Arts, Faculty of
Psychology, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Mercadante, Eric
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Psychologists define greed as a desire to acquire more and the dissatisfaction of never having enough (Seuntjens et al., 2015a), but studies have not examined the psychological processes that underlie and sustain this disposition. We propose that a desire to attain pride might be one emotional mechanism that promotes greedy acquisition. In this account, greedy people experience a boost of pride from acquisition but these feelings are short lived, potentially leading to the perpetual acquisitiveness characteristic of dispositional greed. In the present dissertation, I test this theoretical model, as well as its boundary conditions and implications, in 14 studies. These studies also show that the relationship between greed and pride is robust to controlling for other positive emotions, suggesting that feeling pride upon acquisition is the distinguishing factor between the emotional experience of greedy and less greedy people in this situation. In addition, I demonstrate that greedy people’s pervasive acquisitiveness cannot be explained by a deficit in affective forecasting compared to people low in greed. I also test the boundary conditions of this process finding, for example, that greedy people feel equivalent pride boosts in acquisitions received as gifts compared with those they purchase for themselves and that greedy people do not show the same pattern of pride responses to personal achievements. Finally, I summarize the findings, compare them to other models of related traits in the field, and discuss the implications and future directions of this research. Together, this dissertation proposes and tests a theoretical model that might help explain greedy people’s defining characteristic, pervasive acquisitiveness, by demonstrating how acquisition foments intense, yet ephemeral, emotional benefits for greedy people.
How does it feel to be greedy? The role of pride in avaricious acquisition by Eric Mercadante B.A., Northwestern University, 2017 M.A., University of British Columbia, 2019 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Psychology) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2023 © Eric Mercadante, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: How does it feel to be greedy? The role of pride in avaricious acquisition submitted by Eric Mercadante in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology Examining Committee: Jessica Tracy, Professor, Psychology, UBC Supervisor Sheila Woody, Professor, Psychology, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Steven Heine, Professor, Psychology, UBC University Examiner Lisa Cavanaugh, Associate Professor, Marketing and Behavioral Science, UBC Sauder School of Business University Examiner Additional Supervisory Committee Member: Friedrich Gotz, Assistant Professor, Psychology, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Psychologists define greed as a desire to acquire more and the dissatisfaction of never having enough (Seuntjens et al., 2015a), but studies have not examined the psychological processes that underlie and sustain this disposition. We propose that a desire to attain pride might be one emotional mechanism that promotes greedy acquisition. In this account, greedy people experience a boost of pride from acquisition but these feelings are short lived, potentially leading to the perpetual acquisitiveness characteristic of dispositional greed. In the present dissertation, I test this theoretical model, as well as its boundary conditions and implications, in 14 studies. These studies also show that the relationship between greed and pride is robust to controlling for other positive emotions, suggesting that feeling pride upon acquisition is the distinguishing factor between the emotional experience of greedy and less greedy people in this situation. In addition, I demonstrate that greedy people’s pervasive acquisitiveness cannot be explained by a deficit in affective forecasting compared to people low in greed. I also test the boundary conditions of this process finding, for example, that greedy people feel equivalent pride boosts in acquisitions received as gifts compared with those they purchase for themselves and that greedy people do not show the same pattern of pride responses to personal achievements. Finally, I summarize the findings, compare them to other models of related traits in the field, and discuss the implications and future directions of this research. Together, this dissertation proposes and tests a theoretical model that might help explain greedy people’s defining characteristic, pervasive acquisitiveness, by demonstrating how acquisition foments intense, yet ephemeral, emotional benefits for greedy people. iv Lay summary I propose that one reason why greedy people always want more and are never satisfied with what they own is because they feel a brief boost of pride upon acquisition, such that the act of acquiring something is a highly positive emotional experience, but owning the item afterward does not elicit pride. Thus, greedy people might always want more because they feel pride in the acquisition experience, but not in the item once they own it. Fourteen studies support this theoretical model, rule out an alternative explanations, and test various boundary conditions and implications of this model. Specifically, I show that this process is specific to greedy people and acquisition; it does not occur among greedy people for other kinds of events (e.g., achievements) or among people who are highly motivated in other domains when they have a successful experience (e.g., people high in achievement motivation after a personal achievement). v Preface All of the work presented in this dissertation was conducted in the Emotion and Self lab (PI: Jessica Tracy), at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver campus. All projects and associated methods were approved by the University of British Columbia’s Research Ethics Board [certificates #H18-00051]. A version of Chapter 2 is currently in press to be published at the peer-reviewed journal Journal of Personality, (Mercadante & Tracy, in press). This work was in collaboration with Jessica Tracy. EJM developed the study concept. Both authors contributed to the study designs. Testing and data collection were performed by EJM, who also analyzed and interpreted the data under the supervision of JT. EJM drafted the manuscript, and JT provided critical revisions. EJM and JT approved the final manuscript for submission. The remaining chapters in the dissertation are currently being prepared for publication in peer-reviewed journals. This work was also in collaboration with Jessica Tracy. The contributions of the two authors are identical to what is described above for Chapter 2. vi Table of Contents Abstract..........................................................................................................................................iii Lay Summary.................................................................................................................................iv Preface.............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents...........................................................................................................................vi List of Tables...................................................................................................................................x List of Figures...............................................................................................................................xii Acknowledgements......................................................................................................................xiii Dedication...................................................................................................................................xvii Chapter 1: Introduction..................................................................................................................1 History of Scholarship on Greed.....................................................................................................2 Perceptions of Greed........................................................................................................................4 The Psychology of Dispositional Greed..........................................................................................7 The Role of Pride in Greedy Acquisition......................................................................................11 The Present Dissertation................................................................................................................15 Chapter 2: Is greed associated with short-lived boosts of pride in response to acquisition?.....17 Study 1............................................................................................................................................17 Method...............................................................................................................................17 Results...............................................................................................................................19 Discussion.........................................................................................................................23 Study 2............................................................................................................................................24 Method...............................................................................................................................25 Results...............................................................................................................................26 Discussion.........................................................................................................................34 vii Study 3............................................................................................................................................35 Method...............................................................................................................................36 Results...............................................................................................................................38 Discussion.........................................................................................................................41 Study 4............................................................................................................................................43 Method...............................................................................................................................43 Results...............................................................................................................................45 Discussion.........................................................................................................................53 Study 5............................................................................................................................................54 Method...............................................................................................................................54 Results...............................................................................................................................55 Chapter Summary..........................................................................................................................61 Chapter 3: Is greedy acquisition driven by mistaken affective forecasting?..............................65 Study 6............................................................................................................................................65 Method...............................................................................................................................65 Results...............................................................................................................................67 Discussion.........................................................................................................................70 Study 7............................................................................................................................................71 Method...............................................................................................................................71 Results...............................................................................................................................71 Chapter Summary..........................................................................................................................74 Chapter 4: Is the dynamic emotional process observed among greedy individuals specific to acquisitions purchased for themselves?.......................................................................................76 Study 8............................................................................................................................................76 Method...............................................................................................................................77 viii Results...............................................................................................................................78 Discussion.........................................................................................................................81 Study 9............................................................................................................................................82 Method...............................................................................................................................83 Results...............................................................................................................................84 Discussion.........................................................................................................................88 Study 10..........................................................................................................................................88 Method...............................................................................................................................91 Results...............................................................................................................................92 Discussion.........................................................................................................................98 Study 11..........................................................................................................................................99 Method.............................................................................................................................100 Results.............................................................................................................................101 Discussion.......................................................................................................................108 Chapter Summary........................................................................................................................110 Chapter 5: Is greedy acquisition driven by a desire to increase pride at times when it is low?..............................................................................................................................................112 Study 12........................................................................................................................................112 Method.............................................................................................................................113 Results.............................................................................................................................115 Discussion.......................................................................................................................122 Study 13........................................................................................................................................124 Method.............................................................................................................................124 Results.............................................................................................................................124 Discussion.......................................................................................................................128 ix Study 14........................................................................................................................................128 Method.............................................................................................................................128 Results.............................................................................................................................129 Chapter Summary........................................................................................................................133 Chapter 6: General Discussion..................................................................................................135 Distinctions Between Greed and Models for Related Traits......................................................143 Limitations of the Present Research...........................................................................................133 Future Directions.........................................................................................................................149 References...................................................................................................................................151 x List of Tables Table 1: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 1 ................................................................................................................... 