The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me
Brett
By RICHARD CONNIFF
Published: April 4, 2007
Old Lyme, Conn.
THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie
Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed
bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to
be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo
from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last
year on the Pacific Coast Highway. I mention this only because it's
easy to get confused by the vast and highly repetitious category "Rich
and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots." Mr. Griffin walked away
uninjured, and everybody offered wise counsel about how this wasn't
really such a bad day after all.
So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world?
Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow
through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel ("I
Own Malibu") Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a
bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff's car? And
if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that
they're the ones with all the money?
Modern science has the answer, with a little help from the poet
Hilaire Belloc.
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.
It reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real
life. One of them, for instance, had attended meetings with a magazine
mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed
to share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through
an oral exam for his doctorate at which one faculty member not only
picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light.
As stupid behaviors go, none of this is in a class with slamming
somebody else's Ferrari into a concrete wall. But science advances by
tiny steps.
The researchers went on to theorize that getting power causes people
to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public
acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie - not necessarily in that
order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once - that
they become oblivious to the people around them.
Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are
often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss,
it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always
green (and damn the pedestrians). Professor Keltner and his fellow
researchers describe it as an instance of "approach/inhibition theory"
in action: As power increases, it fires up the behavioral approach
system and shuts down behavioral inhibition.
And thus the Fast Forward Personality is born and put on the path to
the concrete barrier.
The corollary is that as the rich and powerful increasingly focus on
potential rewards, powerless types notice the likely costs and become
more inhibited. I happen to know the feeling because I once had my own
Los Angeles Ferrari experience. It was a bright-red F355 Spider (and
with a mere $150,000 sticker price, not exactly top shelf), which I
rented for a television documentary about rich people. It came with a
$10,000 deductible, and the first time I drove it into a Bel-Air
estate, the low-slung front end hit the apron of the driveway with a
horrible grating sound that caused my soul to shrink. I proceeded up
the driveway at five miles an hour, and everyone in sight turned away
thinking, "Rental."
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. So pity the rich - and protect yourself. This is where Hilaire
Belloc comes in.
He once wrote a poem about a Lord Finchley, who "tried to mend the
Electric Light/Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!"
Belloc wasn't tiresomely suggesting that the gentry all deserve a
first-hand acquaintance with the third rail, as it were, but merely
that they would be smart to depend on hired help. In social psychology
terms, disinhibited Fast Forward types need ordinary cautious mortals
to remind them that the traffic lights do in fact occasionally turn
yellow or even, sometimes, red.
So, Eddie Griffin: next time you borrow a pal's car, borrow his
driver, too. The world will be a safer place for the rest of us.
Richard Conniff is the author of "The Natural History of the Rich."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/opinion/04conniff.html