Reply #108: "certainly closer to the former {greedy} than the latter {altruistic}."

[Mairead]

There's some fairly good research that says that's not so. Quite a lot of anecdotal evidence too. At least if we define 'greed' as 'acquisitiveness for its own sake, as a dominant personality trait', where someone goes on seeking to acquire wealth beyond any actual need, and is willing to sacrifice many other things in its service.

Some of the most interesting research is going on now. It pairs two people (A & B) who are not members of a first-world or urban culture. They are told that the two of them will share a respectable amount of money (usually on the order of a week's earnings) iff person A can make an offer that person B will accept. If B doesn't accept the offer, neither one gets anything. The received Capitalist economic wisdom states that A will be very stingy but B will take whatever is offered, because it's found money. But what they're finding, in almost every case, is that B will walk away from an offer that seems too low. The received wisdom is simplistic. Also interesting is that in most cultures A will spontaneously make an offer of 35-45%, and that's usually enough...but in a few cultures, the offer is automatically and instantly 50%. It's very nice research.

Greedy behavior seems to manifest transiently during times of scarcity -- an impending storm will see people hoarding, for example, who don't ordinarily hoard. But we also see altruism in times of scarcity, too -- as when people share what little they have with needy strangers. Very few people seem to have the 'greedy bit' always turned on, but it's been recognised as a psychopathology at least as far back as Baruch Spinoza in the 17th c.