the FRN It has been found to be sensitive to the magnitude of reward 23 , to the motivational relevance of stimuli 24 and, according to more recent studies, also to the valence of the reward, with more positive amplitudes for positive compared to negative stimuli 25 , Processes reflected by the P3 have been interpreted as contributing to behavioral adjustment to stimuli from the environment 27 , The neural source of the P3 component is less well known and is probably distributed over different regions of the cortex, most likely including the temporal-parietal-junction and the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system According to prior research, we expected an altered neural response to positive and negative feedback stimuli for individuals high and low on trait greed 5.
In our study, participants played a resource dilemma in which they jointly cultivated a fish farm with a partner see Fig. On arrival, they met their partner in person with whom they would play part of the game.
They were told that their partner was also a participant. However, the partner was a gender-matched confederate of the experimenter. On each trial, they had to make a decision about how many units of fish between 0 and 5 to take.
The revenue depended on the decision of both the participant and the partner. For a medium decision two units of fish of both partners, the overall revenue was maximal. If the participant but not the partner took more than two units, the participant would increase his and, at the same time, decrease the revenue of the partner defecting.
However, if his partner also took more than two units, the revenue of both partners would decrease On average, participants took 3. In line with our hypothesis, individuals with higher levels of trait greed took more units of fish from the common resource compared to individuals with lower levels of trait greed.
Post-hoc test showed that the effect of stakes was only observed when participants played against a computer, but not against their partner. Thus, we found the expected moderating effect for stakes, i. Likewise, we found the expected moderating effect for partner, i.
We can therefore conclude that there is partial evidence for the notion that money activates greed, as there is partial evidence for the notion that greed especially manifests when corresponding behavior is at the expense of another person. However, for the combination of the two moderating variables — i.
Rather, there was even a non-significant tendency for a reverse effect. One explanation is that the relation between trait greed and selfish behavior already reached a maximum when either of the two moderator variables activated the trait greed-behavior relation playing for money OR playing against another person 31 ; the combination of the two would thus have no further effect, which would correspond to a ceiling effect. Additionally, it can be speculated that there is a certain point at which situational cues activate mechanisms which run counter to greed, such as empathy, care, or fairness concerns.
In our case, taking real money from a person that sits in the room next door and whom the person just got to known might be such a situation, which thus overrides the effects of greed. Note, however, that important real-life situations are often characterized by only one of the two variables, such as a hedge fund manager or investment banker making investments on huge amounts of real money in a rather anonymous setting, i.
Three-way interaction for the number of units of fish taken by the participant predicted by the factors stakes, partner, and trait greed according to a median split, for illustration purpose. While participants performed the resource dilemma, EEG was recorded from 31 scalp sites methods. To investigate neural correlates of decision-making, we ran a three-factorial analysis of variance with the factors stakes, partner and feedback, the co-variate trait greed, and the amplitude of the FRN and the P3, respectively, as dependent variable.
Post hoc effects indicated that the expected FRN-effect was only observed when playing against a partner for points. No effects were found for trait greed. We assume that our feedback stimulus, consisting of multiple elements, was too complex to elicit neural correlates that can be observed as early as the FRN see Liu and Gehring 32 , for similar results. Grand average following the feedback fair: two units; defecting: 3, 4, or 5 units of fish taken by the partner , at electrode FCz left and Pz right.
In line with recent findings 25 , 26 , positive feedback elicited stronger positive amplitudes, compared to negative feedback. This interaction was not qualified by any higher order interactions.
A reduced feedback-effect in greedy compared to non-greedy individuals has previously been found for the FRN in a risk-taking task and may be interpreted as a lack of sensitivity to adjust behavior according to positive and negative stimuli 5. Presumably, this lack of sensitivity might be an explaining cognitive mechanism for a reckless and callous behavior of greedy individuals, namely striving for obtaining personal goals even if it comes at the expense of others.
In this regard, note that Dikman and Allen 33 found a reduced feedback-effect in the FRN for individuals high compared to low in psychopathy, mirroring that greed and psychopathy might share a common cognitive mechanism.
This interpretation is in line with both lay conceptions of the greedy psychopath that has been used to characterize agents operating in investment departments of financial firms or stock exchanges as well as with psychometric research indicating a high construct overlap between greed and psychopathy 2.
As illustrated in Fig. B As A, but according to the number of units of fish taken by the partner in trial n and trait greed according to a median split, for illustration purpose. C As A,B , but according to the P3 amplitude in response to the number of units of fish taken by the partner in trial n and trait greed both according to a median split, for illustration purpose.
The effect of trait greed on selfish behavior was stronger on trials with a lower, compared to higher P3 amplitude see Fig. Given the interpretation of the P3 amplitude as mirroring processes according to behavioral adaption, these results are in line with the idea that the effect of trait greed on selfish behavior is mediated by a lack of sensitivity to adjust behavior in response to positive and negative stimuli from the environment.
To sum up, our study provides evidence regarding the influence of trait greed on decision-making in a paradigm in which selfish behavior comes at the expense of others. We found evidence for two moderating variables of this relation which are theoretically related with trait greed: Stakes, that is playing for real money compared to points, and partner, that is playing against a real person compared to a computer.
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