THE AL'CHEMY OF EMOTIONS - GREED

Evolutionary biology sees greed as a way to increase your chances of survival

MARCEL ZEELENBERG

What does science say about greed?

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

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

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

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