Seven Sins: Views on what and how bad greed is have changed over time, says Marcel Zeelenberg

Down To Earth (DTE) speaks to scientists and authors to take stock of what we know so far about the emotions of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth; the historical debates around them and the critical gaps in our understanding.

In the third part, DTE speaks to Marcel Zeelenberg, a professor of economic psychology at Tilburg University, Netherlands. Zeelenberg studies the role of emotions and motivational factors in decision-making. His laboratory devised a scale to measure greed.

Q. What does science say about greed?

A. We define greed as the insatiable desire for more, for people wanting to acquire more than they need. In doing so, they prevent other people from getting access to resources. Religions condemn greed because if you are greedy, you hurt others. But we think greedy people have no intention or purpose to hurt others. So, some people define greed also as harming others, but we believe it is merely a by-product of being greedy. And we have done research where we measured the extent to which greedy people take other people’s outcomes into account. We found that greedy people are oblivious to others. They do not want to hurt others but also do not want to help them. They simply do not care about others.

If you collect more coconuts than you need, I think you are greedy. So, I think, you experience this without being around other people. It might be a consequence, but I do not think harming others is essential. So, the views are a little bit different on the definition of greed. We used this definition to develop our scale to assess greed. Other people have also defined those scales and some include harming others in their definitions.

Q. How has the scientific view on greed changed over the years?

A. Well, the research on greed is pretty recent. We published two papers in 2015. When we started to examine research on greed, we found that there was hardly anything. We had philosophical work. Economists have talked about it, and so have religious scholars. But nobody studied it. There was a really interesting review article in 2011 in the Academy of Management Annals, and they said that there are lots of theories but hardly any research because it is really hard to define what greed is.

Now I disagree with that, but they were right in the observation that there is hardly any research. So the views on greed have changed over time, but not really in academia, because the research is just too recent.

The views on “what greed is and how bad it is” have changed enormously over time. Religions viewed them as bad but capitalism sort of changed that by normalising views of earning money, becoming very rich and chasing money. If you look at when people think or write about greed, you will find that most people are negative, but the people who view it positively are economists, who very much believe in rational self-interest and total free markets. Evolutionary biologists, too, agree that greed is good because by being greedy, you might take too many resources, but, for example, it might be useful in times of scarcity. This is a way to increase your chances of survival. So evolutionary biologists and economists are positive about it. Most people, or at least religious thinkers and philosophers, are often negative about it.

If I have to talk about myself, I am more or less neutral about it, because I think it is a human trait that is found more in some and less in others. I do think there are negative consequences of being greedy. But I do not find it useful to either praise or condemn it because it is just a part of being human. I find it more interesting to find out what greed is and when it works.

Q. You have developed a scale for greed. What does it involve?

A. We published the scale in 2015. We measure what is called dispositional greed. A dispositionally angry person is frequently angry. If you are dispositionally anxious, you are always anxious about things, or you can be afraid of something momentarily.

Now, for greed, I would say the same thing happens. You can become greedy because, in a specific situation, something is available in enormous abundance. Or if you go to the shop when something is on sale or discounted, it may make you greedy. But that is not what has been studied most of the time. Most studies have focused on trade greed. Some people are more greedy than others and we can measure that and then we can relate that to different behaviours. The reason for us mostly studying dispositional greed is that we have not been able to induce greed in our experiments.

For example, I also study regret. I can induce this by asking people to make a decision and then make sure that the decision goes badly for half of them. For the other half, the decision goes well. But we do not yet know how to induce greed in people. We have ideas about it. We have tested a few things, but we have not gotten to a good operationalisation of them.

One of the things we do, for example, is that we assess greediness in a group of people, and then ask them about how acceptable they find several immoral things. Imagine you go to the store; you buy something for €5 but pay with a €20 note. The cashier accidentally gives you back the change for €50. How acceptable is it? Would you just keep the money without saying anything? You find that the more greedy people are, the more acceptable they find it to keep the change. Or we ask them, how acceptable is it to lie on your tax declaration? We see that the more greedy people are, the more they think it is acceptable. If you ask people whether they have done things like that, the greedier people are more likely to say they have engaged in those behaviours.

Q. Can your scale tell us how greedy is too greedy?

A. We cannot say that based on whether your score is too high or low. We find that there is a relation, though. In one of our studies, we asked people to play a game. It is called a resource dilemma. The game requires four players. They have to maintain 20 hectares of forests and are allowed to harvest wood and sell it. But if they harvest too much wood, the forest depletes. It does not grow back and they run out of money. After each round of the game, they have to decide how much wood they want to harvest and sell.

We find that greedy people harvest more than their non-greedy counterparts. Greedy people also harvest too much if you compare it to what they should harvest for the forest to regrow. But we also find that people, who score very low on the greed scale, harvest much less than they could do. So they leave money on the table. We find that greedy people take too much, and the non-greedy people take too little. Taking too little, I think, is less of a problem. It is more of a problem for you because you do not generate or generate less income. But taking too much, of course, is a problem for society. It is really hard to say on our scale whether this is too much greed or this is too little.

Also, we found in one of our studies that greedy people work harder. It was a cool experiment. We brought people to the laboratory and told them they could first work for five minutes and then earn chocolates for that. We also told them that they have five minutes to eat the reward. And if they do not eat, they are instructed to return the chocolates.

We also explained what work they were required to do. We made them sit in the laboratory with their headphones on, listening to nice classical music. So this is considered leisure.

They were also asked to press the spacebar on the computer to interrupt the music with white noise. And that is annoying. According to economists, work is aversive and leisure is pleasant. So in this case, leisurely listening to music was pleasant and the work of interrupting it was aversive. Every 20 times the participants pushed a button, they earned a chocolate. Their task was to earn as many chocolates as they wanted in five minutes.

We found that greedy people earned much more chocolate than non-greedy people, but they could not eat them all. So they had to give them back. When I talked about these results at conferences people said that if the task was repeated with the same participants, greedy people would not earn as much.

So we repeated the same experiment three weeks later with the same participants. We still found that greedy people earn way too much.

We also found that greedy people were dissatisfied with their performance. The question for us is also, why do they do that, because they should know better? But maybe greedy people are also a little bit competitive with themselves. They may want to outperform themselves.

(as told to Rohini Krishnamurthy)

This is the fourth of an 18-part series.

This was first published as part of the cover story of the 16-31 May, 2024 Print edition of Down To Earth