סמינר בשיווק

Marcel Zeelenberg,Tilburg University

We have recently become interested in greed. Although greed is both hailed as the motor of economic growth and blamed as the cause of economic crises, very little is known about its psychology. I will present data from two new papers (Seuntjens, Zeelenberg, Breugelmans & Van de Ven, 2014a & 2014b) that focus on what greed is and what greed does. In the first series of studies we explored lay conceptualizations of greed amongst US and Dutch participants using a prototype analysis. In Study 1 features related to greed were identified. Study 2 determined the importance of these features; the most important features were classified as central (e.g., self-interested, never satisfied), whereas less important features were classified as peripheral (e.g., ambition, addiction). Subsequently, we found that central features are better recalled (Study 3); faster classified (Study 4) and more present in real-life episodes of greed (Study 5) compared to peripheral features. These first findings provide into what greed is. In the second series of studies we report on the development and testing of the Dispositional Greed Scale (DGS). Study 1 (4 different samples, total N = 6091) reports on the development of a seven-item DGS, which correlated positively with materialism, self-interest, envy, and impulsiveness, and negatively with self-control, happiness, and life satisfaction. Additional studies found that the DGS predicts economic behavior: people scoring high on dispositional greed were likely to allocate more money to themselves in a dictator game (Study 2, N = 300) and in an ultimatum game (Study 3, N = 569) and took more in a common goods dilemma (Study 4, N = 297). These studies provide insights into what greed does. Taken together, these two series of studies shed light on what greed is and how it can be measured. In addition, they show the importance of greed for behavioral decision making, and give direction to future studies on greed.