Scientific study proves that bankers are more psychopathic than actual psychopaths

Aroddo

Aroddo

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A recent scientific study at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), tested the claim that bankers, hedge-fund managers and high profile traders tend to be psychopaths. This study compared the performance of certified psychopaths and "normal" people in the prisoner's dilemma game.

The result: The psychopaths act way more cooperative ....
They even get better results!

God help us if bankers get elected president in a state with nuclear armament.

Here's the google-translated news article about the study.
 
Tit-for-tat is the best strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
 
He was the dude who did "The men who stare at goats" as well.
 
Aroddo said:
A recent scientific study at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), tested the claim that bankers, hedge-fund managers and high profile traders tend to be psychopaths. This study compared the performance of certified psychopaths and "normal" people in the prisoner's dilemma game.

The result: The psychopaths act way more cooperative ....
They even get better results!

God help us if bankers get elected president in a state with nuclear armament.

Here's the google-translated news article about the study.
Click to expand...

I call BS. No successful trader doesn't know the winning strategy of the prisoner's dilemma.
 
How are they not?
 
The system is psychopathic, actually. The pressures and the metrics by which people are judged are intentionally stripped of morality. It's the nature of chasing a buck.

This is the problem with thinking that the system operates according to some type of merit that is worthy of respect. It only sometimes is. It's mostly not.
 
I don't understand. Even if we ignore the objection already mentioned, that a trader is more likely to know the Prisoner's Dilemma than a regular Joe, why is it that acting the same way as a psychopath in situation X makes one a psychopath? The trader wants to win the game and make money; the psychopath wants to screw over people for fun. There's a difference in the motivations there that make the conclusion spurious. Not to mention that, just because a trader and a psychopath act the same in situation X (and different to the control group), a trader and a psychopath might act different in situation Y. In situation Z, the control might act like the psychopath and the trader differently to both of them.

What do we conclude from that?

Simply that the psychopath group, the trader group, and the control groups are.... *dum dum DUUUUUUH!* different groups!.
 
classical_hero said:
Social sciences are not real sciences.
Click to expand...

That's very damning.
I'm glad you believe in real science.

Aroddo said:
A recent scientific study at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), tested the claim that bankers, hedge-fund managers and high profile traders tend to be psychopaths. This study compared the performance of certified psychopaths and "normal" people in the prisoner's dilemma game.

The result: The psychopaths act way more cooperative ....
They even get better results!

God help us if bankers get elected president in a state with nuclear armament.

Here's the google-translated news article about the study.
Click to expand...

I doubt a banker would send a nuke, unless they had first invented an efficient instrument for shorting an entire city.
 
Mise said:
I don't understand. Even if we ignore the objection already mentioned, that a trader is more likely to know the Prisoner's Dilemma than a regular Joe, why is it that acting the same way as a psychopath in situation X makes one a psychopath? The trader wants to win the game and make money; the psychopath wants to screw over people for fun. There's a difference in the motivations there that make the conclusion spurious. Not to mention that, just because a trader and a psychopath act the same in situation X (and different to the control group), a trader and a psychopath might act different in situation Y. In situation Z, the control might act like the psychopath and the trader differently to both of them.

What do we conclude from that?

Simply that the psychopath group, the trader group, and the control groups are.... *dum dum DUUUUUUH!* different groups!.
Click to expand...

Pretty much what I was going to say. Everyone who ever played Civ also behaved like a "psycopath". To win the game it is better to screw your neighbors even when that means considerable losses to oneself than to let them be. But just because we behave like that in a game does not mean that we enjoy making people suffer.

This experiment sucks.
 
Huffingtonpost finally caught up to that story:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/stockbroker-psychopath_n_981950.html

It got buried quickly away from the frontpage, though.


By the way, one of the conclusions the study drew was that bankers are more likely to assume that others are selfish (self projection) and thus assume that others will take the selfish choice.
They themselves choose to cause more harm to the other party instead of betting on the other one cooperating.