20 Table 2: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 1. ................ 22 Table 3: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 2 ................................................................................................................... 27 Table 4: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 2 ................. 29 Table 5: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 3 ................................................................................................................... 38 Table 6: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 3 ................. 40 Table 7: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 4 ................................................................................................................... 46 Table 8: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 4 ................. 49 Table 9: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 5 ................................................................................................................... 56 Table 10: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 5 ............... 58 Table 11: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 6 ................................................................................................................... 67 Table 12: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 6 ............... 69 Table 13: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 8 ............... 80 Table 14: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 9 ............... 86 Table 15: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 10 ................................................................................................................. 93 Table 16: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 10 ............. 94 Table 17: Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables, Study 11 ............................................................................................................... 101 Table 18: Mixed-effects models for all measured emotions across time, Study 11 ........... 103 xi Table 19: Regression model testing the interaction between greed, self-esteem, and pride condition, predicting consumer product desirability, Study 12 ........................... 118 Table 20: Mixed-effects models examining the interaction between dispositional greed and emotions the day prior predicting making a non-essential purchase, Study 13 ... 126 Table 21: Mixed-effects models examining the interaction between dispositional greed, self-esteem, and emotions the day prior predicting making a non-essential purchase, Study 13 ............................................................................................................... 127 Table 22: Mixed-effects models examining the interaction between dispositional greed and emotions the day prior predicting making a non-essential purchase, Study 14 ... 130 Table 23: Mixed-effects models examining the interaction between dispositional greed, self-esteem, and emotions the day prior predicting making a non-essential purchase, Study 14 ............................................................................................................... 131 Table 24: Key results across all studies...................................................................................138 xii List of Figures Figure 1: Visual depiction of theoretical model .................................................................... 14 Figure 2: Interactions between dispositional greed and time predicting authentic pride and hubristic pride in the purchased item from acquisition to Time 5, Study 2. .............................................................................................................. 29 Figure 3: Three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time predicting authentic pride in the purchased item from acquisition to Time 5, Study 2. ............................................................................................................................. 32 Figure 4: Left: Interaction showing the relationship between greed and person-centered authentic pride on days when participants made non-essential purchases compared to days when they did not. Right: Same interaction for goal progress, Study 3. ..................................................................................... 50 Figure 5: Correspondence between anticipated and actual authentic pride two weeks and one month after acquisition, Study 7. ................................................... 71 Figure 6: Left: Interaction between greed and self-esteem predicting product desirability for participants in low authentic pride condition; Right: Same interaction for participants in high authentic pride condition, Study 12. ............. 117 xiii Acknowledgements Ironically, the thing that stands out most of everything I’ve learned in graduate school has nothing to do with psychology. As I look back on the past six years, the most impactful lesson is that the more you try at something, the more you will fail. Each setback stings, but you emerge stronger than before with new knowledge, insight, and appreciation for the challenges you faced and the inevitable challenges to come. Yet, the silver linings in failure are often hard to see in those moments, and even harder to internalize, especially alone. You must rely on your people to help you navigate these struggles, and I am extremely fortunate to have had truly incredible people by my side in graduate school to guide me through those low points and the high points, too. First and foremost, I am so lucky to have worked with the best graduate advisor a student could ever ask for! Jess— it has been an honor and a privilege to learn from you and work with you. From the beginning to the end of the research process, you’ve shown me how to craft impactful and rigorous studies, and to never lose sight of the bigger picture at each step of the process. Years after the security of tenure, Jess remains deeply invested in all of our research and the state of the field more broadly; the way she works shows everyone that it’s cool to care. We’re pretty different people, but I’ve always felt that Jess brings out the best in me. She knows when and how to push me, yet she’s also thoughtful and caring to recognize when I need a break. I could go on forever (Jess is keenly aware of my penchant for verbosity J), but suffice to say that, as I imagine advising my future students one day, I think mostly about how I can emulate Jess’s role in my graduate career, and in my life more broadly. It’s hard to imagine how someone could do a better job. xiv I have also been extremely fortunate to work with several other faculty members at UBC. I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee— Friedrich Götz and Sheila Woody— for their contributions to my dissertation research. Sheila— I’ve always enjoyed every conversation we’ve had about this work, dating back to EmotionFest 2019. It has been fascinating to think about the connections between greed and hoarding, and I always come away from our discussions with new ideas and questions about my research. Fritz— the timing of when you joined our department is one of those things in life that makes it hard not to believe in fate. The contributions you’ve made to my research and to my career as a scientist in such a short amount of time are borderline unfathomable. Although much of what I’ve learned from you has been practical and technical, the way you carry yourself and treat others stands out most. No one would be surprised if someone so successful at such a young age had an ego or felt that they didn’t have time for lowly graduate students, but Fritz has never once acted that way and routinely shows the exact opposite qualities. Fritz makes myself and the other students believe we can achieve our goals without selling our souls or stepping on other people’s toes, and we’re so lucky to have him because the broader academic culture doesn’t always make that seem possible. There are several other faculty members that have also played a fundamental role in my graduate career. I would like to thank the entire social-personality area of the psychology department. The thing about UBC that I always brag about to others is how collaborative and communal we are as a department, and the fingerprints of the SP area are all over my research. It is quite easy for me to look back at my papers and notice studies that we ran because of a thoughtful question, or sharp critique, presented by someone at SP area workshop or a lab meeting. More specifically, I would like to thank Steve Heine for his contributions to my xv research and graduate career. Steve and I began working together in the middle of my second year of graduate study, and he has since served as an informal supervisor. Steve has taught me to be intellectually curious, explore many different possibilities in research projects, and connect research findings to broader theories and research programs in the field. Steve has also taught me great persistence with the publication process as we dealt with a series of rejections on our paper; each time, we re-engaged with the research and devised a way to move forward without losing hope for the project. There were many moments throughout the process where I thought the paper was dead, but with Steve’s guidance and support, we were able to get the paper published in Journal of Personality, and I could not be happier with that result. I have also been extremely fortunate to work with two professors in Sauder, Karl Aquino and Daniel Skarlicki. Both of these professors have been instrumental to my research career, and I would not be moving onto a post-doctoral position at NYU Stern School of Business without them. Karl and Daniel have shown me the similarities and differences between psychology departments and management departments and have shown me how to live in both camps and shift some of my habits from psychology for business school audiences. I feel immense gratitude for all of these faculty members’ investment in me. Besides Jess, no one had to do anything for me, yet all of these people stepped up countless times to impart their wisdom on me and help me reach my goals. These are debts I’ll never be able to pay back, but I am wholly committed to paying it forward to my future colleagues and students. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the other graduate students who completed graduate school alongside me. Zak Witkower, Gordon Heltzel, Audrey Aday, Lucy de Souza, Kate Guan, Holly Engstrom, Adam Alic, William Jettinghoff, Ian Hohm, and many others have been xvi incredible colleagues and even better friends. I would have crumbled without them; it’s really as simple as that. xvii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my family: my Mom, Dad, and brother Drew. I’m the youngest in my family, and as a kid, I always found myself watching my family and wondering about what they were thinking, why they were doing the things they were doing, and primarily, how I can be more like them. As I’ve gotten older, I recognize this aspect of my childhood as one of the crucial factors that led me to become a psychologist, eternally wondering about people. Each one of them inspires me deeply, and I’ll attempt to describe that in words here. My Mom works to improve herself more than anyone I know. She embodies the idea of a growth-mindset, and she spreads this around; she knows you can do better, even, and especially, when you don’t, and she provides endless support. My Mom knows the important difference between help and support. You don’t always need help, but you always need support, and she’s wise enough to help you when it’s necessary, and to remind you to help yourself when it’s not. My mom shows me that the mark of a good person is someone actively striving to do better. When it feels like you’re done working on yourself and it’s everyone else’s responsibility to catch up is the most telling sign that you’re veering off course. That said, if there was anyone who I’d say is done working on himself and we all need to catch up to him, it’s my Dad. There’s no challenge he can’t overcome, and his generosity is unmatched. My worldview is mostly his; my Dad taught me how to see people for who they are and ignore the noise surrounding them. As I’ve gotten older, we often make the same comment at the same time, and those moments are simultaneously acutely horrifying as I watch myself age, yet immensely comforting and prideful to feel that I’m growing to be more like him. I would have done whatever he told me to do with my life. If he said be a doctor, I would have done that; if he said be a lawyer, I would have done that; if he wanted me to be in the NBA, I’d xviii be a pitiful, 5’ 10” 28-year-old shooting free throws outside right now instead of writing this dissertation. He knew this and made the decision to provide no guidance and force me to figure out my passion myself. That led me here, where I’m fully obsessed and enamored with my career and the life that has come with it, and I’ll always remember that was his doing, despite how he might disagree. My brother Drew is the most talented person I know. Drew creates things that no one else can and brings them to life to make unforgettable experiences in people’s lives. Also my parents’ son, he is relentless in pursuit of his goals, and I am so lucky to have three role models for this in my life, whereas Drew only had two. My story was set in motion by trying to impress Drew; I never really wanted to do anything else as a kid. I’m not much of a musician, so I had to find something else to do, and school was always the place I shined. Drew teaches me to nurture my talents, never settle, and define success in my own terms, not anyone else’s. I am who I am because of these three people. Nothing I ever do in this life will be independent. Chapter 1: Introduction King Midas, one of history’s greediest mythological figures, loved nothing more than gold (Graves, 1960). Midas loved gold so much that when the god Dionysus offered to grant him one wish, Midas wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. With his new power, Midas began alchemizing his kingdom, and along with infinite gold came great joy; he was achieving his wildest dreams. But by the end of story, Midas’ joy dissipated as he came to understand that even infinite gold was not enough to live a fulfilling life, and the endless pursuit of wealth, ironically, robbed him of everything he once held dear. The story of King Midas remains well known today, thousands of years after it was first told. One reason for its timelessness may be that Midas is relatable— we all know people who are constantly in pursuit of that next big thing, and never satisfied with what they have. Indeed, at its core the myth describes a dynamic emotional process that feels real: greedy people regularly seek to acquire new things, and feel positive emotions in response to their acquisitions, but soon feel the need to acquire again. This observation points to a potentially interesting paradox about greed. It is a disposition that seemingly motivates people to consistently seek out new possessions that, just as consistently, fail to satisfy them in the long run. What could explain such a frustrating and fruitless behavioral pattern? In this dissertation, I report 14 studies examining how emotional responses to acquisition might help explain greedy people’s tendency to always want more, yet never be satisfied with what they get. In brief, I propose that greedy people are motivated to acquire new possessions because doing so provides them with potent but fleeting feelings of pride, and these feelings momentarily help regulate their self-esteem. This causes greedy individuals to soon seek out more acquisitions in order to feel pride again, resulting in a self-sustaining cycle. 2 In this chapter, I review the extant psychological literature on greed and detail the proposed theoretical model that, I argue, might help explain the defining characteristic of dispositional greed: pervasive acquisitiveness. History of Scholarship on Greed Greed has fascinated scholars for millennia, with its intellectual history centered in fields such as philosophy, economics, and political science (Wang & Murnighan, 2010). One commonality among past scholarship is the sense that greed is everywhere; it is a ubiquitous aspect of social living. Indeed, this claim has emerged across time, cultures, and disciplines. The famous philosopher Emile Durkheim noted, “from the top to the bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused... Nothing can calm it.” (Durkheim, 1897). The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume felt similarly, remarking that, “avarice... is a universal passion which operates at all times, at all places, and upon all persons” (Hume, 1741/1998). Likewise, Aristotle and Plato both argued that people are naturally greedy (Balot, 2001), because humans tend to confuse wants with needs (Furley, 2003). Outside of philosophy, economic systems as different as Adam Smith’s neoclassical/neoliberal economics and Marxist communism both view greed as an unavoidable aspect of human societies that must either be harnessed for the greater good (according to Smith) or structurally eliminated from the economic system (according to Marx). Political theorists like Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes seem to share this belief, arguing independently that managing individual greed in society is a foremost task of political leaders and institutions (Wang & Murnighan, 2010). In summary, scholars across disciplines have long paid attention to greed, suggesting that it has been considered a salient force on individual and group behavior within many different societies across history. 