I Want More! The Role of Child, Family and Maternal Characteristics on Child Dispositional Greed and Sharing Behavior

Abstract

Greed is often regarded as a negative trait that impedes prosocial behavior in adults. Yet, relatively little is known about the development of greed and its effects on children. We examine the effect of dispositional greed on sharing behavior in 4-to-6-year-olds. In addition, we identified potential factors associated with child greed, including child, family, and maternal characteristics. This study with 63 mother–child dyads (Agechild = 5.11, SD = 0.88, 50.8% female) revealed that child greed was associated with less prosocial behavior in an observational sharing task. More specifically, children who were reported as greedier by their mothers shared less than less greedy children. Having fewer siblings, less mindful maternal parenting style, and high maternal trait anxiety was associated with higher dispositional greed in children. Additionally, their mother rated greedier children as having higher negative affectivity. These findings suggest that child greed is an important developmental trait that warrants further investigation.

Highlights

• 63 mother–child dyads revealed that child greed was associated with less pro-social behavior in an observational sharing task

• Child greed was associated with higher rates of child negative affectivity.

• Having fewer siblings, less mindful parenting style, high maternal trait anxiety predicted dispositional greed in 4-to-6-year-old children

Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Envy among Nurses: A Scoping Review

AIM

This scoping review presents an overview of the causes and consequences of envy among clinical nurses.

BACKGROUND

Many nurses in the United States have in recent years left their permanent positions for temporary agency assignments that pay higher salaries. While greed seems like a likely explanation for the rise in travel nursing, humans tend to have a particular interest in wanting what others have.

EVALUATION

A five-stage scoping review framework and the PRISMA-ScR checklist guided this review.

KEY ISSUES

Social comparison and malicious envy are prevalent among nurses. Envy is a powerful emotion that affects human communication and behavior in organizations. Scholars have underexplored the potential benefits of leveraging benign envy in the nursing context.

CONCLUSION

The results highlight the relational nature of envy. Social comparison and envy provide an insight that suggests that nurses who change jobs are not necessarily greedy. They may be seeking the right mix of tangible and intangible rewards.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

Greed and envy can motivate nurses to change jobs. Although envy and greed may produce the same outcome, they are qualitatively different. The motivation to change jobs alludes to nurses' desire to have better control of their professional and personal lives.

Further tests of the scarcity and luxury hypotheses in dispositional greed: Evidence from two large-scale Dutch and American samples

A recent, large-scale study among Chinese adolescents found that childhood socioeconomic status (CSES) was positively related to dispositional greed (i.e., the “luxury hypothesis”), instead of negatively related (i.e., the “scarcity hypothesis”; Liu et al., 2019c). This relationship was found for only-children, not for children with siblings. The generalizability of these findings may be limited, due to China’s one-child policy and socioeconomic policies which may have led to fewer differences in wealth. We replicated this research in two other cultural contexts that represent markedly different socioeconomic policies in order to test its generalizability: the Netherlands (Study 1, N = 2367, 51.3% female, Mage = 54.06, SD = 17.90), and the USA (Study 2, N = 999, 50.1% female, Mage = 33.44, SD = 12.28). Hierarchical multiple regressions were conducted to test the association between CSES and greed. We mostly replicated the findings by Liu et al. (2019c): CSES was positively related to greed in both studies (“luxury hypothesis”) and there was a moderating effect of siblings in Study 1, but not in Study 2. Implications for theories on greed as well as future research on the association between CSES and greed are discussed.

Using semantic similarity to understand the psychological constructs related to prosociality

Prosociality (measured with economic games) is correlated with individual differences in psychological constructs (measured with self-report scales). We review how methods from natural language processing, a subfield of computer science focused on processing natural text, can be applied to understand the semantic content of scales measuring psychological constructs correlated with prosociality. Methods for clustering language and assessing similarity between text documents can be used to assess the novelty (or redundancy) of new scales, to understand the overlap among different psychological constructs, and to compare different measures of the same construct. These examples illustrate how natural language processing methods can augment traditional survey- and game-based approaches to studying individual differences in prosociality.

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.