A neural perspective on when and why trait greed comes at the expense of others

Domain-Specific Greed

Greed, the insatiable and excessive desire and striving for more even at the expense of others, may be directed toward various goods. In this article, we propose that greed may be conceptualized as a domain-specific construct. Based on a literature review and an expert survey, we identified 10 domains of greed which we operationalized with the DOmain-SPEcific Greed (DOSPEG) questionnaire. In Study 1 (N = 725), we found support for the proposed structure and convergent validity with related constructs. Bifactor-(S-1) models revealed that generic greed is differentially related to the greed domains, indicating that generic greed primarily captures a striving for money and material things. In the second study (N = 591), we found that greed domains had incremental validity beyond generic greed with regard to corresponding criteria assessed via self- and other-reports. We conclude that greed can be conceptualized as a domain-specific construct and propose an onion model reflecting this structure.

Greed personality trait links to negative psychopathology and underlying neural substrates

Greed personality trait (GPT), characterized by the desire to acquire more and the dissatisfaction of never having enough, has been hypothesized to link with negative emotion/affect characteristics and aggressive behaviors. To describe its emotion-related features, we utilized a series of scales to measure corresponding emotion/affect and aggression (n = 411) and collected their neuroimaging data (n = 330) to explore underlying morphological substrates. Correlational analyses revealed that greedy individuals show more negative symptoms (e.g. depression, loss of interest, negative affect), lower psychological well-being and more aggression. Mediation analyses further demonstrated that negative symptoms and psychological well-being mediated greedy individuals' aggression. Moreover, exploratory factor analysis extracted factor scores across three factors (negative psychopathology, happiness, and motivation) from the measures scales. Negative psychopathology and happiness remained robust mediators. Importantly, these findings were replicated in an independent sample (n = 68). Voxel-based morphometry analysis also revealed that gray matter volumes (GMVs) in the prefrontal-parietal-occipital system were associated with negative psychopathology and happiness, and GMVs in the frontal pole and middle frontal cortex mediated the relationships between GPT and aggressions. These findings provide novel insights into the negative characteristics of dispositional greed, and suggest their mediating roles on greedy individuals' aggression and underlying neuroanatomical substrates.

Never mind losing the pound… still got the penny! The influence of trait greed on risky decision behavior in a mixed and gain only BART

Risk proneness and the lack of loss aversion are two different reasons to show varying degrees of risk-taking in decision situations. So far, little is known about the extent to which these two processes underly the influence of trait greed, trait anxiety, and age. The present study investigated risk- taking in decision making in these trait contexts using two variants of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) in an online study: A gain only and a mixed gambling BART. This was done to separate risk proneness from loss aversion. Individuals with high trait greed showed an increased risk decision-making behavior due to an increased risk proneness and not due to a reduced loss aversion. This is partly in contrast with previous findings in other tasks assessing risk proneness and loss aversion. These differences may be caused by the changes of perception during the gain only task. No significant effects were found for trait anxiety or age concerning risk-taking in decision-making behavior. Possible explanations for the lack of influence of these constructs are skewed distributions, omitting pathologically anxious subjects in anxiety and a restricted age range. The findings suggest that a lack of loss aversion is not a driving factor to explain elevated risk-taking in decision-making behavior in persons with high trait greed, but a higher reaction to reward in predominantly rewarding contexts.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03553-6.

The development of trait greed during young adulthood: A simultaneous investigation of environmental effects and negative core beliefs

Recent models of personality development have emphasized the role of the environment in terms of selection and socialization effects and their interaction. Our study provides partial evidence for these models and, crucially, extends these models by adding a person variable: Core beliefs, which are defined as mental representations of experiences that individuals have while pursuing need-fulfilling goals. Specifically, we report results from a longitudinal investigation of the development of trait greed across time. Based on data from the German Personality Panel, we analyzed data on 1,965 young adults on up to 4 occasions, spanning a period of more than 3 years. According to our results, negative core beliefs that have so far been proposed only in the clinical literature (e.g., being unloved or being insecure) contributed to the development of trait greed, indicating that striving for material goals might be a substitute for unmet needs in the past. Additionally, greedy individuals more often self-selected themselves into business-related environments, which presumably allow them to fulfill their greed-related need to earn a lot of money. Our results expose important mechanisms for trait greed development. Regarding personality development in general, core beliefs were identified as an important variable for future theory building.

On second thought … the influence of a second stage in the ultimatum game on decision behavior, electro-cortical correlates and their trait interrelation

Previous EEG research only investigated one stage ultimatum games (UGs). We investigated the influence of a second bargaining stage in an UG concerning behavioral responses, electro-cortical correlates and their moderations by the traits altruism, anger, anxiety, and greed in 92 participants. We found that an additional stage led to more rejection in the 2-stage UG (2SUG) and that increasing offers in the second stage compared to the first stage led to more acceptance. The FRN during a trial was linked to expectance evaluation concerning the fairness of the offers, while midfrontal theta was a marker for the needed cognitive control to overcome the respective default behavioral pattern. The FRN responses to unfair offers were more negative for either low or high altruism in the UG, while high trait anxiety led to more negative FRN responses in the first stage of 2SUG, indicating higher sensitivity to unfairness. Accordingly, the mean FRN response, representing the trait-like general electrocortical reactivity to unfairness, predicted rejection in the first stage of 2SUG. Additionally, we found that high trait anger led to more rejections for unfair offer in 2SUG in general, while trait altruism led to more rejection of unimproving unfair offers in the second stage of 2SUG. In contrast, trait anxiety led to more acceptance in the second stage of 2SUG, while trait greed even led to more acceptance if the offer was worse than in the stage before. These findings suggest, that 2SUG creates a trait activation situation compared to the UG.