3 Despite consensus regarding the societal relevance of greed, the societal value of greed has been subject to much debate. While some view greed as a socially desirable engine of progress, others view greed as a socially undesirable harbinger of collective destruction. Those who believe that greed is good claim it motivates people to pursue what is best for them, and this ultimately creates benefits for others within capitalist societies. In other words, greed takes self-interest and turns it into social progress (Smith, 1776; Wang & Murnighan, 2010). As Smith famously said, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith, 1776: 15). In fact, Smith argued that an ideal society is one where individuals create social good indirectly by pursuing self-interest because, “nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens” (Smith, 1776: 15). Support for this notion can be found in many historical and current events; for example, the recent Covid-19 pandemic provided an extremely lucrative economic opportunity to vaccine-developing pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer and Moderna. Even if one assumes that their motive for developing the vaccines was strictly financial, it is undeniable that doing so provided a global social benefit while simultaneously enriching the companies and their shareholders. Nevertheless, the alternative view of greed, as detrimental to groups, seems more widely shared (Wang & Murnighan, 2010; Gilliland & Anderson, 2014). Greed is considered a major source of war and political conflict; this belief dates back at least to Plato in ancient Greece, and it has not waned in popularity since (Collier, 2000). This negative or fearful stance toward greed has been communicated in religious texts as well; for instance, Christianity’s New Testament claims that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (Fetherston, 2000). According to this perspective, greed is not something that spurs progress or economic growth; instead, greed 4 motivates people to amass more resources than they could ever need at the expense of others. Put differently, those who believe greed is a negative force in society see it as an irrational, short-sighted desire for excessive quantities of goods that provide far less benefit to the greedy person compared to the harm their hoarding causes others. Support for this idea is also rife throughout modern history: greed is considered a major cause of the 2008 economic crisis (Mussel et al., 2015), and many individual corporate accounting scandals (Patsuris, 2002). In addition, psychological studies have found that greed predicts engaging in unethical behaviors to acquire resources (Seuntjens et al., 2019, Sajko et al., 2021), and is often implicated in poor financial outcomes. For instance, CEO greed predicts lower shareholder returns (Takacs Haynes et al., 2017) and slower recovery of stock prices after the 2008 financial crisis (Sajko et al., 2021). Beyond its negative consequences for others, greed is also thought to harm greedy people themselves. These individuals are thought to be so lost in their quest for wealth that they fail to notice the futility of their desires and behaviors. For example, Plato claimed that greed makes people unhappy (Balot, 2001), and Buddhist philosophy posits that “from greed comes grief; from greed comes fear” (Fetherston, 2000). In sum, scholars have held a diversity of views of the value of greed in social groups, with evidence for each perspective. That said, none of this scholarship addresses how ordinary people view greed, specifically whether they are more likely to agree with the view of greed as good or bad. This question has been addressed in recent psychological research that attempted to identify factors that lead people to perceive greed in others. Perceptions of Greed In contrast to the attention paid to greed by economists and philosophers throughout history, psychological research on the intrapsychic processes that promote and sustain 5 dispositional greed is only in its infancy. That said, there exists a larger body of research on perceptions of greed in others. This work has identified certain factors that lead people to perceive a person or group as greedy. Interestingly, although scholars have made compelling arguments for the positive and negative consequences of greed, perceptions of greedy people are uniformly negative (Gilliland & Anderson, 2011), suggesting that people tend to invoke the negative perspective on greed when they judge others. When judging another individual or group as greedy, observers rely on both situational and dispositional factors of the target. First, in regard to situational factors, resource scarcity and the relative deprivation of others seem especially important. Resources must be limited for perceptions of greed to emerge. For example, drinking one gallon of water would not be considered greedy in situations where water is plentiful, although it might be viewed as excessive or gluttonous (Gilliland & Anderson, 2014). Drinking one gallon of water in a drought, however, is much more likely to be considered greedy. In fact, one study found that the Wall Street Journal produced more news articles about greed in years with lower annual stock market returns compared to years when the stock market performed better (Gilliland & Anderson, 2012). This suggests that journalists and readers were more attentive to greed in society during times when people were generally losing money, creating relative scarcity, and less attentive to greed during prosperous years. Resource scarcity is thought to promote perceptions of greed because those who overuse in such situations are seen as depriving others of needed resources, and the relative deprivation of others can lead to perceptions of greed even when resources are not scarce (Gregoire et al., 2010; Helzer & Rosenzweig, 2020). Supporting this point, Gilliland and Anderson (2012) tested numerous possible causes of greed perceptions, and found that those who were richer than their peers, such that their wealth created relative deprivation for others, were 6 more likely to be perceived as greedy than those who were equivalently wealthy but equal to their peers. Perceptions of greed are also driven by dispositional characteristics of the target being judged, namely their deservingness and need (Gregoire et al., 2010). One driver of these perceptions is “overcompensation inequity” (Gilliand & Anderson, 2014), which involves an individual or group attaining more than they deserve based on relative input. In this view, people are seen as greedy when their compensation outweighs their contribution (e.g., a recent college graduate demanding to be paid like an employee with decades of experience), whereas the same compensation is unlikely to lead to perceptions of greed for individuals who are seen as deserving (e.g., an employee with decades of experience demanding to be paid what they are worth). Similarly, those who are perceived as low in need are more likely to be called greedy for the same resource gain as those who are in greater need (Gilliand & Anderson, 2014). These findings are useful for understanding the common tendency to label extremely wealthy people (e.g., billionaires, royals) greedy regardless of any expressed behavior; their resource holdings are so large that perceivers likely think it impossible that they could ever deserve or need so much. As a result, any behavior oriented at gaining or maintaining wealth by already wealthy societal members is likely to be considered greedy. However, to be perceived as greedy, one must be seen as responsible for their gains. A child who inherits a massive sum of money would not be considered greedy for such a windfall, although their inheritance may be perceived as unfair or unnecessary. In summary, both situational and dispositional factors contribute to perceptions of greed. Importantly, perceptions of greed are distinct from related person perceptions such as selfishness and unfairness (Gilliland & Anderson, 2014). A person’s behavior need not 7 negatively affect others to be perceived as selfish, but a harmful impact on others seems to be a necessary appraisal for perceptions of greed. For example, someone inattentive to the needs of others might be labeled selfish, but it is unlikely that this insensitivity would lead to a label of greed. Greed thus may be a specific case of selfishness that necessarily involves depriving others of valuable resources to enrich oneself. Correspondingly, perceptions of unfairness differ from perceptions of greed because a person must be responsible for their behavior to be perceived as greedy, but one can be the passive recipient of a windfall that is considered unfair. The Psychology of Dispositional Greed Social-personality psychology has thus amassed a substantial body of findings on the factors that lead to perceptions of greed in others, but the causes of dispositional greed (i.e., greed as an internal personality trait) is a relatively new topic in the field. This might be due, in part, to greed’s conceptual overlap with previously studied psychological constructs, such as self-interest, maximization, and materialism (Gilliand & Anderson, 2014; Wang et al., 2011; Wang & Murnighan, 2011). To define dispositional greed and distinguish it from related constructs, Seuntjens and colleagues (2015a) conducted the first bottom-up exploration of how people conceptualize greed. Based on participants’ ratings of the centrality of various potential greed features (which were initially generated by another set of participants), these authors defined greed as “a desire to acquire more and the dissatisfaction of never having enough” (Seuntjens et al., 2015a, p. 518). They also developed a reliable seven-item scale for measuring dispositional greed (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), with items capturing a preoccupation with accumulating money and possessions (e.g., “One can never have too much money”; “I can’t imagine having too many things”) as well as insatiability more generally (e.g., “It doesn’t matter how much I have. I’m never completely satisfied”; “I always want more”). This scale converges 8 onto the same latent factor as measures of dispositional greed that were developed using other methods (Mussel et al., 2018); as a result, the field now has multiple validated measures that provide a foundation for studying dispositional greed. In addition to defining dispositional greed and developing measures, past research has highlighted important differences between greed and related constructs, specifically self-interest, maximization, and materialism. The central difference is that greedy people want more of everything, whereas self-interested people, maximizers, and materialists are more narrowly acquisitive for certain things. Self-interest is considered the rational pursuit of one’s goals and desires that weighs costs and benefits to oneself to drive behavior (Wang & Murnighan, 2011). Maximizers rigorously seek out the highest quality products and are not satisfied with anything less (Nenkov et al., 2008). Materialists greatly value material goods and believe that one’s value as a person can be summarized by the things they own (Richins, 2004). In contrast, greedy people tend to be more irrational than self-interested people, often working against their best interests in their pursuit of acquiring more (Seuntjens et al., 2015b). They are also more impulsive than maximizers, unable to resist acquiring something desirable without concern for whether there might be a superior option. Furthermore, their acquisitiveness is less specific than that of materialists; greedy people seek to over-acquire food, sexual partners, and Facebook friends, in addition to material goods (Seuntjens et al., 2015b). In addition to these theoretical differences, empirical research shows that measures of these four constructs are best represented by a four-factor model wherein each measure is considered a distinct construct, supporting their distinctiveness empirically (Seuntjens et al., 2015b). To contextualize greed more broadly within social-personality psychology, previous research has also examined how greed is related to many other psychological constructs. In terms 9 of the five-factor model of personality, there is consistent evidence that greedy people are less agreeable than people low in greed (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Mussel & Hewig, 2016; Seuntjens et al., 2015b). Evidence is more mixed regarding greed’s relation to the other Big Five traits, but greedy people seem to be generally more neurotic than people low in greed (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Seuntjens et al., 2015b; cf. Mussel & Hewig, 2016), and no different on conscientiousness (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Mussel & Hewig, 2016; cf. Seuntjens et al., 2015b), openness (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Mussel & Hewig, 2016; cf. Seuntjens et al., 2015b), or extraversion (Mussel & Hewig, 2016; Seuntjens et al., 2015b; cf. Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015). The inconsistency of many of these relationships across studies may be due to their use of different measures of dispositional greed. In terms of more narrow personality traits, greedy people tend to be entitled (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Seuntjens et al., 2015b), and they are higher in psychopathy, particularly the meanness and disinhibition facets (Mussel & Hewig, 2016; Seuntjens et al., 2015b). Greedy people show signs of disinhibition on several other measures as well; they take more risks (Mussel et al., 2015, Mussel & Hewig, 2016; cf. Seuntjens et al., 2015b), are more impulsive (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), and have less self-control (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; Seuntjens et al., 2019) than people low in greed. Furthermore, neuroscientific research has found that greedy people show reduced P3 responses to monetary gains and losses in an experimental task, suggesting that they are less responsive to external feedback that would be useful for guiding future decision-making (Mussel & Hewig, 2019). Consistent with these associations, greedy people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviors in everyday life, believe unethical behavior is more acceptable, and take greater bribes in an experimental task (Seuntjens et al., 2019). 10 Greedy people also perceive and relate to others differently from people low in greed. Greedy people tend to make more frequent social comparisons with others (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015), and are more envious (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Seuntjens et al., 2015b) and competitive (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015). They also tend to be less empathetic (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Seuntjens et al., 2015b), less concerned for others (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), and less concerned with managing their public reputation (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015). These associations suggest greedy people monitor other people in their environment because they seek to outcompete them and covet things that others have, but not because they are concerned with the welfare of others. Consistent with many of the associations reported above, greedy people also differ from those low in greed in terms of psychological well-being. Greedy people tend to have lower self-esteem (Seuntjens et al., 2015b) and life satisfaction (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Seuntjens et al., 2015b), but they are no more likely than people low in greed to be depressed (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), suggesting that their dissatisfaction with themselves is not pathological. Regarding demographic differences, men tend to be greedier than people with other gender identities (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; Seuntjens et al., 2015b), younger people tend to be greedier than older people (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), less educated people tend to be greedier than more educated people (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), conservatives tend to be greedier than liberals (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), and there is mixed evidence that greedy people tend to be less religious than people low in greed (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015; cf. Seuntjens et al., 2015b). There is also evidence that greedy people are more likely to work in finance or management than the service industry or the arts (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015). 