Podcast appearances and mentions of paul piff

Episode 77: The Psychology of Greed | Put Em On The Couch Podcast In this 77th episode of Put Em On The Couch, hosts Jason McCoy and Nelson Beaulieu dive deep into the complex and often controversial topic of greed. What drives us to want more—whether it's wealth, power, or possessions? How does greed shape our happiness, behaviors, and society at large? We explore: What is greed and its roots in human nature. The psychology of greed: Is it a personality trait or a temporary emotion? How greed negatively impacts well-being and life satisfaction. Paul Piff's studies using Monopoly to demonstrate how wealth affects behavior. The upside of greed: Can it fuel capitalism and economic growth? Greed as addiction: How the cycle of acquisition can become never-ending. The impact of greed on society, from greedy billionaires to unethical behaviors. The difference between the desire to acquire versus the fear of losing. This thought-provoking episode unpacks the forces that drive human behavior and the implications of greed—both on a personal and societal level. Don't miss out on this important conversation! A Special Thank You & Merry Christmas! As we wrap up the year, we want to extend a heartfelt thank you to all our listeners for your continued support. Merry Christmas! May this season bring joy, reflection, and meaningful connections. Call to Action If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback helps us grow and reach more listeners like you. And don't forget to share this episode with your friends and family—let's keep the conversation going! Keywords: Greed, Psychology of Greed, Dispositional Greed, Capitalism, Wealth, Monopoly Study, Paul Piff, Behavioral Addiction, Dark Triad, Emotional Instability, Greedy Billionaires, Social Comparison, Happiness, Put Em On The Couch Podcast.

In this episode we'll look at an interesting study and questionnaire that help us sort out the factors in our lives that have contributed to our "success" in society. This episode includes: Society's definition of success Paul Piff's Monopoly Study and what it tells us about our understanding of success Some factors that contribute to wealth inequality How economic disadvantages can affect every other aspect of life The American Dream questionnaire How to use small changes to make a difference Get my latest book The Journey from Ego to Soul Support this podcast to keep it on the air! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/karen-wyatt/message

This podcast is a commentary and does not contain any copyrighted material of the reference source. We strongly recommend accessing/buying the reference source at the same time. ■Reference Source https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean ■Post on this topic (You can get FREE learning materials!) https://englist.me/155-academic-words-reference-from-paul-piff-does-money-make-you-mean-ted-talk/ ■Youtube Video https://youtu.be/vIs5J06fggg (All Words) https://youtu.be/xIMvJ_7il7s (Advanced Words) https://youtu.be/d3qiZZAW2ro (Quick Look) ■Top Page for Further Materials https://englist.me/ ■SNS (Please follow!)

Bíblia em um ano: Deuteronômio 14–16 Marcos 12:28-44 Eles deram uma parte do que lhes sobrava, mas ela, em sua pobreza, deu tudo que tinha. v.44 Escritura de hoje: Marcos 12:38-44 Warren Buffett, Bill e Melinda Gates fizeram história quando prometeram doar metade de seu dinheiro, em 2018. Naquela época, isso significava doar 92 bilhões de dólares. Essa ação deixou o psicólogo Paul Piff curioso para estudar os padrões de doação. Em suas pesquisas, ele descobriu que os pobres tendem a doar 44% mais do que os ricos. Aqueles que sentiram a própria privação, por vezes, são movidos à maior generosidade. Jesus sabia disso, ao visitar o Templo, Ele viu as multidões ofertarem (Marcos 12:41). Os ricos entregavam muito dinheiro, mas uma viúva pobre ofertou suas duas últimas moedas de cobre, colocando-as na caixa. Eu imagino Jesus se levantando, encantado e surpreso. Imediatamente, Ele reuniu Seus discípulos, certificando-se de que não perdessem esse ato deslumbrante: “essa viúva depositou na caixa de ofertas mais que todos os outros” (v.43), exclamou Jesus. Os discípulos se entreolharam, perplexos, esperando que alguém pudesse explicar o que Jesus falou. Então, Ele deixou claro: “Eles deram uma parte do que lhes sobrava, mas ela, em sua pobreza, deu tudo que tinha” (v.44). Talvez tenhamos pouco para dar, mas Jesus nos convida a ofertar a partir de nossa pobreza. Embora possa parecer escasso para os outros, damos o que temos, e Deus se alegra com as nossas doações generosas. Por: Winn Collier Refletir & Orar O que significa para você ofertar em sua pobreza? Como entregar “tudo” a Jesus hoje? Deus, sinto-me sem muito a oferecer. Meus donativos parecem insignificantes, porém, entrego-me a ti, Senhor.

This week @EchoChamberFP https://www.instagram.com/echochamberfp/ is a 'TwO Parter'!!! In 'Part One', we have a climate documentary, we finally look at the twenty fifth Bond installment, AND, we have the new Nicolas Cage dose of crazy! Today we have: 12th Hour Watch Review: Here. https://youtu.be/P70wWCAhDvU Digital Release Date: 22nd April 2022 Director: Susan Kucera Cast: David Morse, Dr. Paul Piff, Dr. Maureen O'Hara, Dr. Thomas Metzinger, Dr. Bruce M. Hood, Dr. Jorgen Randers, Dr. Azim Shariff, Dr. Daniel Wildcat, Dr. Ugo Bardi, Dr. Michael Ranney, Dr. Kari Norgaard, Pete Russell, Dr. William Catton, Dr. Dario Maestripieri, Richard Dawkins, Dr. Joseph Tainter, George Dyson, Paul Roberts, Dr. William Calvin, Dro. Robert Trivers, Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, Dr. Brian Fagan, Jay Julius, Dr. Sue Blackmore, Rob Hopkins Credit: Rangeland Productions, Video Project Genre: Documentary Running Time: 52 min Cert: 12a Trailer: Here. https://youtu.be/xWBc_r1gyHg Website: Here. https://www.12thhourfilm.com/ Twitter: @12thhourfilm https://twitter.com/12thhourfilm Facebook: Here. https://www.facebook.com/12thhourfilm/ Instagram: @12thhourfilm https://www.instagram.com/12thhourfilm/ ------------ No Time to Die Watch Review: Here. https://youtu.be/YoLJNdqd9bs Theatrical UK Release Date: 28th September 2021 Theatrical USA Release Date: 8th October 2021 Digital Release Date: 20th April 2022 Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga Cast: Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Christoph Waltz, Rory Kinnear, Rami Malek, Lashana Lynch, Billy Magnussen, Ana de Armas, David Dencik, Dali Benssalah, Ralph Fiennes Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Eon Productions, Universal Pictures, United Artists Releasing Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller Running Time: 163 min Cert: 18 Trailer: Here. https://youtu.be/N_gD9-Oa0fg Watch via Prime Video USA: Here. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/No-Time-To-Die/0SILOEE0B6Y2YL1HOCOU40O6L1 Watch via Prime Video UK: Here. https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Time-Die-Daniel-Craig/dp/B09LRC7WSJ Website: Here. https://www.007.com/no-time-to-die/ Twitter: @007 https://twitter.com/007 Facebook: Here. https://www.facebook.com/JamesBond007GB/?brand_redir=266350353379883 Instagram: @007 https://www.instagram.com/007/ YouTube: Here. https://www.youtube.com/c/007 ------------ The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Watch Review: Here. https://youtu.be/aHtW1y6E6gY Digital Release Date: 22nd April 2022 Director: Tom Gormican Cast: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Lily Mo Sheen, Ike Barinholtz, Paco León, Alessandra Mastronardi, Jacob Scipio, Neil Patrick Harris, Katrin Vankova, Tiffany Haddish Credit: Saturn Films, Burr! Productions, LionsGate Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime, Thriller Running Time: 107 min Cert: 18 Trailer: Here. https://youtu.be/CKTRbKch2K4 Website: Here. https://www.nickcage.movie/ Twitter: @NickCageMovie https://twitter.com/NickCageMovie Facebook: Here. https://www.facebook.com/NickCageMovie Instagram: @nickcagemovie https://www.instagram.com/NickCageMovie/ ------------ *(Music) 'Luchini aka This Is It' by Camp Lo - 1997 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eftv/message

Greed is considered one of the seven deadly sins; but is the accumulation - and retention - of wealth always a bad thing? With economic inequality growing, Elizabeth Hotson asks John Paul Rollert, from the Chicago Booth school of management, why greed has historically invited criticism. We also hear from Paul Piff, Associate Professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine, who tells us about an experiment in acquisitiveness, played out during a game of Monopoly. Plus serial entrepreneur and self-made multi millionaire, Richard Skellett, tells us why he supports a wealth tax. Presented by Elizabeth Hotson Produced by Sarah Treanor (Picture of dollar bills, picture via Getty Images).