Sex-specific static and dynamic functional networks of sub-divisions of striatum linking to the greed personality trait

The study of greed has been broadly investigated and discussed in the field of social sciences, including economics, political science, and psychology. However, the neural mechanisms underlying greed personality trait (GPT) have received little attention from the cognitive neuroscience field and still remain unclear. In this study, we explored the associations between GPT and static/dynamic reward circuit-specifically its sub-regions' functional networks including caudate, nucleus accumbens (NAcc), and putamen. Behavioral analyses revealed significant associations of GPT with Past-Negative and Present-Fatalistic time attitude as well as attention impulsivity. Imaging analyses revealed a significant interaction effect between sex and GPT on the static reward functional networks. In particular, GPT was positively correlated with static caudate-NAcc, caudate-cerebellum, and NAcc-parahippocampus/medial orbitofrontal cortex (PHG/mOFC) for males but negatively correlated for females. GPT was also marginally and negatively correlated with static putamen-occipital pole functional connectivities among males. Interestingly, sex difference interaction patterns were further observed in the dynamic reward functional networks. Further, dynamic reward functional networks also exhibited some specific characteristics, manifesting in more brain regions involved for greedy behaviors. These findings suggest sex-specific static and dynamic functional networks underlying human dispositional greed, and also implicate the critical contributions of reward circuit, especially for sub-circuits of reward, on greed.

Dispositional Greed Scales

Abstract. In recent years, different scales have been developed to assess individual differences in dispositional greed. We report two studies ( N1 = 300, N2 = 1,000) on the comparative psychometric properties of these scales. We find that all scales are reliable and that they correlate highly, suggesting that all can be used to assess dispositional greed. Exploratory factor analyses, using the Empirical Kaiser Criterion, the Hull method, and Parallel Analysis as extraction methods, were done on the separate scales and all items together. These analyses reveal that there is quite some consistency in the scales, as in both studies a one-factor solution seems to describe the data best. These results imply that these different scales all assess dispositional greed, although the results also suggest that some items may be deleted from the scales.

Neuroanatomical and functional substrates of the greed personality trait

Greedy individuals often exhibit more impulsive decision-making and short-sighted behaviors. It has been assumed that altered reward circuitry and prospection network is associated with greed personality trait (GPT). In this study, we first explored the morphological characteristics (i.e., gray matter volume; GMV) of GPT combined with univariate and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) approaches. Second, we adopted a revised version of inter-temporal choice task and independently manipulated the amount and delay time of future rewards. Using brain-imaging design, reward- and prospection-related brain activations were assessed and their associations with GPT were further examined. The MVPA results showed that GPT was associated with the GMVs in the right lateral frontal pole cortex, left ventromedial prefrontal cortex, right lateral occipital cortex, and right occipital pole. Additionally, we observed that the amount-relevant brain activations (responding to reward circuitry) in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex were negatively associated with individual's variability in GPT scores, whereas the delay time-relevant brain activations (responding to prospection network system) in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, superior parietal lobule, and anterior cingulate cortex were positively associated with individual's variability in GPT scores. These findings not only provide novel insights into the neuroanatomical substrates underlying the human dispositional greed, but also suggest the critical roles of reward and prospection processing on the greed.

Science-Driven Societal Transformation, Part III: Design

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and other major social and environmental problems pose severe risks. Progress has been inadequate and scientists, global policy experts, and the general public increasingly conclude that transformational change is needed across all sectors of society in order to improve and maintain social and ecological wellbeing. At least two paths to transformation are conceivable: (1) reform of and innovation within existing societal systems (e.g., economic, legal, and governance systems); and (2) the de novo development of and migration to new and improved societal systems. This paper is the final in a three-part series of concept papers that together outline a novel science-driven research and development program aimed at the second path. It summarizes literature to build a narrative on the topic of de novo design of societal systems. The purpose is to raise issues, suggest design possibilities, and highlight directions and questions that could be explored in the context of this or any R&D program aimed at new system design. This paper does not present original research, but rather provides a synthesis of selected ideas from the literature. Following other papers in the series, a society is viewed as a superorganism and its societal systems as a cognitive architecture. Accordingly, a central goal of design is to improve the collective cognitive capacity of a society, rendering it more capable of achieving and sustainably maintaining vitality. Topics of attention, communication, self-identity, power, and influence are discussed in relation to societal cognition and system design. A prototypical societal system is described, and some design considerations are highlighted.