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I dunno, I think that success in society has less to do with what your personality/style of thought/strength are, and how strong your strengths are.

I don't want my therapist to be a great planner, I want them to be emotionally developed. Likewise, my cleaning lady is probably more lopsidedly a planner than I am.

Easy E wrote:So, here is what I have found. People who are the higher-ups (and thus well off financially) in several of the companies I work for are Blue/Green dominant thinkers (i.e. Logical and Planners) meanwhile, the people who are lower down the chain are Red/Yellow dominant thinkers (I.e. Big Picture/Relationships).

This can be shaped to a great extent by the industries you work within. I would expect the CFO of an accounting firm to have a very different cognitive type versus the CEO of a fashion/design firm.

In the specific building I work in, a lot of the higher ups were competitive meat judges in college. Therefore, I could say that competitive meat judging is a predictor of success. However, in a different building in a different location, none of the higher ups were meat judges.

i.e., small sample sizes can lead to general conclusions within small subsets, but may still be invalid in broader applications.

Necros wrote:When I used to be a pizza delivery guy way back when, it was always the mid-lower class type folks that gave the bestest tips. The bigger the house was, the smaller the tip.. if we even got one at all.

Thus, I concur.

I agree. I helped a buddy some years ago being a pizza guy for a few nights, and I had a similar experience. And I figured the bigger the house the better the tip. Nope. Not even close.

Easy E wrote:So, here is what I have found. People who are the higher-ups (and thus well off financially) in several of the companies I work for are Blue/Green dominant thinkers (i.e. Logical and Planners) meanwhile, the people who are lower down the chain are Red/Yellow dominant thinkers (I.e. Big Picture/Relationships).

Therefore, if you are a Hermann Brain Blue (logical) type, you are typically weaker in the Red brain (relationship) and therefore less Emotionally Intelligent.

Our business focused society tends to favor Blue/Greens (Logic/Planners) rather than Red/Yellows (Big Picture/Relationship).

Therefore, it makes sense to me that people who are in the Upper and Middle class would be less clued in to Emotional Intelligence factors, since they have been selected by the system to be strong in more analytical areas.



Edit: I knew someone would bring up sampling.

Interesting experiences you've had with the brain types. It is a bit different from the experiences I've had with the more succesful managers that I know. We've taken the Hermantest and found the more well rounded types were actually the best managers.
They were able to plan while keeping their eye on the big picture and work well with relationships.
The best example I can give to illustrate this is the owner of the plant where I work.
We had a worker whose son was in the hospital to the tune of 100,000 plus dollars. The company owner came to him and told him not to worry,whatever the insurance wouldn't cover, he would.
He has cultivated this attitude throughout the leadership positions in the company and has made it a core value, to look out for other people.

Polonius wrote:I dunno, I think that success in society has less to do with what your personality/style of thought/strength are, and how strong your strengths are.

Or, rather, how strong your weaknesses are. It is difficult, for example, for anyone who completely insensitive emotionally to rise to the top given their propensity to offend the sensibilities of others. Conversely, a person who operates entirely on emotion will possess the obvious deficiencies inherent in being ruled by whim.

Essentially, you need to be really good at one thing, and then good enough at everything else. How good that is, of course, is going to vary just as much as what "really good" entails.


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Relapse wrote:
We had a worker whose son was in the hospital to the tune of 100,000 plus dollars. The company owner came to him and told him not to worry,whatever the insurance wouldn't cover, he would.
He has cultivated this attitude throughout the leadership positions in the company and has made it a core value, to look out for other people.

That follows in the tradition of Japanese managerial and executive staff taking pay-cuts equivalent or greater to those of their employees during periods of poor company performance.


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Polonius wrote:
I'd say that in my experience, the working poor tend to be pretty generous with what they have.

An argument that is often made is that working class people either start off valuing relationships more (and therefore have difficulty making certain sacrifices that are entailed in raising one's socioeconomic status), or grow to value relationships more due to their greater need of them during times of hardship.

Just speaking from personal experience, the members of my extended family who are plant workers, teachers, or similar tend to place greater emphasis on family than those who are lawyers, doctors, or executives.

Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

They're raping everybody!


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What would be interesting is to see a chart on how the kind behavior divvies up between income levels.
How was the experiment conducted?
On the one hand we hear and read of the horrid crime rate among poor people, and on the other hand we have this study that says they're more likely to be kind.

Necros wrote:When I used to be a pizza delivery guy way back when, it was always the mid-lower class type folks that gave the bestest tips. The bigger the house was, the smaller the tip.. if we even got one at all.

Thus, I concur.

Yep. Living in a town with a massive disparity in wages (seven person families crammed into 1 bedroom, 1 bath houses up the street from $3+ million homes) I picked up on this pretty fast.