11 Finally, greedy people show distinctive patterns of behavior when they play economic games. Unsurprisingly, greedy people take more from a common pool in public goods games (Mussel & Hewig, 2016; Seuntjens et al., 2015b), dictator games (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), and ultimatum games (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), compared to people low in greed. Moreover, they show more intense emotional reactions to financial gains and losses during these games (Mussel & Hewig, 2016). Research has also examined factors that might cause dispositional greed. Cross-sectional studies have shown that greedy people tend to retrospectively report greater environmental unpredictability in childhood (Chen, 2018), suggesting that this might be a cause of greed in adulthood. Similarly, greed has been linked to anomie, which refers to the belief that the world is meaningless and chaotic (Jiang et al., 2020), and these researchers argue that greed might be an adaptation to the unpredictability that comes with anomie. Across cultures, it has been found that economic inequality increases a motivation for wealth and status (Wang et al., 2022), which is closely related to greed, although not greed per se. Other studies that examined greed directly found that negative core beliefs about oneself, such as feeling unloved and insecure, predict increases in greed over time (Mussel et al., 2022), suggesting that greed might be a coping mechanism for people who feel chronically isolated or unworthy. Lastly, another set of studies found that education in economics causes people to hold more positive attitudes toward greed, by virtue of showcasing the theoretical societal value of self-interest (Wang et al., 2011). Taken together, extant research suggests that feelings of material or psychological insecurity lead people to become greedier, implying that the relentless acquisitiveness associated with greed might help mitigate these feelings. The Role of Pride in Greedy Acquisition 12 Prior research has identified what greed is and how it differs from related constructs, but not why greedy people always want more and simultaneously feel dissatisfied with never having enough. To better understand the psychological processes that underlie and sustain dispositional greed, I developed a theoretical model based on the definition of greed provided by Seuntjens and colleagues (2015a). According to their definition, dispositional greed is characterized, perhaps most centrally, by two distinct but related sets of feelings: a desire to acquire more and a dissatisfaction with never having enough (Seuntjens et al., 2015a). I propose that one emotional mechanism might explain both of these components: greedy individuals feel pride in response to acquiring new possessions, but not from owning them, resulting in bursts of pride that are ultimately short-lived. This quickly shifting emotional dynamic may stem, in part, from the unique personality profile of greedy individuals. As described above, individuals high in trait greed tend to be low in self-esteem and life satisfaction, envious of others (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), and they possess negative core beliefs about themselves, such as being unloved and unworthy (Mussel et al., 2022). Yet greedy people are no more likely than others to become depressed (Seuntjens et al., 2015b) and they tend to be highly motivated to achieve their goals and feel productive (Krekels & Pandalaere, 2015). These findings suggest that greedy people are dissatisfied with themselves and their life circumstances, but they are not hopeless. Instead, they may believe they know how to satisfy their needs and aspirations, and are motivated to do so. Given that greedy people place great importance on the accumulation of wealth, among other things, they likely view acquiring money and possessions as a viable path toward psychological fulfillment. As a result, each new acquisition may represent meaningful progress towards this identity goal. Whereas less greedy people typically seek to acquire because they 13 expect to enjoy or make use of the acquired item, greedy people may instead seek to acquire because the experience of acquiring something, rather than the acquired thing, makes them feel closer to becoming their ideal self. One implication of this account is that pride, specifically, should be more relevant to this process than generalized positive affect or other positive emotions like happiness, which are commonly experienced when people acquire new, desirable items (e.g., Weidman & Dunn, 2016). In contrast, according to our account, the critical feature that distinguishes greedy people’s emotional responses to acquisition is that acquisition serves as a means toward identity goal fulfillment, and therefore should elicit pride (Tracy & Robins, 2004). These elevated feelings of pride may, in turn, provide a respite from the chronic low self-esteem that greedy individuals tend to report. Importantly, the pride greedy people experience in response to acquisition is likely to be brief, explaining their perpetual dissatisfaction and feelings of never having enough. The reason for this brevity lies in the nature of their acquisition goals. As greedy individuals transition from viewing the item as something they just acquired to something they now own, the item no longer represents progress toward their goal of acquiring more. In other words, because greedy individuals’ identity goals are about acquisition rather than ownership, the pride associated with a new possession is confined to the acquisition experience and should fade shortly after. Nonetheless, greedy people may soon become motivated to seek out new acquisitions again, to achieve another temporary boost in pride, reigniting this dynamic emotional process. The result is a cybernetic feedback loop, in which greedy people experience rewarding feelings of pride upon acquiring something new, but the short-lived nature of these feelings also causes them to entice greedy people to repeatedly seek out new acquisitions. This theoretical model is depicted visually below in Figure 1. Figure 1 Visual Depiction of Theoretical Model Notes: H1 refers to Hypothesis 1 of the theoretical model (i.e., “The Boost”) and H2 refers to Hypothesis 2 of the theoretical model (i.e., “The Drop”). This feature of our model raises a question: which of pride’s two distinct facets, authentic or hubristic (Tracy & Robins, 2007), is the critical emotion that rises and falls in response to greedy acquisition? Authentic pride is the facet of pride common among individuals high in genuine self-esteem; it is characterized by feelings of accomplishment, confidence, and productivity, and associated with a host of positive intrapsychic and interpersonal outcomes. In contrast, hubristic pride is common among individuals high in narcissism; it is characterized by feelings of arrogance and egotism, and associated with poor psychological well-being and antisocial behavior (Mercadante & Tracy, 2022; Tracy et al., 2009; Tracy & Robins, 2007). Despite the substantial differences between these two facets, there are reasons to suspect that both could serve as emotional rewards for greedy individuals’ acquisitiveness. To the extent that greedy people use acquisition as a regulatory behavior to elicit positive self-relevant feelings, we would expect a boost in authentic pride—the form of pride most strongly linked to high self-esteem and life satisfaction—in response to acquisition experiences, and a subsequent drop in this same form of pride later on. However, if greedy people base their self-worth on how much they can acquire rather than on authentic accomplishments or good deeds, then hubristic pride may be the form of pride elicited by their acquisitions, because it is associated with an inauthentic sense of self (Tracy & Robins, 2007). We address these possibilities by measuring both facets of pride in all studies. The Present Dissertation In this dissertation, I present 14 studies that test this proposed model and document its boundary conditions. In Chapter 2, I report five studies testing two central hypotheses: (1) greedy people will show elevated pride upon acquisition, and (2) these feelings will fade over the subsequent weeks. In Chapter 3, I report two studies testing whether greedy acquisition might be 16 driven by poor affective forecasting, such that greedy people do not realize that the pride they feel from acquiring will fade soon after acquisition. In Chapter 4, I report four studies that test different boundary conditions of the model. First, I test whether the same dynamic emotional process occurs for both self-made purchases and gifts received from others (Study 8). Second, I test whether the distinctive short-lived pride responses to acquisition documented among greedy people in Studies 1-5 characterize a distinctive manner of experiencing pride in response to any pride-eliciting event, by testing whether they similarly show short-lived boosts of pride in response to personal achievements, as well as acquisitions (Study 9). Third, in Studies 10 and 11, I adapt the measure of greed to apply specifically to greed for personal achievements to test whether people who see themselves as greedy for things other than money and material wealth show the same emotional response pattern for the things they desire. In Chapter 5, I report three studies testing whether greedy people are motivated to make purchases when they feel negative emotions, to address whether the pride these individuals seek from acquisition can act as a coping mechanism for negative emotional states. Finally, in Chapter 6, I summarize the findings from Chapters 2-5 and their implications, compare these results to existing models in the field for related traits, and discuss the limitations and future directions of this work. 17 Chapter 2: Is greed associated with short-lived boosts of pride in response to acquisition? In Chapter 2, I present five studies testing whether greedy people feel a short-lived boost of pride in response to acquisition. These studies use multiple methods including emotional recall (Study 1), longitudinal methods (Study 2), and daily diary studies (Studies 3-5). Study 1 In Study 1 participants completed an online questionnaire in which they were asked to report their emotions about a purchase made within the last six weeks, both at the time they made the purchase and currently in their daily lives. This study was the first test of our theoretical model, so we pre-registered hypotheses for both authentic pride and positive affect (https://bit.ly/3zCbwd7): (1) greedy people will feel elevated authentic pride and/or positive affect in response to new acquisitions, and (2) these feelings will fade soon afterwards. Method Participants. Two hundred, fifteen adults were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to participate. Following the criteria specified in our pre-registration, 18 participants were excluded from analyses for failing an attention check. This resulted in a final sample of 197 participants (58% female; age range = 20-74, Median = 35 years; cultural background = 72% white, 12% Black, 9% Asian, 6% Hispanic/Latinx, 2% prefer not to answer). A power analysis indicated that 175 participants would provide 80% power to detect a relationship between greed and pride at acquisition of average size in psychology research (r = .21; Richard et al., 2003). Procedure. Participants began by completing the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α = .84), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .90), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985; α = .88). For exploratory purposes, they also completed the Ten Item Big-Five Personality Inventory (Gosling et al., 2003). They were then 18 asked to think of a non-essential purchase they made within the last six weeks, defined as something they bought for themselves (i.e., not a gift for someone else) because they wanted it but did not need it. To ensure that participants wrote about meaningful purchases, we asked them to choose a purchase that they had “planned to make for some time before actually acquiring the item” and gave examples like cars, smartphones, and clothing. Participants then listed the purchase they had in mind, its cost, and the date they acquired the item.1 Participants next reported their emotions about the purchase at two different time points.2 First, to assess emotional responses to acquisition, we asked them to report how the purchased item “made you feel at the moment you got it and immediately after. For example, when you picked it up at the store and for the rest of that day” (henceforth, “Acquisition”). Second, to assess subsequent feelings about the acquired item, participants next reported how it “makes you feel now in your daily life” (henceforth, “Time 2”) For each time point, participants completed the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (AHPS; Tracy & Robins, 2007; αs for authentic pride = .93, .95, αs for hubristic pride = .86, .88), the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988; αs for PA = .93, .95, αs for NA = .85, .92), and the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998; αs for pleasantness = .72, .70, αs for activation = .23, .05) regarding how the purchased item made them feel. We included the Current Mood Questionnaire along with the PANAS to test whether any observed effects of greed were unique to pride or better captured by range of broader positive affective states. We also included the negative affect subscale of the PANAS for exploratory purposes. Including these scales also increased the number of items participants viewed and rated each time they reported their 1 Participants also reported how confident they were that they correctly remembered the exact date they made the purchase. We reran analyses controlling for confidences; doing so did not change any results. 2 For exploratory purposes, participants also reported how the purchase made them feel at a third time point: after they decided they wanted it but before they had actually acquired it. 19 emotions, potentially distracting them from the disproportionate number of pride items included and thus reducing demand characteristics. All items from all measures were intermixed at each measurement occasion to further help disguise the hypothesis of the study. Results Correlations among dispositional variables are available in Table 1. 20 Table 1 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 1. Note: SWL = Satisfaction with Life scale. All variables were reported on 7-point Likert scales. Variable Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1. Greed 3.54 1.21 — 2. Self-esteem 5.30 1.03 -.31*** — 3. SWL 4.53 1.24 -.08 .42*** — 4. Openness 5.13 1.10 -.10 .28*** .04 — 5. Conscientiousness 5.47 1.20 -.30*** .58*** .32*** .21** — 6. Extraversion 3.80 1.53 -.04 .17* .15* .30*** .03 — 7. Agreeableness 5.37 1.07 -.36*** .43*** .17* .26*** .33*** .20** — 8. Neuroticism 3.00 1.39 .24*** -.61*** -.22** -.26*** -.46*** -.12 -.38*** 21 Participants’ purchases were categorized as follows: electronics (computers, smartphones, etc.; 45%), apparel (clothing, make-up, etc.; 19%), home improvements (furniture, appliances, etc.; 15%), automotive (cars, tires, etc.; 8%), health and beauty (exercise equipment, skincare products, etc.; 5%), non-electronic leisure (sporting equipment, musical instruments, etc.; 4%), experiences (flights, concert tickets, etc.; 4%), and 1% of participants left this item blank. We found no significant associations between greed and making purchases within a specific category (ps > .08). The cost of participants’ purchases ranged from $1 to $41,000 with a median of $397.50. The time elapsed since participants made their purchases ranged from the day of the study to 60 days prior to the study, with a median of 27.5 days. Data from both timepoints were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We tested our predictions by conducting three linear mixed-effects models in which authentic pride, hubristic pride, or positive affect, respectively, was regressed onto greed, timepoint, and an interaction term between greed and timepoint, controlling for cost and number of days elapsed since purchase. We also controlled for self-esteem in each model to account for its shared variance with both facets of pride, especially authentic pride (Dickens & Robins, 2022; Tracy & Robins, 2007).3 We included random intercepts for each participant, but did not have enough observations to include a random slope of greed (see Table 2). We also ran these models for negative affect, pleasantness, and activation (see Table 2). 3 We did not pre-register including self-esteem as a covariate in this study, but we did so in all studies in the main text. Given its relevance to both facets of pride, self-esteem is a relevant covariate and including it in our analyses allows us to isolate the unique impact of dispositional greed on feelings of pride in response to acquisition. The results do not change significantly if we remove self-esteem as a covariate in these analyses. 