Since this result was consistent, the conclusion is that bankers are basically anti-social.

Banksters.
 
On a nearly irrelevent note, in my lifetime the calculus has changed in favor of the authorities due to technology.

In most cases sentences passed down are moot now because in the age of information we have essentially recreated the Scarlet A. Any blot on a person's record is now permanent and unmistakeably determinative.

In my early twenties I suffered a bout of mania which landed me in prison, a convicted felon. Within two years I was out and about and proceeded to build a life of respectable success that was essentially unaffected by my past. It was only 30 years later when I was idled by the collapse of my firm that I found myself an outcast from society.

One knows little from having a resume unanswered but in the course of over a thousand attempts to gain employment I grew suspicious. Eventually I heard from friends who were in a position to speak freely that I have been blacklisted in my former profession because of my ancient criminal record, which had never come up in all the previous years. Damned computers.

So now I am reduced to working in the underground economy. For the rest of my life.

So you might need to rework the premise. The slightest blackmark is now a life sentence. The question ought to be refocused on this change in our society, that the power of information now drives us to ever more antisocial behavior on the one hand and conformity on the other.
 
bankers =/= traders
 
I'm sure this study is going to be posted widely as evidence of what we already know - ie that bankers are bastards - but it seems to me to be pretty terrible evidence of that.

For starters, it's an MBA thesis, it wasn't actually run by trained psychology professionals, which makes me very suspicious about methodological rigour. Which leads to the second complaint, that it's not in a peer-reviewed psychology journal; which also means that we can't go in and see the details of their methodology.

That seems to be a significant thing, because the major glaring hole in their methodology that sticks out from that article is that they didn't actually perform the test on the psychopaths and the controls - they just tested a bunch of bankers and compared them to psychopaths in somebody else's previous study. I know these tests are difficult and expensive, but that's just sloppy as hell - and that's why it probably never will make it to a psychology journal. There's no way that it could be properly blinded, for starters. How similar or different were the circumstances in which they took the test? What were they told beforehand? How were the bankers recruited? What was given as the aim of the exercise? etc etc These all seem to me to be things that could consciously or subconsciously change the way that the test subjects behave in the test.
I'm no psychologist, but this seems to me to be an "experiment" with embarrassingly poor controls. And if your tests aren't properly internally controlled, your output data is as good as meaningless.
 
they mentioned "normal" people in the article but i assumed them to be the banksters. not sure, though, since i haven't seen their mba thesis online either.

however, the prisoners dilemma was tested numerous times on 'normal' people, so i'm confident that they have data on how the average persons perform on this test.
 
Aroddo said:
they mentioned "normal" people in the article but i assumed them to be the banksters. not sure, though, since i haven't seen their mba thesis online either.

however, the prisoners dilemma was tested numerous times on 'normal' people, so i'm confident that they have data on how the average persons perform on this test.
Click to expand...

According to the article, the "normal people" controls were taken from the same experiment that they took the psychopaths from - and there were apparently NO normal people controls or psychopaths tested by the people who tested the bankers. Data from another experiment is useless without internal controls, so data on how "normal people" perform is completely incomparable with the banker data, UNLESS those normal people were tested in EXACTLY the same circumstances with the appropriate levels of blinding etc.

A person is going to respond differently to a psychological test depending on the circumstances in which that test is given.
Let's say I took two groups of normal people, controlled in every other respect, except that I told one group nothing and the other group that I was testing whether they were a psycho - I would bet that I'd find a statistically significant difference between the responses of the two groups. There are a million other variables that could affect the response (consciously or unconsciously) - hence why you need internal controls and blinding.

Now I don't know - maybe this particular test is so incredibly robust that a given person is always going to give the exact same response regardless of any other factors whatsoever, but I doubt it because people are more complicated than that. It looks to me that they've just wasted a whole lot of time and money proving nothing else except that MBAs shouldn't pretend to do science.
 
Please remove the word scientific from the thread title.
 
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