Awe is that sense of wonder felt in the presence of something vast that transcends one's understanding of the world. People commonly experience it in nature but also in response to religion, art and music. But recent research shows a surprising fringe benefit to moments of awe. These studies show that inducing a sense of awe in people can promote altruistic, helpful and positive social behavior. Paul Piff, a psychologist who has designed some of these studies, says, “Our investigation indicates that awe, although often fleeting and hard to describe, serves a vital social function. By diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, awe may encourage people to forgo strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others.” The researchers said they believe that awe induces a feeling of being diminished in the presence of something greater than oneself. It is this reduced sense of self that sways focus away from an individual's need and toward the greater good. In this episode, Ven. Tenzin talks about the link between awe and altruism, and explores strategies we can use to enhance our experiences of awe, not only leading to these moments of wonder and transcendence, but motivating altruistic actions and behaviors that benefit others.

Whew! Finally getting this one out! I worked hard on this episode, and I think you will like it...Jesus warns against meritocracy in this often overlooked parable.A couple of resources mentioned in the podcast are:Clifton Mark's article, "A Belief in Meritocracy is Not Only False, It's Bad for You," can be found at https://aeon.co/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you. The PBS video about Paul Piff and his experiments about wealth and meritocracy can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_LcSupport the show (https://paypal.me/ParodySubversion?locale.x=en_US)

Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates made history when they launched the Giving Pledge, promising to donate half of their money. As of 2018, this meant giving away 92 billion dollars. The pledge made psychologist Paul Piff curious to study giving patterns. Through a research test, he discovered that the poor were inclined to give 44% more of what they had than wealthy people. Those who’ve felt their own poverty are often moved to greater generosity. Jesus knew this. Visiting the temple, He watched the crowds drop gifts into the treasury (Mark 12:41). The rich tossed in wads of cash, but a poor widow pulled her last two copper coins, worth maybe a penny, and placed them into the basket. I picture Jesus standing up, delighted and astounded. Immediately, He gathered His disciples, making sure they didn’t miss this dazzling act. “This poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others,” Jesus exclaimed (v. 43). The disciples looked at each other, bewildered, hoping someone could explain what Jesus was talking about. So, He made it plain: those bringing huge gifts “gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything” (v. 44). We may have little to give, but Jesus invites us to give out of our poverty. Though it may seem meager to others, we give what we have, and God finds great joy in our lavish gifts.

At the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, social psychologist Paul Piff paired off approximately 200 u...

The “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” documentary provided a fasted paced and fascinating look at the evolution of capital in recent history and how this has affected so much, and James Keys and Tunde Ogunlana discuss what stood out the most (01:27), what can be made of growing inequality trends (17:05), the link between wealth inequality and social instability (30:04), and how current trends can be addressed (43:12).

Todos (o casi todos) nos jactamos… a veces hasta para cosas que no son mérito nuestro. El tema es que a todos nos gusta que nos digan qué buenos que somos. Hoy viajamos con la mente a una tribu de África donde esto está prohibido. Se llaman los ǃKung San. Como siempre, al final les pregunto su opinión…  Fuente de la informaciónCivilized to Death : The Price of Progress, libro de Christopher Ryan, Antropologo“Does money make you mean?” ted talk de Paul Piff, Psicologo social  https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean “Chasquido consonántico”, Wikipedia https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasquido_conson%C3%A1ntico 

Led by Rev. Steven Protzman and Worship Associate Heidi Emhoff Wood Awe is the feeling we get when something vast challenges our understanding of the world. Feeling awe can be a powerful spiritual experience because as Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner say: "it imbues us with a different sense of ourselves, seeing ourselves as part of something larger." This service will invite us to reflect on awe and its power to help us grow spiritually by inspiring wonder and curiosity, reverence, kindness, and care for others and the world. Sunday morning services are offered at 9:45 and 11:30 with nursery care available during both services.

Depending where you are in the development of your business, you may or may not have thought of giving to charity. On the one hand, when we’re just starting out, we may be struggling just to get by, much less give to others. We may think, “Someday, when I’m doing very well, then I’ll start giving.” On the other hand, when we’re doing very well, we tend to hold onto our money, finding it difficult to let go of what we’ve worked hard to obtain. Whatever our situation, there will always be arguments mitigating against giving to charity.   Interestingly, we discover that the poor tend to be more charitable than the rich. Such was the finding of Paul Piff, a psychology researcher at the University of California, Berkley, in a study he conducted in 2010. Obviously, the wealthy have the capacity to give more total dollars. But those who have little to begin with are inclined to give away a greater percentage of what they possess.   In this episode you’ll hear: 7 great reason to give to charity How to decide which charities to give to Treating charitable gifts as a long term investment Resources: Podcast Supercharger Live Course application - https://dannyozment.com/podcastsupercharger Podcaster Mastermind application - https://dannyozment.com/podcastermastermind Other resources - https://dannyozment.com/resources

What does money tell us about human nature? How does it motivate, trick, satisfy and disappoint us? In this hour, TED speakers share insights into our relationship with money. Guests include psychologist Laurie Santos, behavioral economist Keith Chen, social psychologist Paul Piff, writer Daniel Pink and social scientist Michael Norton. (Original broadcast date: April 4, 2014).

First and foremost - a very special thanks to graphic designer Brett Bolin for the brand new logo!Today's show focuses on Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, Iran, and the darker details of America's housing market.Clips and music today by Paul Piff at UC Berkley, Shopping, Evil Bear Boris, Wreck & Reference, Post Materialists, Graham Rue and Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now!