Ordered pizza about two weeks ago, and my mother made a comment about how thankful the delivery guy seemed for the tip. The fact is, he had probably just delivered to three houses where the owner makes twice as much as both of my parents combined, and got somewhere between jack-crap and jack-diddly for a tip.

#OhHeyHeresAnAnecdote

mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

Quoth the Stein

Relapse wrote:
What would be interesting is to see a chart on how the kind behavior divvies up between income levels.
How was the experiment conducted?
On the one hand we hear and read of the horrid crime rate among poor people, and on the other hand we have this study that says they're more likely to be kind.

Yeah, the methodology is always the most interesting (and easiest to criticize) part of any study.

I really suspect that 'poor' in this study is 2nd or even 3rd quintile of incomes; in other words not really 'poor' in the sense of true poverty.

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dogma wrote:

Quoth the Stein

From the linked article: "Stein’s invective will truly make your skin crawl. To be fair, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has obviously not yet been convicted of a crime. Still, sufficient evidence exists for him to have been placed in prison without bail."

I think it's a credit to the American legal system and society that an incredibly high profile individual, like the president of the International Monetary Fund and a consideration for the French presidential elections to challenge Sarkozy, was able to be put under public scrutiny on nothing more than the accusations of an immigrant, low-status service worker. That in itself gives the American pursuit of justice more veracity and credibility than what I think many other countries in the world would allow for.

The facts have shown that this case was an entire sham from the get-go. He paid this particular hotel maid for sex, and when she thought she could get away with extortion, she tried to pillory him. She got into this country under questionable circumstances and the prosecution attorneys themselves called it quits after her phone calls with drug dealers suggesting that she could hold out for a big settlement came to light. Being poor does not make one righteous. DSK going scotch free with no legal sanctions (dunno about his home life) is not only an acceptable result of this case, it's the only result that an impartial system could possibly reach.

I consider Capitalists in general to be greedy and Socialist to be generous.


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mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

I don't rape people, neither do any of my siblings.

dogma wrote:

mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

Quoth the Stein

Haha.. I cant believe BS actually said that out loud.

I watched "Expelled" as well, needless to say the blokes not in my favourites list.


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rockerbikie wrote:I consider Capitalists in general to be greedy and Socialist to be generous.


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mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

I don't rape people, neither do any of my siblings.

Yes, one family is indicative of everyone. But clearly I was taking the piss, so no need to get your knickers in a twist.

Although, a higher percentage of people in prison are from the underclass right? So it may technically be true!

mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

We've got no information on that. It's pretty offensive to make such a claim.

mattyrm wrote:

dogma wrote:

mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

Quoth the Stein

Haha.. I cant believe BS actually said that out loud.

I watched "Expelled" as well, needless to say the blokes not in my favourites list.


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rockerbikie wrote:I consider Capitalists in general to be greedy and Socialist to be generous.


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mattyrm wrote:Poor people are also quicker to rape you.. it's like this whole thread is a paradox!

I don't rape people, neither do any of my siblings.

Yes, one family is indicative of everyone. But clearly I was taking the piss, so no need to get your knickers in a twist.

Although, a higher percentage of people in prison are from the underclass right? So it may technically be true!

I disagree with that statement. The poorer class of people are in jail for petty crime such as theft. The Upper Class is more likely to do more intelligent crime like Fraud or Hacking.

rockerbikie wrote:
I disagree with that statement. The poorer class of people are in jail for petty crime such as theft. The Upper Class is more likely to do more intelligent crime like Fraud or Hacking.

I don't know if you're joking, trolling, or serious but have a different set of facts than everybody else.

I just typed prison inmate demographics into google and came up with this on Wikipedia:

Inmate convictions 2008:
Violent crime: 52%
Drug Use: 22%

Neither violent crime nor drug use are considered "petty crime" like theft.

Similarly, ratios of white:minority:

Black:White - 5:1
Hispanic:White - 2.5:1

I don't necessarily consider Wikipedia to be the font of all wisdom, but this basically reinforces what I believed to be true about inmate demographics; that people who get incarcerated are primarily poor and primarily non-white.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think background and religion has a lot to do with it too.

sourclams wrote:
From the linked article: "Stein’s invective will truly make your skin crawl. To be fair, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has obviously not yet been convicted of a crime. Still, sufficient evidence exists for him to have been placed in prison without bail."

I suppose I should have noted that I find Ben Stein distasteful as a human being for reasons beyond his comments in that article. This, however...

In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are not usually one of a kind.

...is a personal favorite.

sourclams wrote:
DSK going scotch free with no legal sanctions (dunno about his home life) is not only an acceptable result of this case, it's the only result that an impartial system could possibly reach.

Well, per your narrative, he did solicit a prostitute, which is not legal.

It's worth a couple nights in jail or a fine if convicted, not imprisonment without bail.

