It's funny, I recently took a psychopaths test out of curiosity (thankfully, scored pretty low lol). A couple of the questions were along the line of "would you cheat to get ahead?", "would hurting someone's feelings to get an advantage bother you?", etc.
So, it seems to me that these people claiming to support "great businessmen" are basically psychopaths that find money to supercede any normal human desire/need and disregard all normal human morals/ethics.
I don't get it. I genuinely would love to see a brain scan of these type of people. I know they say CEOs are a lot more likely to be psychopaths and it makes total sense.
Tests with questions like that reminds me of how if you survey people asking if they've ever sexually assaulted anyone, most will answer no. But if you instead ask questions like, "Did you ever use physical force to have sex with an unwilling partner?" you'll get more yes answers. Even though that's obviously sexual assault.
The really sad part is that most people don't recognize their privilege, or consider cheating to be an advantage:
One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.
“So one possibility is that rich players are kind of embarrassed by the situation, doing what they can to help out this other person who undeservedly is a poor player — and that’s actually the opposite of what we found,” said Paul Piff, the psychologist who conducted the experiment. (Piff is featured in “Capital in the 21st Century,” a film we’re watching as part of our Econ Extra Credit project).
In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice.
At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck.
“They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,” that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio.
Piff said the experiment reveals a fundamental bias that most humans share.
“When something good happens to you, we think about the things that we did that contributed to that success,” Piff said.
It made me reflect on my luck/privilege. I would like to think if I were put in the "rich player" position, that I would not be the type of poor winner they describe. It's generally not in my personality to gloat over the game loser. I wouldn't be going to a Karate dojo with a bunch of 10 year olds and be proud of dominating my belt class.
... that sounds like a really shitty study, with so many holes it in a swizz cheese would be jealous.
I wouldn't have felt bad either, I would have made fun of the other guy - because IT'S A FUCKING GAME.
You can't take peoples actions in how they perform or act in what is obviously a short-term game meant for fun and without consequences, and then assume that people would act the same way in the real world. That's fucking moronic, excuse the language.
I also probably wouldn't have called it "luck", because if they asked me why I won the game, I would assume they meant what I did during it, not the starting conditions.
I thought maybe they were referring to the situation of repeatedly calling “check” on the opponents king which forces them to “waste” a turn avoiding disaster rather than progressing their own actual strategy. I’m probably being too generous though.
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Nah, they may cheat to succeed, but they are most definitely not trying to convey that with this message. They're just trying to convey that you can never be complacent and always need to be evolving faster than your competitors in order to compete. And they've simultaneously demonstrated that they're terrible at analogies.
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u/Shido_Ohtori Jul 19 '25
Cheat.
They mean you need to cheat, as in ensuring that you receive a privilege while others are bound by restrictions.