Paul Piff, social psychologist and post-doc scholar in the Psychology Dept at UC Berkeley, studies how social hierarchy, inequality, and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul Piff received PhD in Psychology from UCB May 2012.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm your house today. In today's interview, Renee Rao and I talk with Paul Piff, a social psychologist and postdoctoral scholar in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul's studies house, social [00:01:00] hierarchy, inequality and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul piff received his phd in psychology from UC Berkeley in May, 2012 onto the interview. Paul Piff, welcome to spectrum. Thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure. I wanted to have you talk about your research. Psychology is such a big field. How does your research fit into that? Speaker 4: Psychology is a big field. Lot of people are psychologists center interested in a lot [00:01:30] of different questions as they relate to people and organisms and why different kinds of organisms do the things that they do. The brand of psychology that I'm really interested in is called social psychology. So what I do is as opposed to having people lay on a couch and talk to me about their problems, I study what people do around others in the reasons for what they do. So I study emotion. That's one of the focuses of my work. I've also recently gotten really interested in [00:02:00] the effects of inequality and specifically how a person's levels of wealth and status in society shapes the ways that they see the world and behave toward other people. As a social psychologist, you take a question that's of interest to you, like how do the rich behave compared to those that are poor. And then you think about how you would design experiments in different kinds of studies to look at that using a very quantitative approach. So as a social psychologist, I design a lot of studies where people literally [00:02:30] come into the lab. There's something happening where I can observe what they do without their necessarily knowing, and I use that to infer basic motivations behind people's behavior. Speaker 3: Can you explain then some of your methods, maybe an example of how you're set up Speaker 4: study, study. So a lot of the work that I've been doing relates to this basic question of how money shapes behavior. So how do people who have a lot of money behave differently toward others from those who don't have [00:03:00] as much money? One of the things that I was interested in studying for example, is how does the amount of money that you have shaped how generous and helping you are toward other people. In social psychology, we call that general category of behavior, pro social behavior or altruism. What makes people behave in ways that help another person out, even if that means they have to do something kind of costly. So let's say I'm interested in looking at levels of generosity, a lot of different ways in which people can be generous toward one another in everyday life. [00:03:30] But I want to study this in the lab. Speaker 4: And so one of the ways that we can do that is using a standard task where we can have someone engage in it and see how generous they are. And one of the tasks that I'll use is called the dictator task. And for instance, in one study in this dictator task, I give someone literally $10 and I say, you can keep all these $10 10 single dollar bills or you can decide how many of these dollar bills you want to give away, if any, [00:04:00] to another person who's totally anonymous that you've been paired with in this study. And I tell them they'll never meet this other person, the other person will never meet them. And I just measure how many of those dollars they're willing to give away. Another thing I do before they come into the lab is measure what their income is. So I can look at how generous they are, how many of these single dollar bills they're willing to give away as a function of how much money they have. Speaker 4: And that's one of the assessments that I used in one area of study to look at levels [00:04:30] of giving levels of generosity in the simple task as a function of how much money people have. So there's rational economic models that would say that if you have a lot of money, that the utility of those $10 is somewhat diminished because you have more money in the first place. So you would predict that as a rational actor, a person who has more money is going to give more money away cause $10 means less. That's the opposite of what we find. In fact, people who make under $15,000 [00:05:00] a year give significantly more on average six to $7 away then to someone who makes 150,000 to $200,000 a year. So we found incredible differences. And so a lot of my work over the last five or six years, and this is in collaboration with other people in my lab, is to try to document why it is that these really notable differences emerge between the haves and the have nots and what the psychological underpinnings of those differences are. But that's an example of a kind of study that will run Speaker 2: [00:05:30] [inaudible]. Our guest today is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. Paul is talking about how he designs his research studies. This is k a l X. Berkeley. Speaker 5: I have a question about the dictator test. Do you find any sort of other correlating variables in between just wealth and lack of [00:06:00] wealth? Do you find education has difference or how people made the wealth? Can you draw a sort of a causal line between saying this person has more and this makes them less empathetic or this person being less empathetic maybe has led to them being wealthier? Speaker 4: The dictator task has been used a lot and there are a lot of correlating variables that we know about already. Age correlates, religion correlates, ethnicity correlates, and so if I'm interested in the specific effects of wealth, I have to [00:06:30] account for those other things and I do so controlling for a lot of other variables. Wealth above and beyond a person's race, their age, what religion they are, how religious they are in the first place. Wealth has a specific effect, but the question that you're getting at I think is a even bigger one, which is how do I know whether it's wealth that causes someone to do something or is it people that are say a little more selfish with their money, who become wealthy in the first place? [00:07:00] And that is a really important question. And I think one of the insights that we've had from a lot of the experimental work that we've done, I can literally take someone whose quote unquote poor, make them feel rich and show you that making them feel wealthy temporarily in the lab actually makes them behave more unethically, which suggests that there's at least in part a causal direction between having money, feeling like you have money and that subjective experience. Speaker 4: It's psychological [00:07:30] experience causing you to behave in some ways that are a little more entitled, a little more self-serving. Now there's an another important question, which is if these differences do exist between those that have and those that don't, are they fixed? Are they rooted? Is that just a fact of life that we have to accept and sort of move on from, or are they sensitive to changes and if they are, what are the kinds of things that you can do to move people's behavior around or to make certain people in society a little more empathetic [00:08:00] without necessarily getting into the details? There are a lot of things that can be done in a lot of my work looks at specific variables that you can manipulate, even through subtle interventions that get people who had a lot more money to behave in ways that are a lot more compassionate and a lot more empathetic. And one of the lessons that I've learned from this work is that it's not that difficult. So it's not that people who have money or necessarily corrupt in any way, but that there's a specific psychological experience associated with privilege [00:08:30] that gets you to become a little more disconnected from others. A little more insular from others in that certain patterns of behavior flow as a result, but those patterns can easily changed. Speaker 5: Can we talk about some of the tweaks that you use to sort of bring about those changes? Speaker 4: Sure. One of the things that I'm really interested in right now is if it's the case that upper status individuals are more likely to behave unethically, then what are some subtle interventions that could be [00:09:00] done? Like a little ethics reminder course at the beginning that, so I've run this where I basically had people do sort of a 10 minutes ethics training program where I remind them about some of the benefits of the rules and how cooperating with others can ultimately bring about gains for the whole group, including yourself. And I see how that basic values intervention changes their patterns of unethical, the downstream. But now in one of the studies that I ran, I just wanted to look at helping behavior. [00:09:30] What makes a person want to help out another? So in this study, the way that I designed my test was I had one group of participants sitting in the lab and about 15 minutes into the study, it's the room bursts. Speaker 4: Another person. Now this is appearing visibly distressed. They're worried, they're sweating, they're anxious, they apologize for being late, and they introduce themselves as their partner in the study. Now there is an experimenter standing there who says, it's so great that you're late. Why don't you go ahead and see yourself in this other room? [00:10:00] And they turn to the participant and ask the participant if they'd be willing to give up some of their own time to help out this other person who would otherwise have to stay on for a lot of extra time to complete all of the tasks that they need to complete. And so that's our measure of helping behavior. How many minutes people are willing to volunteer to help out this other person who's actually a confederate. There's someone we've trained to be late to appear distressed, et cetera. They're an actor. All right. Speaker 4: So in one condition we find that Richard people give [00:10:30] way fewer minutes than poor people paralleling all the other results. But we had this other condition that I think is really revealing in that condition. Before they received in the lab about 15 minutes earlier, they watched a 46 second long video. And in that video, it was just a quick little reminder of the problems of childhood poverty. And it was a video that we'd designed to elicit increased feelings of compassion. Now, in that group, 15 minutes later, when [00:11:00] the people who had seen that video were sitting in a lab and we're introduced to that confederate and asked if they'd be willing to help them out, there were no differences between the rich and the poor in our study. So essentially that quick little reminder of the needs of others made wealthier people just as generous of their time to help out this other person as poor people suggesting that simple reminders of the needs of other people can go a long way toward restoring that empathy gap. And so the interesting question [00:11:30] to me is what are the ways in which in everyday life we can remind even those in the upper echelons of society, of the needs of other people in the small benefits that can be incurred through small and even sometimes trivial acts of kindness toward another person. Speaker 4: You are listening to the on k Speaker 2: a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Paul. Pissed in the next second [00:12:00] he talks about his collaboration with Facebook. [inaudible] Speaker 5: try not to talk about how psychology seems to be a field that's accessible, not only in terms of mechanics and just finding the work, but also more understandable for a layman or for everyday people. Then most sciences, I think