Skip to main content

Recent Developments in the Psychology of Greed

Date
Date
Wednesday 3 February 2021, 14:00-15:00
Location
ONLINE
Speaker
Marcel Zeelenberg

Abstract

In the last decade we have been examining the workings of greed. Greed is the insatiable desire for more, an important economic motivator with numerous implications for organizational behavior and decision processes. In this talk I will review our research on the development of the dispositional greed scale, and our research that reveals both the positive and negative consequences of greed. In the final part of the talk I will discuss our resent research on the relation between greed and self-interest. Greed is often related to, or even equated with (excessive) self-interest. Also, greed is sometimes defined as causing negative externalities (harm-to-others), suggesting that greed would be negatively related to other-interest with potential harm for the organization. Even though many theorists have proposed various interpretations of how greed relates to self-interest and other-interest, these ideas have not yet been put to the test. In our recent studies we take an individual differences approach and empirically examine how greed relates to self- and other-interest. The results show sufficient empirical support for treating these constructs as separate phenomena.

The Speaker

Marcel Zeelenberg (PhD Univ. of Amsterdam, 1996) is a Professor of Economic Psychology at Tilburg University, and a Professor of Behavioral Research in Marketing at the VU Amsterdam. His current interests include the relation between emotion and behavioral decisions, financial behavior, and the psychology of greed.