22 Table 2. Mixed-Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 1. Notes: DSA=days since acquisition. For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .16 1.88 .06 [-.01, .33] -.04 -0.48 .63 [-.20, .12] .18 2.10 .04 [.01, .35] Greed .20 (.10) 2.53 (2.62) .01 (.009) [.05, .36] ([.03, .17]) .25 (.26) 3.35 (3.84) <.001 (<.001) [.11, .40] ([.13, .39]) .10 (-.07) 1.32 (-1.69) .19 (.09) [-.05, .26] ([-.14, .01]) Self-Esteem .13 1.70 .09 [-.02, .28] -.11 -1.54 .13 [-.25, .03] .14 1.87 .06 [-.01, .28] Cost -.05 -0.68 .49 [-.19, .09] -.08 -1.15 .25 [-.21, .05] -.06 -0.90 .37 [-.20, .07] DSA .03 0.57 .57 [-.07, .13] -.06 -1.13 .26 [-.17, .05] -.003 -0.05 .96 [-.11, .10] Time 2 -.31 -3.40 <.001 [-.48, -.13] .01 0.07 .95 [-.19, .20] -.41 -4.18 <.001 [-.60, -.22] Greed x Time 2 interaction -.10 (-.06) -2.30 (-1.98) .02 (.049) [-.18, -.01] ([-.12, -.001]) -.06 (-.08) -1.18 (-1.67) .24 (.10) [-.17, .05] ([-.17, .01]) -.04 (.05) -0.77 (1.44) .44 (.15) [-.13, .05] ([-.02, .11]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) -.10 -1.21 .23 [-.26, .06] .26 2.83 .005 [.08, .43] .12 1.25 .21 [-.07, .31] Greed .05 (-.06) 0.71 (-1.06) .48 (.29) [-.09, .20] ([-.18, .05]) .17 (.04) 2.24 (0.63) .03 (.53) [.02, .33] ([-.07, .15]) .12 (-.01) 1.60 (-0.08) .11 (.93) [-.03, .27] ([-.10, .17]) Self-Esteem -.30 -4.30 <.001 [-.43, -.16] .33 4.68 <.001 [.19, .47] .21 3.27 .001 [-.03, .27] Cost -.02 -0.33 .74 [-.15, .11] -.05 -0.73 .47 [-.18, .08] -.08 -1.27 .21 [-.20, .04] DSA -.13 -2.50 .01 [-.23, -.03] .11 1.64 .10 [-.02, .24] -.07 -0.91 .37 [-.22, .08] Time 2 .11 1.18 .24 [-.07, .30] -.51 -4.27 <.001 [-.75, -.28] -.32 -2.21 .03 [-.60, -.04] Greed x Time 2 interaction -.04 (-.01) -0.81 (-0.23) .42 (.82) [-.12, .05] ([-.10, .08]) -.09 (-.02) -1.52 (-0.47) .13 (.64) [-.20, .03] ([-.12, .07]) -.14 (-.10) -1.93 (-1.44) .06 (.15) [-.28, .002] ([-.23, .04]) 23 Supporting our hypothesis, greedy people felt elevated authentic pride at acquisition. They also reported feeling elevated hubristic pride at acquisition. In contrast, after controlling for authentic pride, greedy people reported marginally lower positive affect than people low in greed; they also did not report elevated pleasantness or activation. Likewise, after controlling for pride, greedy people did not report elevated negative affect, pleasantness, or activation (see Table 2). Consistent with these results, when positive affect, pleasantness, and activation were included as covariates in models predicting authentic and hubristic pride, to control for shared variance with both facets of pride, greed remained a significant predictor of authentic and hubristic pride at acquisition. Overall, these results reveal a specific and robust effect of greed on both facets of pride upon acquisition. Also supporting our hypothesis, greedy people experienced a significant drop in authentic pride after acquisition, and this effect was robust to controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. In contrast, greedy people’s feelings of hubristic pride and positive affect did not decline significantly after acquisition. Discussion The results of Study 1 supported our two primary hypotheses for authentic pride, such that greedy people felt elevated authentic pride at acquisition, and these feelings significantly declined thereafter. Greedy people felt a similar spike in hubristic pride at acquisition, but we did not observe an interaction for hubristic pride. Greedy people’s hubristic pride therefore appears to be sustained longer, which may indicate that authentic pride is the facet of pride most relevant to greedy individuals’ specific motivation to acquire, whereas hubristic pride may be related to greed in a less dynamic, more trait-like manner. 24 Further supporting our theoretical account, we did not observe analogous effects of greed on positive affect, pleasantness, or activation, and the effects of greed on pride held controlling for all three affective states, suggesting that feeling pride in recent acquisitions may be the critical emotional response that differentiates greedy people from those low in greed in this situation. . Cost of the purchase also did not affect these patterns, suggesting that the process is triggered by meaningful acquisitions regardless of their objective value. In sum, the findings of Study 1 support our hypotheses, but the recall procedure used here has several limitations. Current emotions are known to influence recollections of previous emotions (Levine & Safer, 2002) and positive experiences are especially likely to be inaccurately recalled (Kensigner, 2009), raising questions about the validity of our pride assessments for acquisition. In addition, participants were asked about their feelings at acquisition prior to asking them about their current feelings, so it is possible that thinking about how the possession once made them feel biased their reports of current emotions. To address these limitations, in Study 2 we restricted our sample to individuals who had made a meaningful purchase within the past week, to reduce the potential for memory bias (Parkinson et al., 1995; Robinson & Clore, 2002), and employed a longitudinal design to assess changes in feelings over time, so that participants would not be directly reminded of their feelings at acquisition when reporting their feelings at later times. Study 2 In Study 2, we used a longitudinal design to replicate the results of Study 1 using a method that allowed us to capture emotional responses to acquisitions made very recently –less than one week after the purchase occurred—and track how these emotions changed over the subsequent four weeks. Based on the results of Study 1, we pre-registered the hypothesis that 25 greedy individuals would experience a boost in authentic pride at acquisition and these feelings would fade significantly after acquisition. (https://bit.ly/3yFDjc5). Method Participants. Four hundred adults were recruited from MTurk to participate in the current study. This number was based on a power analysis that indicated 325 participants were required to obtain 80% power to detect an effect of the size observed for the relationship between greed and authentic pride at acquisition in Study 1 (r = .16). Prior to participating, interested MTurk workers reported the most recent non-essential purchase they had made, its cost, and the week that they had purchased it. To minimize potential effects of memory biases (Parkinson et al., 1995; Robinson & Clore, 2002), we accepted only participants who had reported a purchase within the past week. We also required that this purchase cost at least $100, to maximize the likelihood that these were meaningful items that would be salient in participants’ minds for the duration of the study. Importantly, these items did not need to be material possessions; greedy people are broadly motivated to acquire, excessively seeking things like food and sexual partners along with money and material possessions (Seuntjens et al., 2015b), so we allowed them to report experiential acquisitions (e.g., vacations, tickets to events, dining at restaurants), as well as material acquisitions. Following the criteria specified in our pre-registration, 84 participants were excluded for failing an attention check during the initial assessment. This resulted in a final sample of 316 participants (59% female; age range = 18 - 73, Median = 33 years; cultural background = 76% white, 9% Black, 9% Asian, 4% Hispanic/Latinx, 2% prefer not to answer). Participants were paid $0.35 for completing Part 1, and they earned $0.50 for each follow-up survey. 26 Procedure. Participants first completed the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α = .84) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .92). They then reported how their recent purchase made them feel “at the moment you got it and immediately after” (henceforth referred to as Acquisition; n = 316) and “now in your daily life” (Time 1; n = 316)4. They were then emailed follow-up surveys one week (Time 2; n = 218 completed surveys, 69% of original sample), two weeks (Time 3; n = 204, 65% of original sample), three weeks (Time 4; n = 188; 60% of original sample), and four weeks (Time 5; n = 194; 61% of original sample) after the date they completed the first part of the study. At each follow-up, participants responded to the same prompt used to assess current feelings in the initial session (Time 1). For all time points, participants reported their emotions about the purchased item using the same measures as in Study 1: Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αsauthentic pride = .91-.95, αshubristic pride = .90-.93), the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al., 1988; αsPA = .91-.95, αsNA =.91-.96), and the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998; αsPleasantness = .74-.80, αsActivation = .07-.34). Greed was not significantly associated with attrition on follow-up assessments, r = .10, p = .08. Results Participants purchased a range of items: electronics (39%), apparel (27%), home improvements (16%), non-electronic leisure (8%), experiences (5%), automotive (3%), health and beauty (1%), and 1% did not report the purchased item they had in mind. We found no significant associations between greed and making purchases within a specific category (ps > 4 Participants also forecasted how they expected to feel about the purchase in two weeks and one month, to explore whether people make accurate affective forecasts about their future feelings. These results address a different research question so are not reported here, but the data for these items are included on OSF. These forecasting items were also included in Study 3. 27 .10). The cost of purchases ranged from $100 to $100,000 with a median of $250. Descriptive statistics and correlations among all trait-level variables are reported in Table 3. Table 3 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 2. Data from all time points were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We tested our predictions by conducting three linear mixed-effects models in which authentic pride, hubristic pride, or positive affect, respectively, was regressed onto greed, time (i.e., number of weeks since acquisition), and an interaction between greed and time, controlling for the cost of the purchase and self-esteem. As pre-registered, we included self-esteem as a covariate due to its strong relationship with authentic pride, which allowed us to better identify the unique relationship between greed and authentic pride, and we included this covariate in the models for hubristic pride and positive affect for the sake of consistency. We included a random intercept for participant and a random slope for greed. All variables were standardized, except for time, which was coded numerically such that acquisition was coded as 0 and each later timepoint was coded to represent the number of weeks participants had owned the item (i.e., 1 for Time 1, 2 for Time 2, etc.). Given that participants reported their Time 1 emotions during the first session of the study, these models include all 316 participants who reported their emotions at Time 1. We chose to model timepoint as a continuous variable to Variable Mean SD 1 1. Greed 3.86 1.22 — 2. Self-esteem 5.05 1.20 -.29*** 28 simplify the presentation of the results, but conclusions are identical if we model timepoint as a categorial variable. Supporting our pre-registered hypothesis, greedy people felt significantly greater authentic pride at acquisition than less greedy people (see Table 4). Greedy people also felt elevated hubristic pride at acquisition. In addition, greed remained a significant predictor of authentic and hubristic pride at acquisition after controlling for shared variance with positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. Consistent with these results, after controlling for shared variance with authentic pride, greedy people did not report greater feelings of positive affect in their purchases compared to people low in greed; nor did they report elevated pleasantness or activation (see Table 4). These results indicate that feeling pride in response to acquisition differentiates greedy people’s acquisition experiences from those of individuals low in greed. Also supporting our pre-registered hypothesis, a significant interaction emerged between greed and time predicting authentic pride, indicating that greedy people’s feelings of authentic pride declined significantly more than less greedy people’s did after acquisition (see Figure 2). This interaction remained significant controlling for shared variance with positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. We observed a similar interaction for hubristic pride, and this interaction also held controlling for shared variance with positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. Unlike both facets of pride, changes in positive affect since acquisition were unrelated to greed after controlling for authentic pride. 29 Table 4. Mixed-Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 2. Notes: For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .17 3.39 <.001 [.07, .27] .15 2.85 .005 [.05, .26] .25 4.96 <.001 [.15, .35] Greed .33 (.12) 6.39 (4.76) <.001 (<.001) [.23, .43] ([.07, .17]) .29 (.21) 6.17 (4.75) <.001 (<.001) [.20, .38] ([.12, .29]) .28 (.02) 5.32 (0.85) <.001 (.39) [.17, .38] ([-.03, .08]) Self-Esteem .29 5.82 <.001 [.19, .39] -.12 -2.61 .01 [-.21, -.02] .27 5.29 <.001 [.17, .36] Cost .04 0.85 .40 [-.05, .13] .01 0.14 .89 [-.08, .09] .03 .64 .52 [-.06, .13] Time -.07 -8.23 <.001 [-.08, -.05] -.05 -6.15 <.001 [-.06, -.03] -.10 -13.01 <.001 [-.12, -.09] Greed x Time Interaction -.04 (-.02) -5.03 (-3.27) <.001 (.001) [-.06, -.02] ([-.03, -.01]) -.03 (-.02) -3.88 (-3.26) <.001 (.001) [-.05, -.01] ([-.04, -.01]) -.03 (.001) -3.75 (0.21) <.001 (.83) [-.05, -.01] ([-.01, .01]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .18 3.56 <.001 [.08, .28] .16 3.29 .001 [.06, .25] .18 3.62 <.001 [.08, .27] Greed .11 (-.02) 2.37 (-0.39) .02 (.69) [.02, .21] ([-.01, .02]) .08 (-.11) 1.61 (-2.85) .11 (.005) [-.02, .18] ([-.19, -.04]) .16 (.04) 2.88 (0.72) .005 (.47) [.05, .26] ([-.06, .13]) Self-Esteem -.31 -7.44 <.001 [-.39, -.22] .37 7.95 <.001 [.28, .46] .23 4.94 <.001 [.14, .32] Cost .04 1.15 .25 [-.03, .12] .04 0.89 .37 [-.05, .13] .03 0.70 .49 [-.06, .12] Time -.07 -8.89 <.001 [-.09, -.05] -.08 -8.81 <.001 [-.10, -.06] -.09 -8.27 <.001 [-.11, -.07] Greed x Time Interaction -.01 (.004) -1.35 (0.53) .18 (.60) [-.03, .005] ([-.01, .02]) -.03 (-.001) -2.76 (-0.10) .006 (.92) [-.04, -.01] ([-.06, .08]) -.03 (-.02) -3.75 (-1.62) <.001 (.11) [-.05, -.01] ([-.04, .003]) 30 Figure 2. Interactions Between Dispositional Greed and Time Predicting Authentic Pride (Top) and Hubristic Pride (Bottom) in the Purchased Item from Acquisition to Time 5, Study 2. Notes: Fans around the regression lines represent the standard error. Plots were created using the sjPlot package in R (Lüdecke, 2021). 123450 1 2 3 4 5TimeAuthentic Pride Low Greed (−1 SD) Mean level Greed High Greed (+1 SD) 123450 1 2 3 4 5TimeHubristic Pride Low Greed (−1 SD) Mean level Greed High Greed (+1 SD) 31 Exploratory Analyses. Our theoretical model proposes that acquiring new possessions is a regulatory behavior that greedy people use to elicit desirable feelings of pride. If this is the case, greedy people with low self-esteem might be especially motivated to pursue acquisitions, because those with low self-esteem are more in need of the boosts of self-worth provided by feelings of authentic pride (Tracy & Robins, 2007). As a result, greedy individuals with low self-esteem might derive greater emotional benefits from acquisition relative to those with higher self-esteem and therefore higher baseline levels of authentic pride, resulting in a more pronounced boost in authentic pride for these individuals. These individuals might also report a more intense subsequent drop in pride, because they have further to fall to return to baseline level. To test this possibility, we added an interaction term between greed and self-esteem and a three-way interaction term between greed, self-esteem, and time, to the models for authentic and hubristic pride. For authentic pride, an interaction emerged between greed and self-esteem, β = -.09, t(370) = -1.99, p = .048, indicating that greedy people with low self-esteem experienced a more pronounced boost in authentic pride at acquisition than greedy people with high self-esteem. In other words, although greedy people and people high in self-esteem each felt greater authentic pride at acquisition than people low in greed and people low in self-esteem, respectively, these two main effects were not additive for greedy individuals with high self-esteem. Instead, greedy people with low and high self-esteem felt more similar levels of authentic pride at acquisition than what would be expected based on the two main effects alone. In contrast, for people low in greed, authentic pride at acquisition was strongly determined by self-esteem (see Figure 3). We also observed a significant three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time, β = .01, 32 t(1155) = 2.06, p = .04, indicating that greedy people with low self-esteem experienced a significantly greater decline in authentic pride after acquisition. 33 Figure 3. Three-way Interaction Between Greed, Self-Esteem and Time Predicting Authentic Pride in the Purchased Item from Acquisition to Time 5, Study 2. Note: Fans around the regression lines represent the standard error. Plots were created using the sjPlot package in R (Lüdecke, 2021). 