it's one of the most popular majors in colleges across the u s and can you sort of talk about the broad appeal that psychology has and why you think that might [00:12:30] be? I think Speaker 4: that observation rings true. I think psychology is something that's accessible and that that accessibility and the understandable illness of the content is what makes it kind of relatable and popular in the kind of work that we do. It's a positive and a negative. So what I mean by that is everyone who's engaged with others or interacted with others who are, has a sense of how people behave is a, an intuitive psychologist. We're all psychologists. [00:13:00] We all make decisions based on what we think is gonna make us happy. What's gonna make others happy? What's the kind of relationship that's meaningful to me? We all run these kinds of experiments. In fact, the life is sort of like a psychological experiment to run on a single person, 5 billion people at a time or whatever the population of the earth is. So we're all intuitive psychologists. But what that means is for the work that we do, if we find something or generate a finding, it's either obvious. Speaker 4: So someone could say, Oh yeah, you had to run a study [00:13:30] to do that. I've known that all along. Or if it doesn't conform to your worldview, you're wrong. You've run the study incorrectly. So the question is, are we actually convincing people or revealing new insights about how the mind works to others such that our awareness and understanding of psychology is increasing? Or are we simply just telling people what they knew all along or telling them things that they feel like is just flat out wrong? And that's something that I've wondered about myself. To what extent our findings are convincing people or informing people of things that they don't [00:14:00] intuitively experience in their everyday lives. Speaker 5: Do you want to talk about what you're doing with Facebook? I know you're, yeah, we can talk about Facebook in an ongoing collaboration with Facebook. So maybe you should tell us a little bit more about that Speaker 4: with Facebook. Dacher Keltner, who's a psychology faculty member here at Berkeley and Amelianna, Simon Thomas, who's the science director of the greater good science center, also at Berkeley, and I have been working with a team of engineers [00:14:30] at Facebook to put very, very simply make Facebook a more compassionate place. Now, when we started working with Facebook about 12 months ago, that was what was post to us. Help us make Facebook a more compassionate place. What does that mean? How do you do that? Well, what's become clear to me is that there are a lot of opportunities on Facebook and elsewhere to build little tools to make interactions between people and online. A little more sympathetic and a little more empathetic. [00:15:00] So here's an example. A lot of people on Facebook post photos. What that means when photos are getting posted is that there's the possibility that you're going to encounter a photo that you don't like. Speaker 4: And what Facebook found was that people were encountering these photos and just submitting reports to Facebook saying, hey, there's something seriously wrong with this photo. Facebook needs to take it down. And more often than not, people were reporting photos that had been posted by a friend of theirs. Very rarely do these reported photos actually violate [00:15:30] Facebook's terms of services. So Facebook can't do anything about it. And what we thought and what we've done is in the context of a photo being posted that you don't like, maybe this is a photo of your child that you think shouldn't be up at violates your privacy. Maybe it's a photo of you at a party in a some kind of revealing pose that you think is embarrassing. It doesn't really matter. But what we've done is tried to, for instance, give people tools to express why that photo is problematic, not to Facebook but to the person who posted [00:16:00] it. Speaker 4: And so now there's a series of things that pop up on the site. If you're having a problem with something that someone's posted that basically gets you to think about your experience, be a little bit mindful about the feelings that you're experiencing and be a little more mindful in how you express those feelings to the other person. That puts the photo up and when we just looked at the data recently, what we found is that by identifying the particular reason why you're finding that photo problematic and expressing that to the other person gets [00:16:30] them to be a lot more empathetic, a lot more sympathetic and really importantly a lot more likely to take the photo down. So we're actually trying to resolve disputes and conflicts on Facebook and there are a lot of other directions that this work is taken. We're dealing with bullying with the team at Yale, we're doing all sorts of other things that basically relate to what makes people get along or not get along in an online context. Speaker 5: I think the other question that I was trying to get at but didn't quite get to is how you think interactions [00:17:00] on platforms like the Internet, if they are fundamentally different than people interacting face to face or in a laboratory and why you think that might be the case? Speaker 4: Yes. What I mean by that is there's no single answer to the question and I think it's too early to tell. I think that online interactions are expressions of fundamental psychological tendencies, much like real world interactions are. So I don't think that things unfolds [00:17:30] online that wouldn't unfold in the real world, but does that mean that certain things are going to be accentuated or emphasized or magnified in an online setting? I think that's true as well. So I think online interactions are a certain kind of context where dynamics and fold that aren't fundamentally different from other kinds contexts in everyday life, but in which you might see certain kinds of patterns emphasized or magnified. Speaker 2: [00:18:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. Speaker 4: Do you see a future in collaboration between brain studies and psychology? Absolutely. So that that future is now, I think a lot of psychologists who [00:18:30] incorporate brain imaging and brain data, FMR data into their papers, into their studies. This is the direction that even my work is beginning to move into. So I feel like the opportunities for collaboration are definitely there and in fact they're unfolding now. There's a lot of neuroscience that's less interested in quote unquote psychology and more interested in say biology, but there's a lot of social neuroscience, a lot of brain research that's done that's specifically motivated and [00:19:00] oriented around understanding why people feel the things that they do. What does emotion look like in the brain? What drives basic behavior patterns? So absolutely, I think that those opportunities are there, and this is a, an incredibly exciting developing area of the science. Speaker 4: One of the things in the fifties and sixties when BF Skinner and behaviorism was all the rage, is that behaviorism and the quantification of behavior gained traction [00:19:30] because it was argued that you can't look inside the black box. And if you can't look inside the black box, which is people's brains, people's minds, then the only thing you can study is behavior. And if we're interested in a science of behavior, then the only thing we can measure is what a person does or what a rat does or what a pigeon pecks at. But what neuroscience has allowed us to do is take a look at what is happening in that so-called black box. And if you put someone's brain in [00:20:00] a magnet in, scan it and see what's happening in the brain when you're showing them, say, images of another person's suffering, well then you're getting a sense of what compassion looks like neuro anatomically. Speaker 4: And that's a really exciting and incredible opportunity for understanding how basic psychological experiences are rooted in the brain and how basic anatomical structures in the brain can illuminate how psychology works. So I think the [00:20:30] opportunities are bi-directional. If I might, let me just add one more thing, which is one more insight that I think is interesting to me that social psychology seems to have been moving in the direction of, or psychology and there are about 80 or 90 years of research documenting the extent to which people stick to their groups. People are antagonistic potentially toward other groups. There's a history of violence in the human tradition or the history of humanity as sort of a history [00:21:00] of violence and that's given a lot of psychologists the perspective that people are in a way born to be sort of self-serving, especially if you look at behavior from an evolutionary framework, then it makes sense that people would do anything they could to get themselves ahead of the pack and get their groups ahead of the pack of other groups. Speaker 4: And what I think is a really important insight, and this is in part a movement that's been inspired by people like my advisor in graduate [00:21:30] school, Dacher Keltner, toward understanding that people are a lot more complicated than that in that a lot of the driving motivation to behavior is not just what gets you ahead, but also how you can help other people. So in a way, compassion and altruism we're learning is hardwired into the brain and that's a really puzzling thing because it's hard to fit that specifically into an evolutionary framework. But put generally [00:22:00] what I think we're learning about what motivates people is not just that people are motivated to get ahead, but the people are really driven to make others around them happy and to serve other people in ways that benefit others. And that insight has inspired 30 years of the most hard-hitting social psychology that I know of and it's also given rise to just a different kind of conceptualization of what makes people do the things that they do. Paul Piff, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. [00:22:30] That was a lot of fun. Thanks again for having me. On and I'd be happy to come on any other time. Great. Speaker 2: [inaudible] spectrum is archived on iTunes university. To find the archives, do a search in your favorite browser for iTunes Dash and view space k a l x space spectrum. The feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find [00:23:00] interesting and a coolio and Renee route present the news. Speaker 6: A National Institute of Health funded team of researchers at Stanford University have created an entirely transparent mouse brain. This new process known as clarity by its inventors will allow scientists to explore the neural networks and their natural 3d arrangement without having to slice the brain or severing any neural connections. Additionally, the process preserves the delicate biochemistry of the brain, which will allow researchers to test [00:23:30] chemicals affecting specific structures as well as to examine past brain activity. While the breakthrough is not part of the Obama Administration's recent brain exploration initiative, the senior author on the paper, Dr Karl Deisseroth, was involved in the planning of the initiative. Speaker 1: Well, some moderations do need to be made for the more complex human brain. The Stanford lab has already produced transparent human livers, hearts and lungs. You see Berkeley researchers and the integrative Biology Department just came out [00:24:00] with a study showing the positive effects of stress in studies on rats. They found that brief stressful events caused stem cells to branch into new nerve cells that improved the rats. Mental performance. It is important to differentiate acute stress and chronic stress. Chronic stress elevates levels of stress hormones that suppress the production of new neurons, which impairs mental performance. Associate Professor Coffer Characterizes [00:24:30] the overall message of this study