Ironically, because the credibility of the 'victim' was shot completely to pieces after her background, inconsistent testimony, and attempts at extortion were revealed, DSK could only have been found guilty of prostitution charges if she admitted to being a prostitute. Because she was ineptly extorting a "rape" charge, there was no charge of soliciting prostitution made by anyone.

But that's all beside the point, I don't care if Ben Stein is Satan made incarnate, you don't get to imprison rich people just because someone wants to stick it to the man. I actually don't find anything to get upset over with Stein's narrative because I think what he's really responding to is how the media pilloried DSK before the facts of the case were known, and before any verdict was possible. The media convicted a public figure without trial. I don't read him as saying 'Rich people can't be criminals, only criminals are criminals', but rather 'Maybe somebody--anybody--in the media, or the DA, or prosecution should have said 'wait, does this all add up?'.

sourclams wrote:
Ironically, because the credibility of the 'victim' was shot completely to pieces after her background, inconsistent testimony, and attempts at extortion were revealed, DSK could only have been found guilty of prostitution charges if she admitted to being a prostitute.

That's incorrect. You can solicit prostitution from someone who is not a prostitute.

sourclams wrote:
Because she was ineptly extorting a "rape" charge, there was no charge of soliciting prostitution made by anyone.

There were no charges made because DSK is DSK and the witness was presumed to be lacking in credibility.

sourclams wrote:
But that's all beside the point, I don't care if Ben Stein is Satan made incarnate, you don't get to imprison rich people just because someone wants to stick it to the man.

Sure you do, we (humans) do it all the time. Its called scapegoating, and its fantastically useful.

sourclams wrote:
I actually don't find anything to get upset over with Stein's narrative because I think what he's really responding to is how the media pilloried DSK before the facts of the case were known, and before any verdict was possible.

Really? You don't see anything at all, considered from a position of reason, offensive about implying that the group "criminals" necessarily excludes anyone with money, or an education?

sourclams wrote:
The media convicted a public figure without trial.

Sure, so what? They did it to Casey Anthony too.

sourclams wrote:
I don't read him as saying 'Rich people can't be criminals, only criminals are criminals', but rather 'Maybe somebody--anybody--in the media, or the DA, or prosecution should have said 'wait, does this all add up?'.

You're putting many words into his mouth. Which is interesting given that you're objecting to conviction without trial.

I find your post to be nonsensical. Sentence-by-sentence rebuttal is silly and impossible to carry any meaningful discussion with, and so much of the point that I was attempting to make to you simply whizzed on past.

Ben Stein wrote multiple morally offensive and intellectually indefensible things.

DSK was treated appropriately by the law. As you pointed out before, the fact that our system takes the accusation of a poor person against a wealthy and influential person this seriously is a reassuring demonstration of equality under the law.

sourclams wrote: I don't read him as saying 'Rich people can't be criminals, only criminals are criminals', but rather 'Maybe somebody--anybody--in the media, or the DA, or prosecution should have said 'wait, does this all add up?'.

The above was your point. I consider that point to be amusing given that you are seemingly agreeing with Stein in that DSK was convicted by the media without significant evidence. I find this amusing because your argument is founded on convicting Stein of holding a set of beliefs that are not reflected by the meaning of the words he used in the supplied quotations.

I responded to you in a sentence by sentence fashion for two reasons:

1) It is my habitual means of responding on this board.

2) You said several things that were incorrect or objectionable that did not contribute to your ultimate argument, which could have been expressed in a single sentence (as above).

Ahtman wrote:This isn't about giving money. Kindness and money aren't the same thing. It might factor into it, but it wasn't a study of how much money people are willing to give, and it doesn't say that rich people have any less capacity for kindness than poor people, just that poor people may be quicker to notice others suffering and be kind in some fashion.

This. Everyone talking about money, tipping, etc, is a bit off topic. That has nothing to do with the study.

Mannahnin wrote:

Ahtman wrote:This isn't about giving money. Kindness and money aren't the same thing. It might factor into it, but it wasn't a study of how much money people are willing to give, and it doesn't say that rich people have any less capacity for kindness than poor people, just that poor people may be quicker to notice others suffering and be kind in some fashion.

This. Everyone talking about money, tipping, etc, is a bit off topic. That has nothing to do with the study.

I mentioned my doubts about the accuracy of this study on several points.
In the first place, I would like to know how it was conducted. What were the factors and how long was it. Where actual income levels simulated, ie., what constituted the study's definition of rich and poor, and were various income levels in these individual classes simulated?
I ask this because I have lived at a rock bottom poverty level, and most of the people that lived around me were never in any danger of making it onto an honor roll anywhere.
I never saw a bigger group of users, con artists, and outright thieves gathered in one place in my life. I had one person come to my apatment in tears one night because he had been cheated in a 20 dollar drug deal and he was trying to find out if he had pawned his pistol to me. His idea was for me to loan it to him if he had, so he could go shoot the guy who cheated him.
As I stated earlier, we have this report that seems to talk up the kindness of the poor and how it is more likely to show up among them, yet according to news, and statistics, the crime rate among the poor is rampant.
I am inclined to believe the experiment would have had more accurate results if people had been imbedded for a few months among different levels of those defined as poor to see what the actual story is.


