Comment Re:Brilliant... (Score 1) 419
from your Puffington Host link:
"The participants were first asked about their wealth, schooling, social background, religious persuasions and attitudes to money in an attempt to establish their perceived social class."
Interesting experiment. The methodology is broken.
Because of the possibility that dishonest people will lie about their own income and social status the conclusion that wealthy people are more dishonest is unfounded. According to the description of the experimental methods, subjects categorized as "wealthy" in the study would have included both the genuinely wealthy and the non-wealthy liars. That is, the study misidentifies poor liars as wealthy liars. And with some degree of idiocy; The experimenters simultaneously identify a group as dishonest and believe their self reports of income, without recognizing the contradiction in that reasoning.
Then, also, more intelligent subjects would seem more likely both to be wealthy and to recognize that lying and cheating within the artificial context of a human psychology experiment causes no real harm and is part of the game. Human subject guidelines would mandate that these experiments be performed with informed consent of the subjects, so no doubt the smarter ones understood this was not real life. Snookering others in games vs real life is a similar distinction to killing others in video games vs real life. Just because you murder others in virtual online environments does not make you more prone to do that in real life. So does lying in games contrived by psychologists make you more prone to lie in real life?