as stress can be something that makes you better, but it is a question of how much, how long and how you interpret or perceive it. We'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky, Julian and Renee arou present the calendar. NASA astrobiology researcher and Lawrence Berkeley fellow in residence, Felisa Wolf Simon is delivering tonight. Future Friday's [00:25:00] lecture at the Chabot Space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. She'll be discussing the chemical elements that can support microbial life on earth. Drawing from molecular biology, biochemistry and physiology. Admission is $23 in advance. Visit shabbos space.org for more info this Saturday come to the UC Berkeley campus for the [inaudible] Speaker 6: bears annual kal day. Over 300 lectures, workshops [00:25:30] and presentations will be available with topics ranging from how the interplay of light with the atmosphere can create rainbows to a demonstration from the first laundry folding robot. Rosie Cal Day's tomorrow April 20th held on the UC Berkeley campus and open to the public events. Begin at 8:00 AM go to [inaudible] dot berkeley.edu Speaker 1: false schedule of events April 22nd through April 26th is national parks week. During this week, [00:26:00] admission to all US national parks is free. Put on your hiking boots and visit the nearest national park to you. Speaker 6: On April 27th Berkeley High School will host the day long Alameda County apps challenge contestants are asked to create apps that will address community needs. Using Alameda county open datasets apprise of $3,000 will be awarded to the most inventive and user friendly app. Well, second, third and honorable mentions will also be meted out. Alameda county [00:26:30] invites participation from residents of all skill levels and age groups. The apps challenge is part of a nationwide movement to increase transparency and implement open data policies in governmental organizations. The event be held at Berkeley High School Speaker 1: in downtown Berkeley from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Saturday, April 27th it costs $15 to participate with discounts for students and seniors. There has been a rapid spread of sudden oak death pathogen [00:27:00] referred to Assad over the East Bay hills, specifically in north Berkeley and Montclair. Professor Matteo Garber, Loto, head of the UC Berkeley forest pathology and my collegey lab has been tracking the spread through annual area surveys. Garber Lotos team is looking for volunteers to help conduct annual spring surveys to find diseased trees. There will be several training sessions for volunteers in the bay area. The Berkeley session is on Saturday, April 27th at 1:00 PM [00:27:30] on the Berkeley campus in one 59 Mulford Hall. For other training sessions in the bay area. Searched the web for sod blitz project, but first after dark at the new exploratorium in San Francisco. [inaudible] on Thursday May 2nd after dark is the exploratorium monthly evening program for adults 18 and over. Admission for non-members is $15 in addition to the museums regular exhibits, there will be live music films and [00:28:00] the lectures. The theme this month is home and you can hear about how an empty warehouse on pier 15 was transformed into the explore Torrens new home. Karen [inaudible]. We'll discuss the human microbiome and Ron Hitchman. We'll talk about what makes earth and other goldilocks planets just right for sustaining life. For more information, visit the exploratorium.edu Speaker 6: on Friday May 3rd the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series [00:28:30] will host a workshop on crafting the perfect science story. Editors of the science writer handbook will share personal stories of working in the field and address questions about building sustainable science writing careers. The May 3rd event will begin at 7:00 PM in San Francisco's bizarre cafe. More details can be found online at ask a scientist, s f.com Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:29:00] a character in the show is by lost on a David from his album, folk acoustic and available by it. We have Commons license 3.0 and attribution editing assistance provided by renew route 90 spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum lx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks. Same time [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Piff, social psychologist and post-doc scholar in the Psychology Dept at UC Berkeley, studies how social hierarchy, inequality, and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul Piff received PhD in Psychology from UCB May 2012.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm your house today. In today's interview, Renee Rao and I talk with Paul Piff, a social psychologist and postdoctoral scholar in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul's studies house, social [00:01:00] hierarchy, inequality and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul piff received his phd in psychology from UC Berkeley in May, 2012 onto the interview. Paul Piff, welcome to spectrum. Thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure. I wanted to have you talk about your research. Psychology is such a big field. How does your research fit into that? Speaker 4: Psychology is a big field. Lot of people are psychologists center interested in a lot [00:01:30] of different questions as they relate to people and organisms and why different kinds of organisms do the things that they do. The brand of psychology that I'm really interested in is called social psychology. So what I do is as opposed to having people lay on a couch and talk to me about their problems, I study what people do around others in the reasons for what they do. So I study emotion. That's one of the focuses of my work. I've also recently gotten really interested in [00:02:00] the effects of inequality and specifically how a person's levels of wealth and status in society shapes the ways that they see the world and behave toward other people. As a social psychologist, you take a question that's of interest to you, like how do the rich behave compared to those that are poor. And then you think about how you would design experiments in different kinds of studies to look at that using a very quantitative approach. So as a social psychologist, I design a lot of studies where people literally [00:02:30] come into the lab. There's something happening where I can observe what they do without their necessarily knowing, and I use that to infer basic motivations behind people's behavior. Speaker 3: Can you explain then some of your methods, maybe an example of how you're set up Speaker 4: study, study. So a lot of the work that I've been doing relates to this basic question of how money shapes behavior. So how do people who have a lot of money behave differently toward others from those who don't have [00:03:00] as much money? One of the things that I was interested in studying for example, is how does the amount of money that you have shaped how generous and helping you are toward other people. In social psychology, we call that general category of behavior, pro social behavior or altruism. What makes people behave in ways that help another person out, even if that means they have to do something kind of costly. So let's say I'm interested in looking at levels of generosity, a lot of different ways in which people can be generous toward one another in everyday life. [00:03:30] But I want to study this in the lab. Speaker 4: And so one of the ways that we can do that is using a standard task where we can have someone engage in it and see how generous they are. And one of the tasks that I'll use is called the dictator task. And for instance, in one study in this dictator task, I give someone literally $10 and I say, you can keep all these $10 10 single dollar bills or you can decide how many of these dollar bills you want to give away, if any, [00:04:00] to another person who's totally anonymous that you've been paired with in this study. And I tell them they'll never meet this other person, the other person will never meet them. And I just measure how many of those dollars they're willing to give away. Another thing I do before they come into the lab is measure what their income is. So I can look at how generous they are, how many of these single dollar bills they're willing to give away as a function of how much money they have. Speaker 4: And that's one of the assessments that I used in one area of study to look at levels [00:04:30] of giving levels of generosity in the simple task as a function of how much money people have. So there's rational economic models that would say that if you have a lot of money, that the utility of those $10 is somewhat diminished because you have more money in the first place. So you would predict that as a rational actor, a person who has more money is going to give more money away cause $10 means less. That's the opposite of what we find. In fact, people who make under $15,000 [00:05:00] a year give significantly more on average six to $7 away then to someone who makes 150,000 to $200,000 a year. So we found incredible differences. And so a lot of my work over the last five or six years, and this is in collaboration with other people in my lab, is to try to document why it is that these really notable differences emerge between the haves and the have nots and what the psychological underpinnings of those differences are. But that's an example of a kind of study that will run Speaker 2: [00:05:30] [inaudible]. Our guest today is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. Paul is talking about how he designs his research studies. This is k a l X. Berkeley. Speaker 5: I have a question about the dictator test. Do you find any sort of other correlating variables in between just wealth and lack of [00:06:00] wealth? Do you find education has difference or how people made the wealth? Can you draw a sort of a causal line between saying this person has more and this makes them less empathetic or this person being less empathetic maybe has led to them being wealthier? Speaker 4: The dictator task has been used a lot and there are a lot of correlating variables that we know about already. Age correlates, religion correlates, ethnicity correlates, and so if I'm interested in the specific effects of wealth, I have to [00:06:30] account for those other things and I do so controlling for a lot of other variables. Wealth above and beyond a person's race, their age, what religion they are, how religious they are in the first place. Wealth has a specific effect, but the question that you're getting at I think is a even bigger one, which is how do I know whether it's wealth that causes someone to do something or is it people that are say a little more selfish with their money, who become wealthy in the first place? [00:07:00] And that is a really important question. And I think one of the insights that we've had from a lot of the experimental work that we've done, I can literally take someone whose quote unquote poor, make them feel rich and show you that making them feel wealthy temporarily in the lab actually makes them behave more unethically, which suggests that there's at least in part a causal direction between having money, feeling like you have money and that subjective experience. Speaker 4: It's psychological [00:07:30] experience causing you to behave in some ways that are a little more entitled, a little more self-serving. Now there's an another important question, which is if these differences do exist between those that have and those that don't, are they fixed? Are they rooted? Is that just a fact of life that we have to accept and sort of move on from, or are they sensitive to changes and if they are, what are the kinds of things that you can do to move people's behavior around or to make certain people in society a little more empathetic [00:08:00] without necessarily getting into the details? There are a lot of things that can