34 A similar interaction emerged between greed and self-esteem predicting hubristic pride at acquisition, β = -.13, t(453)= -3.23, p = .001. However, we did not find a three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time for hubristic pride, β = .01, t(1148) = 1.47, p = .14. Greedy people with low self-esteem thus seem to experience a notable boost in hubristic pride from acquisitions, but these feelings do not decline any more precipitously than those of greedy people with high self-esteem. Nonetheless, all of these analyses are exploratory, and this study was not powered to test three-way interactions, so replication is needed. We therefore pre-registered this prediction in Studies 3, 4, and 5, and in Studies 4 and 5 included a much larger sample size to detect the effect. Discussion Supporting our pre-registered predictions, greedy people responded to acquisitions with elevated authentic pride that dropped soon afterward. We also found that greedy people felt elevated hubristic pride at acquisition, and these feelings also declined soon afterward. Further supporting our theoretical account, we did not observe analogous effects of greed on positive affect, pleasantness, or activation, and the effects of greed on pride held controlling for all three affective states, suggesting that feeling pride in recent acquisitions might be a critical emotional response that differentiates greedy people from those low in greed. In addition, exploratory analyses suggested that greedy people with low self-esteem experience a more extreme boost in authentic pride at acquisition and a more extreme decline afterwards, compared to greedy people with high self-esteem. This interaction suggests that greedy people with low self-esteem derive greater emotional benefits from acquisition, relative to their typical feelings about themselves, but these feelings also fade significantly faster for these greedy people compared to their counterparts with high self-esteem. A more intense boost 35 in pride might occur because individuals with low self-esteem are more in need of a pride boost than those with high self-esteem, and thus more likely to pursue acquisitions for the explicit purpose of increasing authentic pride. Given that their baseline levels of authentic pride tend to be lower than that of individuals with high self-esteem, the greater decline in authentic pride over time among these individuals might reflect that they have farther to fall on their return to baseline after the acquisition experience has ended. We also observed a more pronounced boost of hubristic pride among greedy people with low self-esteem at acquisition, but these feelings did not decline more steeply. This effect is more difficult to interpret because hubristic pride is related to low, rather than high, self-esteem, (Tracy & Robins, 2007; Tracy et al., 2009); we therefore hesitate to interpret this interaction at this time and test it again in Studies 3-5 to determine its robustness. In summary, Study 2 supports our pre-registered hypotheses using a longitudinal method that allowed us to capture changes in pride over time. However, this study relied on participants’ recollections of their emotional experiences during acquisitions that occurred up to a week prior to assessment. This limitation is unlikely to bias results, as one-week retrospective reports of emotion tend be as accurate as reports made on the same day (Parkinson et al., 1995; Robinson & Clore, 2002), but to eliminate any possibility of recollection bias Studies 3-5 used a daily-diary procedure to measure participants’ immediate emotional responses to new acquisitions on the same day they purchased them. Study 3 To avoid capturing responses to mundane, meaningless acquisitions (e.g., coffee, parking) we specified the following eligibility criteria (https://bit.ly/3AqeGRK): (1) the purchase was non-essential (i.e., something they wanted but did not need), (2) the participant bought it to 36 keep for themselves, (3) it cost at least $25, and (4) it was a material item that they planned to own for some time. We lowered the cost requirement to $25 in this study because we did not observe significant effects of cost in Studies 1 or 2 and expected to more easily recruit the required sample size if this criterion was reduced. We pre-registered the predictions that greedy people would show a boost in authentic pride in response to acquisitions, followed by a drop shortly after. We also predicted that two interactions would emerge between greed and self-esteem such that (1) greedy people with low self-esteem would report a greater boost of authentic pride at acquisition and (2) greedy people with low self-esteem would report a steeper drop in authentic pride at the later time points (https://bit.ly/3yBYpId). Given that we restricted eligible acquisitions to material items, we also measured materialism (Richins, 2004) to test whether the observed emotional dynamic is specific to greed or partly attributable to shared variance with this related disposition. Method Participants. Based on an analysis of the sample size at which correlations stabilize (Schönbrodt & Perugini, 2013), we aimed to obtain 250 data points (i.e., unique acquisitions) for analyses. Preliminary data indicated that we could expect each participant to make an average of .75 purchases that met our criteria during their time in the study, so we planned to recruit at least 335 participants.5 In total, 346 undergraduates were recruited (78% female, age range = 18-49, median = 20 years), and our final sample consisted of 269 purchases made by 183 participants (82% female, age range = 18-49, median = 20 years; cultural background = 65% Asian, 21% white, 2% Black, 2% Hispanic/Latinx, 10% prefer not to answer). The number of purchases 5 We had planned to recruit a smaller sample size when we originally pre-registered this study (https://bit.ly/3yBYpId). After running the study for several weeks, we realized that participants were less likely to make a purchase during their time in the study than we had expected, so we uploaded a pre-registration amendment with this updated planned sample size (https://bit.ly/3AqeGRK). 37 made by each participant did not vary based on greed, r(344) = .06, p = .27. Participants completed the study in exchange for course credit. Procedure. Participants first participated in a lab session in which they completed the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α = .69), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .89), and the Material Values Scale (Richins, 2004; α = .77). Each day for the following two weeks, participants received daily emails at approximately 5pm asking if they had made a purchase that met our pre-specified criteria that day. In these emails, we emphasized that the item “MUST be something you bought TODAY” and that they should not complete the survey if they did not make an eligible purchase that day. If they had made a purchase that met our criteria, they reported what the item was, its cost, and “how [the item] makes you feel RIGHT NOW” using the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (Tracy & Robins, 2007; α = .88 and α = .81, respectively), the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, et al.,1988; α = .89 and α = .82, respectively), and the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998, αPleasantness = .71 and αActivation = .16). For each acquisition, participants were emailed follow-up surveys one week later (n = 201 completed surveys, 75% of those who made purchases) and two weeks later (n = 195 completed surveys, 72% of those who made purchases), which again asked “how [the item] makes you feel RIGHT NOW” and included the same emotion measures (αsauthentic pride = .90, .92, αshubristic pride =.84, .87, αsPA = .91, .92, αsNA = .89, .89, αspleasantness = .71, .70, αsactivation = .22, .11). We ended follow-up assessments after two weeks because exploratory analyses from Study 2 revealed that greedy people’s authentic and hubristic pride did not drop significantly more over the assessments that occurred after two weeks. Greed was not significantly associated with attrition on follow-up assessments, r = .02, p = .65. 38 Results Descriptive statistics and correlations among all trait-level variables are reported in Table 5. Table 5 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 3. Participants purchased a range of items: apparel (65%), non-electronic leisure (22%), health and beauty (8%), electronics (6%), home improvements (6%), experiences (5%), and automotive (<1%). We found no significant associations between greed and making purchases within a specific category (ps > .10). The cost of purchases ranged from $25 to $1,450 with a median of $62. Data from all time points were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants, and we also included random intercepts for greed and self-esteem in each model, given that some participants made multiple purchases but have the same values for greed and self-esteem at each purchase (results are identical with or without these random intercepts included). In addition, for models that include materialism (see below), we included a random intercept for materialism, for the same reason. We conducted two linear mixed-effects models in which authentic or hubristic pride, respectively, was regressed onto greed, time, and an interaction term between greed and time, controlling for the cost of the purchase. We also added Variable Mean SD 1 2 1. Greed 3.58 0.89 — 2. Self-esteem 4.82 0.98 -.22*** — 3. Materialism 4.28 1.05 .60*** -.01 39 self-esteem, an interaction between greed and self-esteem, and a three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time to each model. These models include all participants who completed at least one follow-up survey; participants who did not complete either follow-up were removed using listwise deletion. In contrast to results from Studies 1 and 2 and our pre-registered hypothesis, we did not observe a main effect of greed on authentic pride at acquisition, nor a significant interaction between greed and time (see Table 6). However, consistent with Study 1 and our pre-registered hypothesis, an interaction emerged between greed and self-esteem at acquisition, indicating that greedy people with low self-esteem experienced a greater boost in authentic pride at acquisition compared to greedy people with high self-esteem. We also observed a significant three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time, indicating that greedy people with low self-esteem experienced a significantly greater decline in authentic pride after acquisition compared to greedy people with high self-esteem. Both the interaction between greed and self-esteem at acquisition, and the three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time, remained significant controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. As in Studies 1 and 2, we conducted the same analyses but treating positive affect as the response variable, and we did not observe significant interactions between greed and self-esteem predicting a boost or drop in positive affect (see Table 6). We next added materialism and an interaction between materialism and time to the model. We did not observe a significant effect of materialism on authentic pride at acquisition, β = .16, t(454) = 1.51, p = .13, nor a significant interaction between materialism and time, β = .01, t(509) = 0.24, p = .81. 40 Table 6. Mixed-Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 3. Notes: For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .30 3.01 .004 [.10, .50] .22 2.35 .02 [.03, .41] .55 6.30 <.001 [.38, .72] Greed .04 (-.04) 0.41 (-0.70) .68 (.49) [-.15, .23] ([-.14, .07]) .18 (.12) 1.95 (1.51) .054 (.13) [-.004, .36] ([-.04, .28]) .10 (.07) 1.13 (1.38) .26 (.17) [-.07, .27] ([-.03, .16]) Self-Esteem .18 2.22 .03 [.02, .35] -.01 -0.10 .92 [-.17, .16] .12 1.49 .14 [-.04, .28] Cost .02 0.72 .47 [-.04, .09] .05 1.37 .17 [-.02, .12] .02 0.72 .47 [-.04, .09] Greed x Self-Esteem interaction -.18 (-.12) -2.33 (2.83) .02 (.005) [-.32, -.03] ([-.20, -.04]) .03 (.05) 0.35 (0.79) .73 (.43) [-.13, .17] ([-.09, .18]) -.05 (.08) -0.75 (1.94) .45 (.053) [-.19, .09] ([-.0003, .16]) Time -.14 -4.63 <.001 [-.20, -.08] -.10 -3.20 .001 [-.16, -.04] -.26 -9.11 <.001 [-.32, -.21] Greed x Time interaction -.001 (.03) -0.05 (1.79) .96 (.07) [-.06, .06] ([-.003, .07]) -.005 (.01) -0.15 (0.28) .88 (.78) [-.07, .06] ([-.05, .07]) -.04 (-.04) -1.30 (-1.86) .20 (.06) [-.09, .02] ([-.07, .002]) Greed x Self-Esteem x Time interaction .07 (.04) 2.53 (2.41) .01 (.02) [.01, .12] ([.01, .07]) -.02 (-.03) -0.75 (-0.99) .45 (.32) [-.07, .03] ([-.08, .02]) .02 (-.03) 0.86 (-1.72) .39 (.09) [-.03, .07] ([-.07, .004]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .29 3.23 <.001 [.11, .46] .51 5.72 <.001 [.34, .68] .28 2.94 .003 [.09, .46] Greed .08 (.02) 0.93 (0.30) .35 (.77) [-.08, .25] ([-.13, .18]) .02 (-.01) 0.26 (-0.11) .80 (.91) [-.15, .20] ([-.14, .15]) .01 (-.003) 0.15 (-0.03) .88 (.98) [-.17, .20] ([-.17, .19]) Self-Esteem -.18 -2.07 .04 [-.35, -.01] .18 1.99 .047 [.004, .35] .06 0.65 .52 [-.12, .25] Cost .09 2.47 .01 [.02, .15] .01 0.21 .83 [-.07, .08] .05 1.21 .23 [-.03, .13] Greed x Self-Esteem Interaction .04 (.03) 0.60 (0.41) .55 (.69) [-.11, .17] ([-.10, .16]) -.08 (.04) -1.12 (0.62) .26 (.54) [-.23, .06] ([-.09, .16]) -.08 (-.01) -0.99 (-0.16) .32 (.87) [-.23, .08] ([-.16, .14]) Time -.13 -4.02 <.001 [-.20, -.07] -.26 -7.16 <.001 [-.33, -.19] -.15 -3.73 <.001 [-.24, -.07] Greed x Time Interaction .02 (.03) 0.73 (0.81) .47 (.42) [-.04, .09] ([-.04, .09]) -.05 (-.05) -1.41 (-1.73) .16 (.08) [-.12, .02] ([-.11, .01]) -.03 (-.02) -0.60 (-0.62) .55 (.54) [-.11, .06] ([-.10, .05]) Greed x Self-Esteem x Time Interaction -.02 (-.02) -0.81 (-0.62) .42 (.54) [-.08, .03] ([-.07, .04]) .05 (.01) 1.70 (0.51) .09 (.61) [-.01, .11] ([-.04, .06]) .01 (-.01) 0.32 (-0.28) .75 (.78) [-.06, .08] ([-.08, .06]) 41 In contrast to Studies 1 and 2, greedy people did not feel significantly greater hubristic pride in their purchases at acquisition than less greedy people, and this effect remained non-significant after controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. We also observed no significant interaction between greed and time on hubristic pride, indicating that greedy people’s hubristic pride in their purchase did not decline significantly more than less greedy people’s did. We also did not observe an interaction between greed and self-esteem predicting hubristic pride at acquisition, nor a three-way interaction with greed, self-esteem, and time. We next added materialism and an interaction between materialism and time to the model. No significant effect of materialism emerged on hubristic pride, β = .11, t(468) = 1.10, p = .27, nor was there a significant interaction between materialism and time, β = .01, t(512) = 0.29, p = .77. Discussion In contrast to the results of Studies 1 and 2, Study 3 did not find a boost in authentic or hubristic pride in response to new acquisitions, or a sharper decline in either facet of pride over time, among greedy people. However, the expected effects on authentic pride did emerge for greedy people low in self-esteem, as predicted in our preregistration and observed in Study 2. The absence of main effects in Study 3 may be due to the fact that its undergraduate sample reported significantly lower levels of authentic, M = 2.20, SD = 0.82, and hubristic pride, M = 1.28, SD = 0.41, in their new acquisitions, compared to Study 2’s adult sample, MAuthentic Pride = 2.97, SD = 1.04, t = -9.95, d = 0.82, p < .001; MHubristic Pride = 1.50, SD = 0.75, t = -4.54, d = 0.36, p < .001. This difference could be a result of weaker associations between acquisitions and one’s self-concept among undergraduates, compared to older adults. In addition, we changed the prompt in this study to ask about participants’ feelings about the item “right now”, which might have contributed to the lack of an effect because this prompt might have been interpreted more 42 literally than we expected such that participants reported how the item was making them feel at the exact moment they did the survey, which is a time they are unlikely to be engaging with the purchased item. Thus, this item might not have assessed their specific feelings about the item upon acquisition and general feelings about it in their lives afterwards. Nonetheless, the hypothesized pattern of authentic pride responses was observed for greedy individuals with low self-esteem, suggesting that for these undergraduates, new acquisitions may result in the same emotional responses as they do in greedy adults. As for hubristic pride, the very low mean level observed here might have prevented us from capturing a decline after acquisition, due to a floor effect. Alternatively, the decline in hubristic pride observed in Study 2 might be spurious, as it was unpredicted and not observed in Study 1. It is noteworthy that although this study did not replicate the main effect of greed on authentic pride in acquisitions, it did replicate the predicted interactions between greed and self-esteem on authentic pride at acquisition and after owning the item for some time. Overall, Studies 1, 2, and 3 suggest that greedy individuals respond to new acquisitions with bursts of authentic pride that decline soon after, but in some samples this pattern is more pronounced or only apparent among greedy individuals with low self-esteem. While there is some evidence that greedy individuals also experience a boost in hubristic pride, it remains unclear whether this boost is unique to acquisition experiences, or symptomatic of a broader tendency to feel greater hubristic pride across situations. Given the inconsistency between the results of Studies 2 and 3, Studies 4 and 5 were designed to accumulate more evidence about greedy people’s emotional reactions to acquisitions with larger and therefore more highly powered samples of adults (Study 4) and undergraduates (Study 5). 