Selfish, Excessive, Greedy: The Psychological Causes and Consequences of Perceptions of Greed

Abstract

Perceptions of greed permeate the popular business and management environment, yet the scholarly literature in these areas has given scant attention to greed and perceptions of greed. In three laboratory studies, I investigated both the antecedents and consequences of perceived greed. Contrary to a number of literatures' treatment of greed as simply a synonym for selfishness, I proposed that the three antecedents of perceived greed are distributive injustice, inference of a selfish motive to acquire, and relative deprivation. I then explored four key outcomes of perceived of greed: personal anger, moral outrage, punishment behaviors, and social distancing behaviors. Results demonstrated that perceptions of greed are formed when an individual experiences a distributive injustice, combined with an inference of a selfish motive to acquire, and that each of personal anger, moral outrage, punishment behaviors and social distancing are consequences of perceiving others as greedy. Relative deprivation contributed to perceptions of greed, but in a manner different from the hypothesized model.