be done in a lot of my work looks at specific variables that you can manipulate, even through subtle interventions that get people who had a lot more money to behave in ways that are a lot more compassionate and a lot more empathetic. And one of the lessons that I've learned from this work is that it's not that difficult. So it's not that people who have money or necessarily corrupt in any way, but that there's a specific psychological experience associated with privilege [00:08:30] that gets you to become a little more disconnected from others. A little more insular from others in that certain patterns of behavior flow as a result, but those patterns can easily changed. Speaker 5: Can we talk about some of the tweaks that you use to sort of bring about those changes? Speaker 4: Sure. One of the things that I'm really interested in right now is if it's the case that upper status individuals are more likely to behave unethically, then what are some subtle interventions that could be [00:09:00] done? Like a little ethics reminder course at the beginning that, so I've run this where I basically had people do sort of a 10 minutes ethics training program where I remind them about some of the benefits of the rules and how cooperating with others can ultimately bring about gains for the whole group, including yourself. And I see how that basic values intervention changes their patterns of unethical, the downstream. But now in one of the studies that I ran, I just wanted to look at helping behavior. [00:09:30] What makes a person want to help out another? So in this study, the way that I designed my test was I had one group of participants sitting in the lab and about 15 minutes into the study, it's the room bursts. Speaker 4: Another person. Now this is appearing visibly distressed. They're worried, they're sweating, they're anxious, they apologize for being late, and they introduce themselves as their partner in the study. Now there is an experimenter standing there who says, it's so great that you're late. Why don't you go ahead and see yourself in this other room? [00:10:00] And they turn to the participant and ask the participant if they'd be willing to give up some of their own time to help out this other person who would otherwise have to stay on for a lot of extra time to complete all of the tasks that they need to complete. And so that's our measure of helping behavior. How many minutes people are willing to volunteer to help out this other person who's actually a confederate. There's someone we've trained to be late to appear distressed, et cetera. They're an actor. All right. Speaker 4: So in one condition we find that Richard people give [00:10:30] way fewer minutes than poor people paralleling all the other results. But we had this other condition that I think is really revealing in that condition. Before they received in the lab about 15 minutes earlier, they watched a 46 second long video. And in that video, it was just a quick little reminder of the problems of childhood poverty. And it was a video that we'd designed to elicit increased feelings of compassion. Now, in that group, 15 minutes later, when [00:11:00] the people who had seen that video were sitting in a lab and we're introduced to that confederate and asked if they'd be willing to help them out, there were no differences between the rich and the poor in our study. So essentially that quick little reminder of the needs of others made wealthier people just as generous of their time to help out this other person as poor people suggesting that simple reminders of the needs of other people can go a long way toward restoring that empathy gap. And so the interesting question [00:11:30] to me is what are the ways in which in everyday life we can remind even those in the upper echelons of society, of the needs of other people in the small benefits that can be incurred through small and even sometimes trivial acts of kindness toward another person. Speaker 4: You are listening to the on k Speaker 2: a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Paul. Pissed in the next second [00:12:00] he talks about his collaboration with Facebook. [inaudible] Speaker 5: try not to talk about how psychology seems to be a field that's accessible, not only in terms of mechanics and just finding the work, but also more understandable for a layman or for everyday people. Then most sciences, I think it's one of the most popular majors in colleges across the u s and can you sort of talk about the broad appeal that psychology has and why you think that might [00:12:30] be? I think Speaker 4: that observation rings true. I think psychology is something that's accessible and that that accessibility and the understandable illness of the content is what makes it kind of relatable and popular in the kind of work that we do. It's a positive and a negative. So what I mean by that is everyone who's engaged with others or interacted with others who are, has a sense of how people behave is a, an intuitive psychologist. We're all psychologists. [00:13:00] We all make decisions based on what we think is gonna make us happy. What's gonna make others happy? What's the kind of relationship that's meaningful to me? We all run these kinds of experiments. In fact, the life is sort of like a psychological experiment to run on a single person, 5 billion people at a time or whatever the population of the earth is. So we're all intuitive psychologists. But what that means is for the work that we do, if we find something or generate a finding, it's either obvious. Speaker 4: So someone could say, Oh yeah, you had to run a study [00:13:30] to do that. I've known that all along. Or if it doesn't conform to your worldview, you're wrong. You've run the study incorrectly. So the question is, are we actually convincing people or revealing new insights about how the mind works to others such that our awareness and understanding of psychology is increasing? Or are we simply just telling people what they knew all along or telling them things that they feel like is just flat out wrong? And that's something that I've wondered about myself. To what extent our findings are convincing people or informing people of things that they don't [00:14:00] intuitively experience in their everyday lives. Speaker 5: Do you want to talk about what you're doing with Facebook? I know you're, yeah, we can talk about Facebook in an ongoing collaboration with Facebook. So maybe you should tell us a little bit more about that Speaker 4: with Facebook. Dacher Keltner, who's a psychology faculty member here at Berkeley and Amelianna, Simon Thomas, who's the science director of the greater good science center, also at Berkeley, and I have been working with a team of engineers [00:14:30] at Facebook to put very, very simply make Facebook a more compassionate place. Now, when we started working with Facebook about 12 months ago, that was what was post to us. Help us make Facebook a more compassionate place. What does that mean? How do you do that? Well, what's become clear to me is that there are a lot of opportunities on Facebook and elsewhere to build little tools to make interactions between people and online. A little more sympathetic and a little more empathetic. [00:15:00] So here's an example. A lot of people on Facebook post photos. What that means when photos are getting posted is that there's the possibility that you're going to encounter a photo that you don't like. Speaker 4: And what Facebook found was that people were encountering these photos and just submitting reports to Facebook saying, hey, there's something seriously wrong with this photo. Facebook needs to take it down. And more often than not, people were reporting photos that had been posted by a friend of theirs. Very rarely do these reported photos actually violate [00:15:30] Facebook's terms of services. So Facebook can't do anything about it. And what we thought and what we've done is in the context of a photo being posted that you don't like, maybe this is a photo of your child that you think shouldn't be up at violates your privacy. Maybe it's a photo of you at a party in a some kind of revealing pose that you think is embarrassing. It doesn't really matter. But what we've done is tried to, for instance, give people tools to express why that photo is problematic, not to Facebook but to the person who posted [00:16:00] it. Speaker 4: And so now there's a series of things that pop up on the site. If you're having a problem with something that someone's posted that basically gets you to think about your experience, be a little bit mindful about the feelings that you're experiencing and be a little more mindful in how you express those feelings to the other person. That puts the photo up and when we just looked at the data recently, what we found is that by identifying the particular reason why you're finding that photo problematic and expressing that to the other person gets [00:16:30] them to be a lot more empathetic, a lot more sympathetic and really importantly a lot more likely to take the photo down. So we're actually trying to resolve disputes and conflicts on Facebook and there are a lot of other directions that this work is taken. We're dealing with bullying with the team at Yale, we're doing all sorts of other things that basically relate to what makes people get along or not get along in an online context. Speaker 5: I think the other question that I was trying to get at but didn't quite get to is how you think interactions [00:17:00] on platforms like the Internet, if they are fundamentally different than people interacting face to face or in a laboratory and why you think that might be the case? Speaker 4: Yes. What I mean by that is there's no single answer to the question and I think it's too early to tell. I think that online interactions are expressions of fundamental psychological tendencies, much like real world interactions are. So I don't think that things unfolds [00:17:30] online that wouldn't unfold in the real world, but does that mean that certain things are going to be accentuated or emphasized or magnified in an online setting? I think that's true as well. So I think online interactions are a certain kind of context where dynamics and fold that aren't fundamentally different from other kinds contexts in everyday life, but in which you might see certain kinds of patterns emphasized or magnified. Speaker 2: [00:18:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. Speaker 4: Do you see a future in collaboration between brain studies and psychology? Absolutely. So that that future is now, I think a lot of psychologists who [00:18:30] incorporate brain imaging and brain data, FMR data into their papers, into their studies. This is the direction that even my work is beginning to move into. So I feel like the opportunities for collaboration are definitely there and in fact they're unfolding now. There's a lot of neuroscience that's less interested in quote unquote psychology and more interested in say biology, but there's a lot of social neuroscience, a lot of brain research that's done that's specifically motivated and [00:19:00] oriented around understanding why people feel the things that they do. What does emotion look like in the brain? What drives basic behavior patterns? So absolutely, I think that those opportunities are there, and this is a, an incredibly exciting developing area of the science. Speaker 4: One of the things in the fifties and sixties when BF Skinner and behaviorism was all the rage, is that behaviorism and the quantification of behavior gained traction [00:19:30] because it was argued that you can't look inside the black box. And if you can't look inside the black box, which is people's brains, people's minds, then the only thing you can study is behavior. And if we're interested in a science of behavior, then the only thing we can measure is what a person does or what a rat does or what a pigeon pecks at. But what neuroscience has allowed us to do is take a look at what is happening