43 Study 4 In Study 4, we pre-registered three predictions (https://bit.ly/3ye7Hsw), aimed at replicating the key results that had emerged in the prior studies: (1) greedy people will feel a short-lived boost of authentic pride in response to acquisitions, (2) this boost in authentic pride will hold controlling for positive affect, and (3) the boost and drop in authentic pride will be moderated by self-esteem, such that greedy people with low self-esteem report a more intense boost in authentic pride at acquisition and a steeper drop thereafter. This study also addressed another question in an exploratory manner: Are greedy people’s emotional responses to acquisitions unique to acquisition, or might they occur more broadly to other kinds of events that are also likely to elicit pride, such as making progress towards a personal goal? To do so, we asked participants to indicate whether they engaged in various other activities, including achievements that tend to elicit pride across individuals, in each daily survey. We did not pre-register predictions about these analyses, so report them as Exploratory Analyses below. Method Participants. To calculate sample size, we used the InteractionPoweR package in R (Baranger et al., 2021). We aimed to obtain 80% power to detect an interaction between greed and self-esteem on the decline in authentic pride since acquisition of size r = -.10 at the final timepoint in this study. We determined this effect size based on the results of Studies 2 and 3. This power analysis suggested a sample size of 700 participants at the final assessment, so we aimed to recruit 1000 participants who made a purchase during their time in the study, to prepare for attrition by the final assessment. In total, 3580 American participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk completed the initial survey and were emailed daily surveys for the 44 following week, and 1082 of these participants went on to make a purchase during that week. Of the 1082 participants who made purchases, 897 participants completed all assessments (83% of those who made purchases; 67% female, age range = 18-84, median = 36; cultural background = 72% white, 10% Black, 8% Asian, 7% Hispanic/Latinx, 3% prefer not to answer). Participants were paid $0.25 for Part 1, an additional $0.25 for each daily survey, and $0.50 for each follow-up survey about purchases made during the week of the study. Procedure. Participants began the study by completing the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α = .83), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .93), and the Material Values Scale (Richins, 2004; α = .87). Participants also reported their trait-level proneness to authentic and hubristic pride (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αAuthentic Pride = .93; αHubristic Pride = .91), positive and negative affect (Watson et al., 1988; αPA = .91; αNA = .92), and pleasantness (Feldman-Barrett & Russell; α = .88) by reporting how often they feel each of these emotions in general in their daily life. We omitted the measure of activation from this study due to low reliability in the prior studies. Beginning the following day, participants were emailed surveys every evening for the next week around 5pm PST that asked them to indicate each activity they participated in that day from a list of nine activities (see materials for the full list: bit.ly/3Si0KA1). The focal activity was “made a non-essential purchase for yourself (i.e., something that you wanted but did not need) that cost $50 or more”, but participants also indicated whether they engaged in other common activities such as “made progress on a professional/academic goal, or achieved success on a professional/academic goal”, “got in a fight/disagreement with someone”, and “spent time with friends and/or family”. We raised the cost requirement to $50 in this study because we were concerned that lowering it to $25 in Study 3 might have contributed to the absence of a 45 significant effect of greed on authentic pride in that study. We opted not to raise it to $100—where it was set in Study 2—to better enable the recruitment of a large enough sample to test Study 4’s predicted three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time. If participants indicated that they made a non-essential purchase that day, they were directed to a questionnaire where they reported the purchased item, its cost, and their emotions about the item upon acquisition using the same measures as in Study 2 (αAuthentic pride = .91, αHubristic pride =.90, αPA = .91, αNA = .88, αPleasantness = .76). If they did not indicate making a non-essential purchase, they reported their general emotional state that day (αauthentic pride = .94, αhubristic pride =.88, αPA = .93, αNA = .91, αpleasantness = .88). All participants who indicated making a purchase were sent follow-up surveys one week and two weeks later that asked them to report their current feelings about the purchased item (αsauthentic pride = .95, .95, αshubristic pride =.89, .91, αsPA = .95, .96, αsNA = .89, .92, αspleasantness = .77, .77). Greed was not significantly associated with attrition on follow-up assessments, r = .01, p = .46. Results Descriptive statistics and correlations among all trait-level variables are reported in Table 7. 46 Table 7 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 4. **p < .01 ***p < .001 Participants purchased a range of items: apparel (28%), experiences (20%), electronics (17%), home improvements (15%), non-electronic leisure (9%), health and beauty (7%), and automotive (1%); the remaining 3% of purchases did not fit into any of these categories or were not clearly indicated by participants. In contrast to past studies, we found that greedy people were less likely to purchase non-electronic leisure items in this study, β = -.30, t(966) = -2.39, p = .02. The cost of purchases ranged from $50 to $6,500 with a median of $72. Data from all time points were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We conducted two linear mixed-effects models in which authentic or hubristic pride, respectively, was regressed onto greed, time, and an interaction term between greed and time, controlling for the cost of the purchase. To test for self-esteem moderation, we Variable Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1. Greed 3.30 1.20 — 2. Self-esteem 4.84 1.34 -.26*** — 3. Materialism 3.79 1.20 .74*** -.29*** — 4. Trait-level Authentic Pride 2.88 0.97 -.07*** .76*** -.16*** — 5. Trait-level Hubristic Pride 1.35 0.60 .43*** -.14*** .32** .14*** — 6. Trait-level Positive Affect 3.05 0.83 -.05** .63*** -.09*** .85*** .15*** — 7. Trait-level Negative Affect 1.87 0.80 .29*** -.65*** .29*** -.42*** .43*** -.30*** — 8. Trait-level Pleasantness 3.53 0.88 -.22*** .79*** -.27*** .77*** -.14*** .66*** -.71*** 47 also added self-esteem, an interaction between greed and self-esteem, and a three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time to each model. In each model, we included a random intercept for participant and a random slope of greed. These models include all participants who completed at least one follow-up survey; participants who did not complete either follow-up were removed using listwise deletion. Replicating Studies 1 and 2 and supporting our pre-registered hypotheses, greedy people experienced a boost of authentic pride at acquisition, and these feelings faded significantly more over the following two weeks compared to people low in greed (see Table 8). In addition, both of these effects held controlling for positive affect and pleasantness. We conducted the same analyses but treating positive affect as the response variable, and, after controlling for authentic pride, we did not observe a significant main effect of greed on positive affect or an interaction between greed and time predicting a decline in positive affect (see Table 8). However, in contrast to our pre-registered hypotheses, we did not observe interactions with self-esteem for either the boost or the drop in authentic pride. We next added materialism and an interaction between materialism and time to the model. No effect of materialism emerged on authentic pride at acquisition, β = .06, t(1178) = 1.19, p = .23, nor was there a significant interaction between materialism and time, β = -.005, t(1380) = -0.21, p = .83. We also found that greedy people felt significantly greater hubristic pride in their purchases at acquisition than less greedy people. However, no interaction emerged between greed and time, indicating that greedy people’s hubristic pride in their purchases did not decline significantly more than less greedy people’s. The effect of greed on hubristic pride at acquisition was robust to controlling for positive affect and pleasantness. We next added materialism and an interaction between materialism and time to the model. There was no effect of materialism on 48 hubristic pride, β = .03, t(1255) = 0.80, p = .42, nor a significant interaction between materialism and time, β = .001, t(1452) = 0.06, p = .95. 49 Table 8. Mixed Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 4. Notes: For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect and pleasantness, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .07 2.20 .03 [.01, .13] .002 0.07 .95 [-.06, .06] .13 3.97 <.001 [.06, .19] Greed .13 (.05) 4.03 (3.54) <.001 (<.001) [.07, .20] ([.02, .08]) .19 (.18) 6.48 (6.48) <.001 (<.001) [.13, .24] ([.13, .23]) .10 (-.02) 2.87 (-1.03) .004 (.30) [.03, .16] ([-.05, .02]) Self-Esteem .33 10.36 <.001 [.27, .39] -.06 -1.96 .051 [-.12, .0004] .25 7.86 <.001 [.19, .32] Cost .10 3.73 <.001 [.05, .16] .03 0.19 .85 [-.03, .03] .09 3.25 .001 [.04, .14] Greed x Self-Esteem interaction -.03 (.01) -0.85 (0.70) .39 (.49) [-.09, .03] ([-.02, .04]) -.02 (-.02) -0.70 (-0.74) .48 (.46) [-.07, .03] ([-.07, .03]) -.04 (-.02) -1.45 (-1.57) .15 (.12) [-.10, .02] ([-.05, .01]) Time -.08 -5.52 <.001 [-.11, -.05] -.02 -1.34 .18 [-.05, .01] -.16 -10.68 <.001 [-.19, -.13] Greed x Time interaction -.04 (-.02) -2.29 (-2.22) .02 (.03) [-.07, -.01] ([-.04, -.002]) -.005 (-.005) -0.37 (-0.36) .71 (.72) [-.03, .02] ([-.03, .02]) -.02 (.01) -1.01 (1.57) .31 (.12) [-.05, .01] ([-.004, .03]) Greed x Self-Esteem x Time interaction .01 (.01) 0.65 (1.07) .51 (.29) [-.02, .03] ([-.01, .02]) -.001 (-.003) -0.11 (-0.22) .91 (.83) [-.03, .02] ([-.03, .02]) .002 (-.005) 0.16 (-0.58) .88 (.56) [-.02, .03] ([-.02, .01]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .06 1.79 .07 [-.01, .12] .18 5.68 <.001 [.12, .24] Greed .09 (-.003) 2.45 (-0.10) .01 (.92) [.02, .16] ([-.07, .06]) .05 (-.04) 1.58 (-1.71) .11 (.09) [-.01, .12] ([-.09, .01]) Self-Esteem -.30 -9.30 <.001 [-.36, -.24] .31 9.80 <.001 [.25, .37] Cost .01 0.74 .46 [-.02, .05] .05 1.99 .048 [.001, .10] Greed x Self-Esteem Interaction -.03 (-.02) -0.87 (-0.67) .38 (.51) [-.09, .04] ([-.08, .04]) -.01 (.002) -0.46 (0.07) .64 (.94) [-.07, .04] ([-.04, .05]) Time -.09 -4.82 <.001 [-.12, -.05] -.22 -11.69 <.001 [-.25, -.18] Greed x Time Interaction .005 (.006) 0.25 (0.33) .80 (.74) [-.03, .04] ([-.03, .04]) -.03 (-.007) -1.66 (-0.46) .10 (.64) [-.07, .01] ([-.04, .02]) Greed x Self-Esteem x Time Interaction -.01 (-.01) -0.46 (-.38) .65 (.71) [-.04, .02] ([-.04, .02]) -.01 (-.01) -0.54 (-1.11) .59 (.27) [-.04, .02] ([-.04, .01]) 50 Exploratory Analyses. We next sought to determine the specificity of greedy people’s pride responses to acquisitions by comparing their emotional responses to purchases to their emotional responses to another pride-eliciting activity: goal progress. Recall that participants had been asked on each daily assessment to not only report on any acquisitions they had made, but also several other common activities, including making progress towards a professional or academic goal. This design feature allowed us to determine whether both acquisitions and goal progress were associated with within-person boosts in authentic and hubristic pride, relative to participants’ personal average level of each facet of pride. By testing this possibility for both purchases and goal progress, we can distinguish whether greedy people’s boost in pride in response to purchases is specific to acquisitions or better reflects a general response tendency among greedy people to any event likely to elicit pride. We began by conducting a regression model in which person-centered authentic pride was regressed onto greed, a binary variable indicating whether participants made a purchase that day or not, and an interaction between greed and this binary variable. We also included a random intercept for participant and a random slope for greed. Results revealed a significant main effect of making a purchase, β = -.22, t(7945) = -4.57, p < .001, indicating that participants generally felt lower-than-average authentic pride on days when they made a non-essential purchase compared to days when they did not. We also found a significant interaction, β = .24, t(7945) = 5.11, p < .001. Decomposing this interaction indicated that, consistent with our prior results, compared to people low in greed, greedy people felt significantly greater authentic pride, relative to their personal average, on days when they made a purchase, β = .23, t(7945) = 4.98, p < .001. In contrast, on days when participants did not make a non-essential purchase, there was 51 no difference in person-centered authentic pride based on greed, β = -.01, t(7945) = -1.14, p = .25 (see Figure 4). We next repeated this same model for goal progress. We found a main effect of goal progress, β = .37, t(7823) = 15.29, p < .001, indicating that participants, in general, felt greater-than-average authentic pride on days when they made progress towards a goal compared to days when they did not. However, we did not find a significant effect of greed, β = .005, t(7823) = 0.38, p = .70, indicating that greedy people did not experience a distinctive boost in authentic pride on days when they made progress towards a goal. There also was no interaction, β = -.03, t(7823) = -1.40, p = .16, indicating no difference in authentic pride based on greed on days when participants did vs. did not make progress towards a goal (see Figure 4). 52 Figure 4. Left: Interaction Showing the Relationship Between Greed and Person-Centered Authentic Pride on Days When Participants Made Non-Essential Purchases Compared to Days When They Did Not. Right: Same Interaction for Days of Goal Progress, Study 3. Notes: Fans around regression lines represent the standard error. Plots were created using the sjPlot package in R (Lüdecke, 2021). −0.50.00.52 4 6GreedAuthentic Pride (Person−mean centered) No purchase Purchase −0.50.00.52 4 6Greed No Goal ProgressGoal Progress 53 Overall, these analyses suggest that making a non-essential purchase is a distinctive way in which greedy people can elicit elevated feelings of authentic pride, compared to their average feelings, and this does not occur for people low in greed. Indeed, a main effect of acquisitions on authentic pride indicated a general tendency to feel lower-than-average authentic pride in response to acquisition, but greedy people showed the opposite pattern. In contrast, greedy people showed authentic pride responses to goal progress that were not significantly different from people low in greed; we observed a general tendency for participants to feel greater authentic pride on days when they made goal progress compared to days when they did not. These results further support our theoretical proposal that greedy people’s tendency to feel short-lived boosts of authentic pride in response to acquisitions is a distinct emotional process underpinning their chronic and insatiable desire to acquire. We next repeated these analyses for hubristic pride, beginning with the model for acquisitions. In contrast to what was observed for authentic pride, we did not find a main effect of greed, β = -.005, t(7945) = -0.41, p = .69, nor an interaction, β = .05, t(7945) = 1.23, p = .22, indicating that greedy people did not deviate from their personal average level of hubristic pride on days when they made purchases, and this same pattern was observed for days when they did not make purchases. Likewise, in the model for goal progress, we again found a null main effect of greed, β = -.01, t(7823) = -0.74, p = .46, and no interaction, β = .03, t(7823) = 1.20, p = .23. As a result, these analyses suggest that neither purchases nor goal progress provide greedy people with boosts in hubristic pride relative to their average feelings. The elevated, and seemingly durable, hubristic pride that greedy people reported about their acquisitions, across studies, therefore does not seem to represent a distinctive emotional response to acquisition. Discussion 54 In summary, these results further support the notion that the dynamic shifts in authentic pride observed in these studies is the emotional process that likely drives greedy acquisition, and what was observed for hubristic pride better represents a stable emotional tendency. This conclusion is consistent with research demonstrating that greed shares a conceptual core with other “dark traits” like narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (Moshagen et al., 2018), all of which are positively associated with trait-level hubristic pride (Mercadante & Tracy, 2022). Study 5 Study 5 was a direct replication of Study 4 with an undergraduate sample with one additional follow-up survey sent four weeks after the date of purchase. We included this additional assessment because Study 3 showed no evidence of a drop in authentic pride over time among greedy undergraduates, and we thought it possible that we failed to find this effect because we did not allow enough time to elapse for a drop to occur. Given that it is essentially a direct replication, we did not write a new pre-registration because the methods and predictions are identical to those of Study 4. Method Participants. One thousand five hundred eighty four participants completed the initial intake survey and were emailed daily surveys for the following week (80.6% women; age range = 15 – 69, median = 20; cultural background was reported as a free response in this study— the five most popular responses were Chinese (15%), white (15%), East Asian (9%), Asian (8%), and South Asian (6%).). Of these participants, 710 went on to make a purchase during that week; 551 of these participants completed the one-week follow-up (77.6% response rate), 562 completed the two-week follow-up (79.2% response rate), and 493 completed the four-week 55 follow-up survey (69.4% of the sample). Participants completed the study in exchange for course credit. Procedure. The procedure of Study 5 was identical to Study 4 with the addition of one more follow-up survey four weeks after the date of the purchase. Reliability was high for all trait-level assessments during the initial survey: αDispositional Greed = .72, αSelf-Esteem = .90, αMaterialism = .80, αAuthentic Pride = .90; αHubristic Pride = .85, αPA = .87; αNA = .87, αPleasantness = .82. Reliability was also high for all emotions measured at the state-level in the daily survey and follow-up surveys (αAuthentic Pride = .89 - 93; αHubristic Pride = .82-90, αPA = .89-94; αNA = .85-91, αPleasantness = .72-.76). Greed was not significantly associated with attrition on follow-up assessments, r = .08, p = .08. Results Descriptive statistics and correlations among all trait-level variables are reported in Table 9. 