Posted on 04/07/2007 6:29:09 AM PDT by shrinkermd
...Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.”
Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table
...The bottom line: Without power, people tend to play it safe. Given power, even you and I would soon end up living large and acting like idiots.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This is a hard article to excerpt; however, the point is that innate, human nature is such that power or celebrity results in insensitive selfishness.
Which goes to prove that Jesus was right. “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
Gee, in today's psycho-babbel it's called “disinhibited.” Anywhere else it's just bad manners.
I am sure it was not the intent of the article, but it makes a great case for limited government. If power is so corrupting, and it is, best limit it lest our presidents start boinking interns and staining their dresses... oh, wait. It’s the rich who are cads, not liberals. Liberals are well-intentioned and therefore above reproach.
What bull****.
Therefore.......we would be doing the rich a favor by confiscating their wealth?
It’s “than you or I.” Can’t believe the “Paper of Record” made such a fundamental grammatical error.
Bingo! The ivory tower screed has been translated..
Bingo!
The whole idea of the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights especially, is that the People In Power need to be tightly constrained or else they will expand their control over the rest of us.
Long ago, this country lost sight of what our Founding Fathers knew.
The NYTimes trying to excuse why it acts the way it does.
If they’d said The Rich Are More Obvious, I could agree. All but the wise ones are that. :)
As it is...this is what passes for science nowadays? It’s about as rigorous as journalism.
The guy might have a point but I don’t see how an experiment with cookies supports it.
“human nature is such that power or celebrity results in insensitive selfishness.”
And class envy results in hateful lies.
The rich in this country do more, pay more and contribute more than any group in the world.
Cheers!
Cheers!
---------------------------------------------
Really? i hadn't noticed.
Pinch was one of the subjects. He took all the cookies and demanded a 52% share of all future cookies.
Instead, let’s just create a category of psychological behavior called...oh, let’s see...”disinhibition” and assign people with “manners problems” to one of its many subcategories. Then everybody can have their own subcategory (after all isn’t each one of us “disinhibited” about something?) and we can fit right in with the people who like to sexually abuse children or like to have sex with animals or etc. in one big happy nonjudgmental family.
There, all fixed.
< / sarcasm>
Today, I have exactly zero respect for psychiatrists and psychologists. This wasn’t always the case.
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