in that so-called black box. And if you put someone's brain in [00:20:00] a magnet in, scan it and see what's happening in the brain when you're showing them, say, images of another person's suffering, well then you're getting a sense of what compassion looks like neuro anatomically. Speaker 4: And that's a really exciting and incredible opportunity for understanding how basic psychological experiences are rooted in the brain and how basic anatomical structures in the brain can illuminate how psychology works. So I think the [00:20:30] opportunities are bi-directional. If I might, let me just add one more thing, which is one more insight that I think is interesting to me that social psychology seems to have been moving in the direction of, or psychology and there are about 80 or 90 years of research documenting the extent to which people stick to their groups. People are antagonistic potentially toward other groups. There's a history of violence in the human tradition or the history of humanity as sort of a history [00:21:00] of violence and that's given a lot of psychologists the perspective that people are in a way born to be sort of self-serving, especially if you look at behavior from an evolutionary framework, then it makes sense that people would do anything they could to get themselves ahead of the pack and get their groups ahead of the pack of other groups. Speaker 4: And what I think is a really important insight, and this is in part a movement that's been inspired by people like my advisor in graduate [00:21:30] school, Dacher Keltner, toward understanding that people are a lot more complicated than that in that a lot of the driving motivation to behavior is not just what gets you ahead, but also how you can help other people. So in a way, compassion and altruism we're learning is hardwired into the brain and that's a really puzzling thing because it's hard to fit that specifically into an evolutionary framework. But put generally [00:22:00] what I think we're learning about what motivates people is not just that people are motivated to get ahead, but the people are really driven to make others around them happy and to serve other people in ways that benefit others. And that insight has inspired 30 years of the most hard-hitting social psychology that I know of and it's also given rise to just a different kind of conceptualization of what makes people do the things that they do. Paul Piff, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. [00:22:30] That was a lot of fun. Thanks again for having me. On and I'd be happy to come on any other time. Great. Speaker 2: [inaudible] spectrum is archived on iTunes university. To find the archives, do a search in your favorite browser for iTunes Dash and view space k a l x space spectrum. The feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find [00:23:00] interesting and a coolio and Renee route present the news. Speaker 6: A National Institute of Health funded team of researchers at Stanford University have created an entirely transparent mouse brain. This new process known as clarity by its inventors will allow scientists to explore the neural networks and their natural 3d arrangement without having to slice the brain or severing any neural connections. Additionally, the process preserves the delicate biochemistry of the brain, which will allow researchers to test [00:23:30] chemicals affecting specific structures as well as to examine past brain activity. While the breakthrough is not part of the Obama Administration's recent brain exploration initiative, the senior author on the paper, Dr Karl Deisseroth, was involved in the planning of the initiative. Speaker 1: Well, some moderations do need to be made for the more complex human brain. The Stanford lab has already produced transparent human livers, hearts and lungs. You see Berkeley researchers and the integrative Biology Department just came out [00:24:00] with a study showing the positive effects of stress in studies on rats. They found that brief stressful events caused stem cells to branch into new nerve cells that improved the rats. Mental performance. It is important to differentiate acute stress and chronic stress. Chronic stress elevates levels of stress hormones that suppress the production of new neurons, which impairs mental performance. Associate Professor Coffer Characterizes [00:24:30] the overall message of this study as stress can be something that makes you better, but it is a question of how much, how long and how you interpret or perceive it. We'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky, Julian and Renee arou present the calendar. NASA astrobiology researcher and Lawrence Berkeley fellow in residence, Felisa Wolf Simon is delivering tonight. Future Friday's [00:25:00] lecture at the Chabot Space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. She'll be discussing the chemical elements that can support microbial life on earth. Drawing from molecular biology, biochemistry and physiology. Admission is $23 in advance. Visit shabbos space.org for more info this Saturday come to the UC Berkeley campus for the [inaudible] Speaker 6: bears annual kal day. Over 300 lectures, workshops [00:25:30] and presentations will be available with topics ranging from how the interplay of light with the atmosphere can create rainbows to a demonstration from the first laundry folding robot. Rosie Cal Day's tomorrow April 20th held on the UC Berkeley campus and open to the public events. Begin at 8:00 AM go to [inaudible] dot berkeley.edu Speaker 1: false schedule of events April 22nd through April 26th is national parks week. During this week, [00:26:00] admission to all US national parks is free. Put on your hiking boots and visit the nearest national park to you. Speaker 6: On April 27th Berkeley High School will host the day long Alameda County apps challenge contestants are asked to create apps that will address community needs. Using Alameda county open datasets apprise of $3,000 will be awarded to the most inventive and user friendly app. Well, second, third and honorable mentions will also be meted out. Alameda county [00:26:30] invites participation from residents of all skill levels and age groups. The apps challenge is part of a nationwide movement to increase transparency and implement open data policies in governmental organizations. The event be held at Berkeley High School Speaker 1: in downtown Berkeley from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Saturday, April 27th it costs $15 to participate with discounts for students and seniors. There has been a rapid spread of sudden oak death pathogen [00:27:00] referred to Assad over the East Bay hills, specifically in north Berkeley and Montclair. Professor Matteo Garber, Loto, head of the UC Berkeley forest pathology and my collegey lab has been tracking the spread through annual area surveys. Garber Lotos team is looking for volunteers to help conduct annual spring surveys to find diseased trees. There will be several training sessions for volunteers in the bay area. The Berkeley session is on Saturday, April 27th at 1:00 PM [00:27:30] on the Berkeley campus in one 59 Mulford Hall. For other training sessions in the bay area. Searched the web for sod blitz project, but first after dark at the new exploratorium in San Francisco. [inaudible] on Thursday May 2nd after dark is the exploratorium monthly evening program for adults 18 and over. Admission for non-members is $15 in addition to the museums regular exhibits, there will be live music films and [00:28:00] the lectures. The theme this month is home and you can hear about how an empty warehouse on pier 15 was transformed into the explore Torrens new home. Karen [inaudible]. We'll discuss the human microbiome and Ron Hitchman. We'll talk about what makes earth and other goldilocks planets just right for sustaining life. For more information, visit the exploratorium.edu Speaker 6: on Friday May 3rd the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series [00:28:30] will host a workshop on crafting the perfect science story. Editors of the science writer handbook will share personal stories of working in the field and address questions about building sustainable science writing careers. The May 3rd event will begin at 7:00 PM in San Francisco's bizarre cafe. More details can be found online at ask a scientist, s f.com Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:29:00] a character in the show is by lost on a David from his album, folk acoustic and available by it. We have Commons license 3.0 and attribution editing assistance provided by renew route 90 spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum lx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks. Same time [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pour écouter cette chronique diffusée le 06/03/2012 sur AlgreFM La fiscalité en une…François Hollande a, cette semaine, pris la main avec sa proposition de porter à 75% le taux marginal d’imposition des revenus annuels supérieurs à 1 million d’euros. La mesure a fait couler d’encre, elle a renvoyé la droite à ses préférences pour les plus riches et suscité beaucoup de scepticisme chez les experts qui insistent sur son rendement qui devrait être faible tant ceux qu’elle concernerait disposent de moyens d’y échapper. En fait, cette mesure se justifie pleinement d’un point de vue économique et sera, si elle est appliquée, beaucoup plus efficace qu’on ne dit. Elle devrait notamment contribuer à réduire les inégalités et inciter les entreprises à revoir le mode de rémunération de leurs dirigeants. Mais j’ai expliqué tout cela dans un billet publié sur mon blog auquel je renvoie ceux que cela intéresse. Je préférerais ce matin parler d’évasion fiscale.Parce que c’est un sujet en soi intéressant mais aussi parce que qu’on a assisté, dans l’offensive de la droite un glissement passé inaperçu et cependant majeur.Impôts, évasion fiscale, désir de ne pas travaillerTraditionnellement, les adversaires de l’impôt insistent sur son impact sur le désir de travailler. Trop d’impôts, nous disent-ils, tuent l’impôt tout simplement parce que ceux qu’ils incitent les plus productifs, ceux qui gagnent le plus d’argent à préférer les loisirs, les vacances au travail. C’est la thèse classique que l’on trouve dans toute la littérature économique et que reprennent très volontiers à leur compte tous ceux qui se plaignent de payer trop d’impôts. Pourquoi, disent-ils en gros, ferais-je des efforts si c’est pour que je n’en voie pas la couleur. L’argument est naturellement contestable. Et probablement largement inexact. Steve Jobs ne serait pas arrêté de travailler s’il avait du payer plus d’impôts. Il aurait, bien plus sûrement, essayer d’y échapper. Et c’est bien d’ailleurs ce que font les entreprises, ce que fait notamment Apple qui dispose d’une trésorerie considérable stockée à l’extérieur des Etats-Unis pour justement ne pas payer l’impôt sur les sociétés.Or, cette thèse classique n’a pas été reprise par l’opposition de droite qui a plutôt insisté sur les risques d’évasion fiscale. Cette mesure nous a-t-on dit va inciter les plus riches à s’expatrier pour échapper à l’impôt. L’argument n’est pas non plus tellement convaincant ne serait-ce que parce que je le disais à l’instant, les plus riches ont mille moyens d’échapper à l’impôt, mais il met justement en évidence ces pratiques d’évasion fiscale que l’opinion, surtout à droite, tolère et que les économistes ont longuement négligée alors même qu’elle s’affiche régulièrement devant le grand public. On se souvient encore des déclarations arrogantes de Florent Pagny, ce chanteur exilé en Argentine qui venait narguer sur tous les plateaux de télévision ceux qui paient des impôts, les imbéciles qui achetaient ses disques pour mieux faire la promotion d’une chanson dans laquelle il s’en prend justement à l’impôt. Cette évasion fiscale peut prendre plusieurs formes :- la fraude et la sous-déclaration,- la transformation des revenus du travail en capital (bonus, actions, dividendes…) moins