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Not imbedded, I mean embedded

Relapse wrote:
I never saw a bigger group of users, con artists, and outright thieves gathered in one place in my life.

Clearly you've never spent time with the Harvard student body.

Relapse, your personal vidid and unpleasant experiences have no doubt had a substantial impact on how you see the world. That being said, just because every poor person you've met is a scumbag doesn't make all poor people scumbags.

Usually if one finds the results of a study incredible, the first thing to do is to read the actual study and find out if there are any flaws in its methodology. Whether those might have led to issues in its accuracy or validity. Or whether a news article/popular summary of the study has actually misinterpreted or misrepresented the results of the study. If you haven't actually looked into it, dismissing its findings is at least premature, and at worst foolish, because it can result in preventing yourself from learning something new.

Hrm. I think I've found the journal, but I don't see that particular study in the December issue.
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=browsePA.volumes&jcode=emo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_(journal)

Emotion is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which, as its title states, publishes articles relating to the study of emotion. It is one of several psychology journals published by the American Psychological Association.[1] It was established by founding co-editors-in-chief Richard Davidson and Klaus Scherer in 2001.[2] The current editor-in-chief is Elizabeth A. Phelps (Department of Psychology, New York University). From 2012, the editor-in-chief will be David DeSteno (Northeastern University).[1] Initially published quarterly, the publication frequency has been bimonthly since 2008.[3]

I had gone earlier looking for the study also, but couldn't find it.


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dogma wrote:

Relapse wrote:
I never saw a bigger group of users, con artists, and outright thieves gathered in one place in my life.

Clearly you've never spent time with the Harvard student body.

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As I thought, it was a bogus experiment.

http://yubanet.com/life/Lower-classes-quicker-to-show-compassion-in-the-face-of-suffering.php#.TwG0pqN5mSM

Mannahnin wrote:DSK was treated appropriately by the law. As you pointed out before, the fact that our system takes the accusation of a poor person against a wealthy and influential person this seriously is a reassuring demonstration of equality under the law.

DSK was treated fairly, dare I say honorably, by US law. DSK was demolished by the media. Stein's post, and mine, are in response to the media's gross mistreatment of the man, not the just process of the law. That was the point that whizzed straight past you.


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Relapse wrote:http://yubanet.com/life/Lower-classes-quicker-to-show-compassion-in-the-face-of-suffering.php#.TwG0pqN5mSM

That's a good find. And as expected, all of the volunteers were college undergraduates. They took special care to note how ethnically diverse their subject sample was, but make no reference to its economic diversity. I'd really like to see the actual breakdown, by quintile, of their subject sample because I bet it is a bell curve and I bet again that the lowest quintile is nearly neglible given that participants had to pass a significant economic hurdle--entry and eligibility into UC Berkeley--just to participate within this study.

Relapse wrote:As I thought, it was a bogus experiment.

http://yubanet.com/life/Lower-classes-quicker-to-show-compassion-in-the-face-of-suffering.php#.TwG0pqN5mSM

How does posting a link to what is almost the same press release as in the original post prove that it is bogus? It gives a general outline of the experiment but not enough to form that conclusion. The specific methodology isn't detailed, just a broad overview. To determine whether it is a bogus experiment or not you would need more than a press clipping.

As I've said, I am well aquainted with what it's like to be rock bottom. The people in the experiment were basicaly graded on how they answered questions on a paper or how they were supposed to feel watching a movie.
As I have learned, someone can talk about how bad they feel for someone in a scrape, but that doesn't neccesarily translate into action.
When I was at the low point in my life, I heard tale after tale from the people around me about how good and noble they were and how they'd like to help others if they could.
The next thing you'd know, they'd be ripping off the people they said they felt bad about.
One set of parents would tell me about how they stayed up at night, feeling awful about not being able to feed their kids. I had jack all at the time, but gave them any money or food I could spare, only later to be told by their children that the money saved by them was going towards drugs.
There were others that came to me with the same story about wanting to feed their kids, but by then I had wised up, and didn't give out any more, what I was to find out, money to be used for drugs.
It's one thing to sit in an academic setting, theorizing and reaching for conclusions about how much more noble one class of people over another is, but it's another thing entirely to be in the belly of the beast over an extended period to see things as they really are.
The gist of what I'm saying is not that all poor people are scum of the Earth, far from it. I just hate what seems to be a biased study that seems aimed from the beginning at a conclusion that trys to evoke images about different classes of people that tend to villanize some to a degree, while painting others in a rosey light.