Articles of Distraction

[Nanny]

That mouth needs a hook in it.

[Angrboda]

How the Brains of the Wealthy Are Hardwired Differently

In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — “five” for a brand-new BMW, for instance; “one” for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car’s driver.

For centuries, humans have studied and tried to understand our own hierarchies — how and why we arrange ourselves into tribes and nations and by what means certain groups and individuals rise to the top. But Piff had realized that we had little data on how wealth — a prime marker of power in our current times — affects the psychology of those who hold it. “In the U.S., we spend a lot of time pathologizing poverty and valorizing aspects of the rich,” he tells me. “I was really interested in the flip side of poverty: If poverty has these effects, then wealth must also, and let’s start to try to uncover what those are. There must be some pathologies there too, right?”

What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.

When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person.

“People find the car study infinitely relatable,” Piff says now of this research, the results of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s almost like science masquerading as allegory, or allegory masquerading as science.”

For all the attention it has received, the car study was admittedly small, but other research has backed up its findings — and augmented them. Wealth makes you less generous (lower-income individuals have been shown to give a greater proportion of their income than wealthier ones), less compassionate (people with more money and status report less distress when confronted with another person’s suffering), and more narcissistic. In a hilariously pointed study that was also included in the PNAS article, people primed to think of themselves as upper-class were more likely to take candy from a jar that they had been told was meant for kids in a nearby lab. In other words, they were more likely to literally steal candy from children.

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[Fake Messiah]

Pity.

[Fake Messiah]

John Travolta is selling his Florida home that has a private airport.

Is it me or does it look hilarious?



But he won't be homeless since he also owns a villa in Calabasas, California, and a waterfront mansion in Maine.

https://www.hellomagazine.com/homes/8536...-for-sale/

It just never occurred to me that someone who makes crappy movies that no one watches can afford all that crap. So I looked it up and it turns out it does pay to make crappy movies. Just for 'Battlefield Earth" he made $10 million. Or for that idiotic movie "Michael" – $12 million.

So I guess Travolta does get the last laugh.

[Nanny]

^IIRC it was built by an exercise equipment inventor.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

John Travolta is selling his Florida home that has a private airport.

Is it me or does it look hilarious?



But he won't be homeless since he also owns a villa in Calabasas, California, and a waterfront mansion in Maine.

https://www.hellomagazine.com/homes/8536...-for-sale/

It just never occurred to me that someone who makes crappy movies that no one watches can afford all that crap. So I looked it up and it turns out it does pay to make crappy movies. Just for 'Battlefield Earth" he made $10 million. Or for that idiotic movie "Michael" – $12 million.

So I guess Travolta does get the last laugh.

I though Michael was a delightful film.

Boru

[awty]

John Travolta is selling his Florida home that has a private airport.

Is it me or does it look hilarious?



But he won't be homeless since he also owns a villa in Calabasas, California, and a waterfront mansion in Maine.

https://www.hellomagazine.com/homes/8536...-for-sale/

It just never occurred to me that someone who makes crappy movies that no one watches can afford all that crap. So I looked it up and it turns out it does pay to make crappy movies. Just for 'Battlefield Earth" he made $10 million. Or for that idiotic movie "Michael" – $12 million.

So I guess Travolta does get the last laugh.

I though Michael was a delightful film.

Boru

ummm....Pulp Fiction is not a crappy movie.

[Fake Messiah]

Ha, yeah it's interesting how Travolta got like 100k for pulp and then, suddenly, millions of dollars per movie. Tarantino saved his career. Still, it seems that Travolta hasn't made a movie with a million dollars paycheck in something like 30 years.

I though Michael was a delightful film.

Boru

IDK, I tried watching it and it seemed boring and plotless.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I though Michael was a delightful film.

Boru

ummm....Pulp Fiction is not a crappy movie.

Neither is Blowout, The Taking of Pelham 123, Grease, Get Shorty, Be Cool, Face/Off, etc, etc.

Every actor - even greats like Tom Hanks and Gary Oldman - has a few clunkers in their career. Travolta's certainly not an Olivier, but he's a dependably competent actor who has made plenty of good, solidly entertaining films. And I don't think the house looks hilarious.

Not getting the hate.

Boru

[awty]

ummm....Pulp Fiction is not a crappy movie.

Neither is Blowout, The Taking of Pelham 123, Grease, Get Shorty, Be Cool, Face/Off, etc, etc.

Every actor - even greats like Tom Hanks and Gary Oldman - has a few clunkers in their career. Travolta's certainly not an Olivier, but he's a dependably competent actor who has made plenty of good, solidly entertaining films. And I don't think the house looks hilarious.

Not getting the hate.

Boru

^This.

There aren't many actors with lengthy careers who have not mis-stepped along the way.  Sometimes they were simply the wrong person for the part.

From Sweathog to livin' large, there have been stinkers.  

Tarantino utilized great casting.  I can't imagine anyone other than Travolta and Samuel L. in the main roles.  Not a fan of Uma Thurman, but that worked out well too.

I think this hate is the whole Scientology thing, which I don't focus on when looking for entertainment.  

YMMV