taxés puisque non affectés par les différentes cotisations sociales (santé, vieillesse, chômage…), toutes techniques le plus souvent légales qui relèvent de ce que l’on appelle l’optimisation fiscale,- la délocalisation dans des pays aux fiscalités plus accommodantes voire dans des paradis fiscaux qui peut être légale, comme dans le cas des multinationales qui pratiquent l’optimisation fiscale ou illégale.Ces pratiques concernent aussi bien les entreprises que les particuliers. Les entreprises internationales pratiquent cette évasion fiscale de manière systématique tant pour leur propre compte que pour celui de leurs dirigeants. Ainsi, pour ne prendre que cet exemple, Google facture depuis l’Irlande, pays à la fiscalité légère, les prestations de publicité qu’il vend en Grande-Bretagne, faisant ainsi perdre au fisc britannique des sommes considérables.Une difficile mesure Cette évasion fiscale représente des sommes considérables qu’il est difficile d’évaluer. Beaucoup de chiffres circulent. Tous sont très importants. En voici quelques uns glanés au fil de mes lectures :- Valérie Pécresse parlait il y a quelques mois de 16 milliards d’euros de fraude décelée, mais il y a à coté, toute celle qui ne l’est pas et je le répète, ce n’est qu’un bout de l’évasion fiscale,- Le ministère de l’économie britannique estimait il y a quelques mois que l’évasion fiscale, calculée en comparant les recettes fiscales effectivement perçues à ce qu’elles auraient du être, a coûté à la Grande-Bretagne 42 milliards de £, soit un peu plus de 50 milliards d’€, soit 17,5% des taxes dues, un ratio que l’on retrouve probablement dans bien d’autres pays. Et on peut imaginer que dans certains, ces ratios sont largement dépassés. L’ONG Transparency International estime ainsi que l’évasion fiscale représente 30% du PIB de la Grèce.- 800 contribuables quitteraient la France chaque année d'après Bercy. 5000 étaient installés en 2008 en Suisse où ils bénéficient d’un statut fiscal très avantageux. L’un de ceux-ci, Paul Dubrule, fondateur du groupe Accor, expliquait à un journal suisse qu’il économisait chaque année plus de 2 millions d’impôts grâce à son installation en Suisse: son forfait fiscal lui coûte environ 300 000 francs suisses alors qu’il devrait payer douze fois plus en France.- 280 milliards d’€ d’origine grecque, soit 120% du PIB de ce pays terriblement endetté seraient cachés en Suisse, d’après le ministre du budget grec. Tous ces chiffres méritent naturellement d’être maniés avec précaution puisqu’il s’agit de compilations de données qui ne sont pas toujours très fiables, mais le phénomène est massif et a un impact direct sur l’économie que l’on néglige trop souvent.Un impact économique majeur L’impact économique de cette évasion fiscale est évidemment très important mais il n’est pas le même pour toutes ses formes. La fraude, le travail non déclaré n’ont pas les mêmes effets que l’expatriation ou l’optimisation fiscale.L’économie parallèle, la non-déclaration appauvrit l’Etat mais l’essentiel des sommes qui ne lui sont pas versées sont réinjectées rapidement dans l’économie. Le salarié qui travaille au noir ne paie pas d’impôts sur ses revenus non déclarés, et en ce sens, il contribue à gonfler la dette publique ou, du moins à rendre son remboursement plus difficile, mais il les utilise pour vivre et les dépense. Et dans les périodes de crise, ces revenus non déclarés allègent le poids de la précarité…Il en va tout autrement des sommes placées dans les paradis fiscaux. Sommes importantes. Un économiste de l’Ecole de Paris, Gabriel Zucman a évalué qu’elles représentaient 8% des revenus des ménages. Il a fait ce calcul en partant des données suisses, la banque nationale helvétique publie en effet régulièrement des statistiques sur les avoirs de non résidents.Ces sommes sont doublement détournées : non seulement, elles échappent à l’impôt mais elles ne sont pas réintroduites dans l’économie du pays qui les a générées. Lorsqu’un Français dépose de l’argent en Suisse, il y a de fortes chances que celui-ci soit réinvesti ailleurs qu’en France, aux Etats-Unis, par exemple…Pour ce qui est de l’optimisation fiscale que pratiquent les entreprises, elle appauvrit l’Etat mais elle peut, dans un certain nombre de cas se retrouver dans l’économie réelle sous forme d’investissement. Mais elle peut également détourner des sommes qui devraient revenir aux actionnaires sous forme, par exemple, de dividendes. Le cas d’Apple que je citais tout à l’heure est caractéristique. Grâce à sa politique d’optimisation fiscale, cette entreprise que tout le monde admire tant a un taux d’imposition de 24%, soit dix points de moins que les entreprises américaines ordinaires. Mais cette habileté fiscale a un revers : il l’oblige à conserver les deux tiers de sa trésorerie à l’étranger, en dehors des Etats-Unis, ce qui l’empêche, en pratique, d’en reverser un partie à ses actionnaires sous forme de dividendes, ce qui ne va pas sans susciter l’agacement de beaucoup. D’autant que cette trésorerie ne peut rester éternellement inactive et qu’elle peut demain amener Apple à investir dans des sociétés étrangères sans véritablement en avoir la nécessité.Une indulgence coupable Quelque forme qu’elle prenne, cette évasion fiscale est largement tolérée. Je faisais tout à l’heure allusion à la manière dont les télévisions faisaient la promotion des chansons de Florent Pagny. Personne, sur le service public n’a imaginé lui dire qu’après tout, il en faisait la promotion sur une chaine financée par ces impôts qu’il ne paie pas. Cette indulgence est d’autant plus surprenante que l’évasion fiscale a un coût pour tous ceux qui ne la pratiquent pas. Lorsqu’un artiste, un sportif, un industriel s’installe à l’étranger pour payer moins d’impôts, il ne réduit pas les besoins de routes, d’hôpitaux, d’écoles du pays qu’il quitte. Il ne paie plus ses impôts, mais les besoins de recettes fiscales ne diminuent pas d’autant. Ce qui veut tout simplement que ce qu’il ne paie pas, d’autres le paient, ceux qui ne trichent pas, ne fuient pas. Tous ces Français qui vont s’installer en Belgique, en Suisse ou ailleurs pour ne pas payer d’impôts chez nous s’enrichissent aux dépens de ceux qui restent et qui en paient. Ils prennent dans nos poches pout mettre dans les leurs. Cela s’appelle tout simplement du vol et ne mérite certainement aucune complaisance.Cette indulgence se devine partout : dans les propos du public. Le Parisien Libéré faisait hier sa une sur le sujet et interrogeait, comme il fait de manière systématique, quelques citoyens. Il en trouvé au moins deux qui trouvaient des excuses à ces Français qui s’exilent. « Si j’avais la moindre possibilité de partir pour profiter davantage de ce que je gagne, je le ferais volontiers, dit une musicienne de 35 ans que l’on ne devine pas très riche. Il y en a marre d’être toujours pris à la gorge. Le système d’imposition actuel est trop confiscatoire. Et les Français sont trop assistés. »On retrouve cette indulgence dans les propos de nos politiques. Quand a-t-on entendu Nicolas Sarkozy ou ses ministres s’en prendre à ceux qui partent à l’étranger ? Il est tellement plus facile et plus agréable de taper sur ceux qui n’ont rien, sur les chômeurs, les étrangers… On retrouve enfin et surtout cette indulgence dans les textes. Les sanctions pour évasion fiscale sont extrêmement faibles. Un compte ouvert à l’étranger sans être déclaré en France ne coûte, s’il est découvert, que 1500€, quelque soit le montant des sommes déposées dessus. Une misère ! Et les amendes sur les sommes non déclarées au fisc français restent modestes.Plus grave : pour lutter contre cette fraude fiscale, les pouvoirs publics cherchent moins à la poursuivre et à la punir qu’à la prévenir. C’était l’objet initial du bouclier fiscal. On sait qu’il n’a convaincu personne pour un motif qu’expliquait très bien, il y a quelques mois, un avocat spécialiste dans un journal suisse : pourquoi prendre le risque d’une amende, même modérée, et changer de banquier quand on est content du sien ? Et les banquiers suisses sont plutôt efficaces. Surtout dans une situation de crise où le pouvoir politique peut à tout moment changer son fusil d’épaule. C’est l’instabilité des politiques fiscales qui favorise l’exil des plus riches bien plus que le montant des impôts.Il faut lutter contre l’évasion fiscale L’évasion fiscale n’est pas une nouveauté, mais elle s’est développée avec la mondialisation, avec la concurrence fiscale que se livrent les grands pays qui donnent aux grandes entreprises la possibilité de pratiquer l’optimisation fiscale mais aussi avec les politiques conservatrices qui, depuis Reagan et Thatcher, dénigrent l’impôt. Cette évasion présente plusieurs inconvénients :- elle réduit les recettes des Etats, ce qui est particulièrement dommageable dans les périodes de crise économique et financière. Les crises de la dette souveraine qui épuisent aujourd’hui l’Europe du sud seraient certainement bien moins graves si l’évasion fiscale était maîtrisée, prise au sérieux et combattue : ce sont aujourd’hui les Grecs moyens, ordinaires qui paient les pots cassés par les armateurs et industriels qui déposent leur fortune en Suisse et ailleurs,- elle introduit une distorsion entre les multinationales qui peuvent échapper à l’impôt et les entreprises plus petites pour lesquelles c’est plus difficile, amenant à une situation où, en proportion, les PME paient plus que les grandes entreprises,- elle augmente l’impôt des classes moyennes qui ne peuvent y échapper,- elle rend illisibles les statistiques,- elle dégrade le sens civique des dirigeants et de ceux qui profitent de ces facilités. Comme l’ont montré les travaux récents de Paul Piff, plus on est riche, plus on est cupide et susceptible de tricher,- elle favorise la concentration des richesses dans quelques régions plus à l’abri, mieux protégées. Pour tous ces motifs il faut lutter contre de manière énergique. Non pas, comme font les gouvernements impuissants en augmentant les sanctions de ceux qui se font prendre, non pas non plus en baissant les impôts les plus riches comme a fait le gouvernement français, ce qui ne fait qu’augmenter les inégalités, mais en négociant des accords internationaux qui réduisent la concurrence fiscale, qui évitent, par exemple, que l’Irlande puisse attirer des entreprises internationales sur son territoire aux dépens de ses voisins européens, en supprimant les niches qui favorisent l’optimisation fiscale et en imposant la transparence aux paradis fiscaux de toutes sortes. Ce sont des opérations compliquées à mettre en œuvre, qui demandent du temps, de longues négociations et un consensus dans les pays victimes de ces pratiques mais qui donnent des résultats. J’indiquais tout à l’heure que la banque nationale suisse publie régulièrement des statistiques. Leur lecture montre qu’une action concertée comme celle menée depuis quelques mois par quelques Etats dont l’Allemagne et les Etats-Unis portent leurs fruits. En 2007, les avoirs étrangers en Suisse représentaient 3072 milliards de francs suisses, soit 2500 milliards d’€. En 2011, suite aux pressions de ces pays qui ont imposé aux Suisses un peu plus de transparence, ils ne représentaient plus que 2162 milliards de francs suisses, soit 1700 milliards d’€. En quatre ans, grâce à l’action internationale, les fonds étrangers déposés en Suisse ont donc fondu en moyenne de près de 30%. Et ceux détenus par des particuliers de près de 50%. Ces sommes ne sont pas rentrées dans leur pays d’origine, elles ont probablement transité vers d’autres paradis fiscaux, mais ce qui est possible avec la Suisse devrait l’être avec les Antilles, les Barbades, les Bermudes et toutes ces îles qui permettent aux plus riches de se protéger du fisc aux dépens des classes moyennes.Tout cela suppose une action concertée des pouvoirs publics, action qui ne prendra forme que lorsque les opinions seront convaincues que l’évasion fiscale nous coûte bien plus cher que les fraudes aux allocations familiales et aux allocations chômage dont on nous rebat en permanence les oreilles.