56 Table 9 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 5. *p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001 Participants purchased a range of items: experiences (39%), apparel (37%), electronics (6%), home improvements (6%), non-electronic leisure (6%), health and beauty (6%); three purchases were not clearly indicated by participants. Consistent with Studies 1-3, we found no significant associations between greed and making purchases within a specific category (ps > .09). The cost of purchases ranged from $50 to $6,500 with a median of $72. Data from all time points were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We conducted two linear mixed-effects models in which authentic or hubristic pride, respectively, was regressed onto greed, time, and an interaction term between greed and time, controlling for the cost of the purchase (see Table 10). To test for self-esteem moderation, we also added self-esteem, an interaction between greed and self-esteem, and a Variable Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1. Greed 3.59 0.99 — 2. Self-esteem 4.41 1.13 -.22*** — 3. Materialism 3.97 1.00 .65*** -.12*** — 4. Trait-level Authentic Pride 2.76 0.77 -.15*** .77*** -.06* — 5. Trait-level Hubristic Pride 1.61 0.61 .40*** -.02 .31** .14*** — 6. Trait-level Positive Affect 3.00 0.69 -.12*** .56*** -.06* .79*** .16*** — 7. Trait-level Negative Affect 2.32 0.70 .22*** -.55*** .16*** -.34*** .37*** -.12*** — 8. Trait-level Pleasantness 3.44 0.71 -.22*** .73*** -.15*** .70*** -.11*** .54*** -.60*** 57 three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time to each model. In each model, we included a random intercept for participant and a random slope of greed. These models include all participants who completed at least one follow-up survey; participants who did not complete either follow-up were removed using listwise deletion. Replicating prior studies, greedy people experienced a boost of authentic pride at acquisition, and these feelings faded significantly more over the following four weeks compared to people low in greed (see Table 10). However, unlike prior studies, neither of these effects held controlling for positive affect and pleasantness. We found an identical pattern of results for positive affect, such that there was evidence of a boost and drop that did not hold controlling for authentic pride. Consistent with Study 4, but in contrast to Study 3 and our pre-registered hypothesis, we did not observe significant interactions between greed and self-esteem predicting either a boost or drop of authentic pride, but we did find the interaction for the boost after controlling for positive affect and pleasantness. We next added materialism and an interaction between materialism and time to the model. Results revealed a significant effect of materialism on authentic pride at acquisition, β = .14, t(1080) = 2.28, p = .02, and a significant interaction between materialism and time, β = -.04, t(1216) = -2.71, p = .007. That said, neither of these effects held controlling for positive affect and pleasantness (βBoost = .05, t(1401) = 1.47, p = .14; βDrop = .05, t(1401) = 1.47, p = .14). 58 Table 10. Mixed Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 5. Notes: For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect and pleasantness, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .23 4.89 <.001 [.14, .32] .08 1.55 .12 [-.02, .17] .40 8.57 <.001 [.31, .50] Greed .12 (.03) 2.37 (1.18) .02 (.24) [.02, .21] ([-.02, .08]) .23 (.23) 4.69 (4.96) <.001 (<.001) [.14, .33] ([.14, .33]) .11 (.01) 2.12 (0.46) .03 (.64) [.01, .21] ([-.04, .07]) Self-Esteem .28 5.90 <.001 [.19, .38] .02 0.32 .75 [-.08, .12] .19 3.96 <.001 [.10, .28] Cost .04 1.13 .26 [-.03, .12] .05 1.10 .27 [-.04, .15] .06 1.63 .11 [-.01, .14] Greed x Self-Esteem interaction -.06 (-.05) -1.37 (-2.20) .17 (.03) [-.16, .03] ([-.10, -.01]) -.05 (.04) 1.01 (1.01) .31 (.31) [-.04, .14] ([-.04, .13]) -.01 (.04) -0.28 (1.59) .78 (.11) [-.11, .08] ([-.01, .07]) Time -.11 -9.07 <.001 [-.14, -.09] -.04 -2.68 .007 [-.06, -.01] -.19 -14.70 <.001 [-.21, -.16] Greed x Time interaction -.03 (-.001) -2.43 (-0.16) .02 (.87) [-.06, -.006] ([-.02, .02]) -.03 (-.03) -1.95 (-1.89) .051 (.06) [-.05, .00] ([-.05, .001]) -.03 (-.01) -2.47 (-1.00) .01 (.32) [-.06, -.01] ([-.02, .01]) Greed x Self-Esteem x Time interaction .01 (.01) 1.18 (1.67) .24 (.10) [-.001, .04] ([-.002, .03]) -.001 (.005) -0.06 (0.40) .96 (.69) [-.03, .03] ([-.02, .03]) -.001 (-.01) -0.08 (-1.52) .94 (.13) [-.02, .02] ([-.03, .004]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .27 5.54 <.001 [.18, .37] .51 9.51 <.001 [.40, .62] Greed .0002 (-.09) 0.004 (-1.94) >.99 (.053) [-.10, .10] ([-.19, .00]) -.03 (-.07) -0.61 (-1.47) .54 (.14) [-.14, .07] ([-.17, .02]) Self-Esteem -.16 -3.12 .002 [-.26, -.06] .20 3.62 <.001 [.09, .30] Cost .001 0.02 .98 [-.08, .08] .01 0.42 .67 [-.05, .07] Greed x Self-Esteem Interaction -.001 (-.02) -0.01 (-0.37) .99 (.71) [-.10, .10] ([-.10, .07]) .02 (.04) 0.40 (0.95) .69 (.34) [-.08, .12] ([-.05, .14]) Time -.12 -7.96 <.001 [-.14, -.09] -.22 -11.96 <.001 [-.26, -.19] Greed x Time Interaction .02 (.03) 1.64 (2.35) .10 (.02) [-.005, .05] ([.01, .06]) -.02 (-.01) -0.89 (-0.73) .37 (.47) [-.05, .02] ([-.05, .02]) Greed x Self-Esteem x Time Interaction -.01 (-.01) -0.67 (-0.68) .50 (.50) [-.04, .02] ([-.04, .02]) -.03 (-.03) -1.51 (-1.83) .13 (.07) [-.06, .01] ([-.06, .002]) 59 Consistent with past studies, we also found that greedy people felt significantly greater hubristic pride in their purchases at acquisition than less greedy people. We also found a marginally significant interaction between greed and time, tentatively suggesting that greedy people’s hubristic pride in their purchases declined significantly more than less greedy people’s over the subsequent four weeks. The effect of greed on hubristic pride at acquisition was robust to controlling for positive affect and pleasantness, and the interaction between greed and time remained marginally significant with these controls. We next added materialism and an interaction between materialism and time to the model. There was no effect of materialism on hubristic pride, β = .08, t(1124) = 1.43, p = .25, nor a significant interaction between materialism and time, β = -.01, t(1233) = -0.63, p = .53. Exploratory Analyses. We next sought to replicate the exploratory analyses reported in Study 4 wherein we compared greedy people’s emotional responses to purchases to their emotional responses to goal progress. We began by conducting a regression model in which person-centered authentic pride was regressed onto greed, a binary variable indicating whether participants made a purchase that day or not, and an interaction between greed and this binary variable. We also included a random intercept for participant and a random slope for greed. Results revealed a significant main effect of making a purchase, β = -.48, t(4402) = -8.02, p < .001, indicating that participants generally felt lower-than-average authentic pride on days when they made a non-essential purchase compared to days when they did not. We also found a significant interaction, β = .27, t(4402) = 4.77, p < .001. Decomposing this interaction indicated that, consistent with our prior results, compared to people low in greed, greedy people felt significantly greater authentic pride, relative to their personal average, on days when they made a purchase, β = .25, t(4402) = 4.63, p < .001. In contrast, on days when participants did not make 60 a non-essential purchase, there was no difference in person-centered authentic pride based on greed, β = -.02, t(4402) = -1.21, p = .23. We next repeated this same model for goal progress. We found a main effect of goal progress, β = .50, t(4349) = 15.49, p < .001, indicating that participants, in general, felt greater-than-average authentic pride on days when they made progress towards a goal compared to days when they did not. However, we did not find a significant effect of greed, β = .01, t(4349) = 0.26, p = .80, indicating that greedy people did not experience a distinctive boost in authentic pride on days when they made progress towards a goal. There also was no interaction, β = .02, t(4349) = 0.48, p = .63, indicating no difference in authentic pride based on greed on days when participants did vs. did not make progress towards a goal. Thus, these analyses directly replicate Study 4; together, these studies suggest that making a non-essential purchase is a distinctive way in which greedy people can elicit elevated feelings of authentic pride, compared to their average feelings, whereas making progress towards personal goals does not provide a unique avenue to authentic pride for greedy people. We next repeated these analyses for hubristic pride, beginning with the model for acquisitions. In contrast to what was observed for authentic pride, we did not find a main effect of greed, β = .01, t(4402) = 0.33, p = .74, nor an interaction, β = -.05, t(4402) = -0.85, p = .39, indicating that greedy people did not deviate from their personal average level of hubristic pride on days when they made purchases, and this same pattern was observed for days when they did not make purchases. Likewise, in the model for goal progress, we again found a null main effect of greed, β = -.002, t(4349) = -0.07, p = .94, and no interaction, β = .01, t(4349) = 0.34, p = .73. As a result, these analyses suggest that neither purchases nor goal progress provide greedy people with boosts in hubristic pride relative to their average feelings. The elevated, and 61 seemingly durable, hubristic pride that greedy people reported about their acquisitions, across studies, therefore does not seem to represent a distinctive emotional response to acquisition. Taken together with the results of Study 4, these results further support the notion that the dynamic shifts in authentic pride observed in these studies is the emotional process that likely drives greedy acquisition, and what was observed for hubristic pride better represents a stable emotional tendency. Chapter Summary Five studies investigated greedy people’s emotional responses to new acquisitions. Across studies, we found that people high in greed felt a boost of authentic pride in response to new acquisitions, and these feelings faded shortly afterwards, consistent with pre-registered hypotheses derived from our theoretical model. Given that we observed some heterogeneity in the results across Studies 1-5, we conducted internal meta-analyses across all five studies (see Figure 5). These showed significant evidence for both the boost, β = .17, 95% CI = [.08, .26], and drop, β = -.04, 95% CI = [-.05, -.02], in authentic pride across studies. The effect size of the boost corresponds to a medium-sized effect in individual-differences research, whereas the size of the drop is quite small for this area of research (Gignac & Szodorai, 2016). We next conducted these same meta-analyses for the boost and drop in hubristic pride. These also showed significant evidence for both a boost, β = .22, 95% CI = [.18, .26], and drop, β = -.02, 95% CI = [-.04, -.01], in hubristic pride. That said, despite the significant effects we believe that the interpretation of these results requires greater caution than the corresponding meta-analytic estimates for authentic pride for several reasons. Most notably, the significant drop in hubristic pride that emerged in Study 2 was the result of an exploratory (i.e., not pre-registered) analysis, and was not replicated in any other study, nor did we ever pre-register the 62 prediction that this effect would emerge. Furthermore, there is also reason to be skeptical about the meta-analytic boost in hubristic pride because greedy people show a stronger dispositional proneness to hubristic pride across situations. In Studies 4 and 5, greedy people were found to be dispositionally lower in authentic pride (rs = -.07, -.15, respectively; ps < .001), and higher in hubristic pride (rs = .43, .40, respectively; ps < .001) compared to those low in greed. The boost of authentic pride these individuals experience upon acquisition is therefore particularly noteworthy, because this effect works against their general tendency to feel less authentic pride than people low in greed. In contrast, the boost in hubristic pride is partly driven by greedy people’s elevated proneness to hubristic pride, such that the true effect size is likely to be considerably smaller than what is calculated by the meta-analysis. Supporting this expectation, controlling for trait hubristic pride in Study 4 decreased the magnitude of the effect of greed on hubristic pride at acquisition by almost half (β = .19 to β = .12), and doing the same in Study 5 decreased the magnitude of this effect by over half (β = .23 to β = .11). Figure 5 Internal Meta-Analyses of the Relationships between Greed and the Boost and Drop in Authentic and Hubristic Pride, Studies 1-5. Study 1Study 2Study 3Study 4Study 5Boost in Authentic Pride−0.1 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4Standardized BetaStudy 1Study 2Study 3Study 4Study 5Drop in Authentic Pride−0.2 −0.1 0.0Standardized BetaStudy 1Study 2Study 3Study 4Study 5Boost in Hubristic Pride0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5Standardized BetaStudy 1Study 2Study 3Study 4Study 5Drop in Hubristic Pride−0.3 −0.2 −0.1 0.0 0.1Standardized Beta In addition, follow-up exploratory analyses from Studies 4 and 5 support the notion that authentic pride is the more distinctive response to acquisition among greedy people. Specifically, we observed a within-person boost in authentic pride among greedy people on days they made purchases, such that they felt significantly greater authentic pride on those days compared to their personal average; this effect did not emerge for people low in greed. In contrast, on days when participants made progress toward an important goal, another pride-eliciting event, there was no distinctive boost in authentic pride among those high in greed. There was also no specific within-person boost in hubristic pride among greedy people in response to acquisitions or goal progress. These findings suggest that greedy people tend to feel elevated authentic pride, specifically, in response to acquisitions, but not more generally. Moreover, the elevated hubristic pride greedy people report in this situation is more likely to reflect these individuals’ average emotional state. 65 Chapter 3: Is greedy acquisition driven by mistaken affective forecasting? In Chapter 3, I report two studies conducted to test whether greedy acquisition might be partly driven by mistaken affective forecasting. Given that affective forecasting is often inaccurate (Gilbert et al., 1998), one possible explanation for greedy people’s pervasive acquisitiveness is that they fail to anticipate that their pride will fade shortly after acquisition, and repeatedly seek out new purchases due to an affective forecasting deficit. Alternatively, greedy people might understand that the emotional benefits they receive from acquisitions are ephemeral in nature. If they do, it would imply that greedy people consciously seek out acquisitions to obtain a momentary boost of authentic pride even while knowing it will be short-lived. I test these alternative hypotheses in the following studies. STUDY 6 In Study 6, participants either reported their emotional response to a recent acquisition or imagined how they would feel about a future acquisition. Among participants recollecting a recent acquisition, we expected to replicate the effects found previously, such that greedy people would report elevated authentic pride at acquisition and a significant decline in authentic pride since that time. Among participants imagining a future purchase, we predicted that greedy people would anticipate elevated authentic pride at acquisition, but would not anticipate that these feelings would decline in the subsequent month. This prediction was based on our intuition that greedy people’s pervasive acquisitiveness is partly driven by deficits in affective forecasting. Regarding hubristic pride, however, we predicted that those high in greed would both recall and anticipate elevated hubristic pride both at acquisition and currently in daily life (https://bit.ly/3Lae4ok). Method 66 Participants. 350 participants were recruited from Mturk to participate in the current study. Following the criteria specified in our pre-registration, 56 participants were excluded for failing an attention check. This resulted in a final sample of 294 participants (63% female, age range = 18-74, median = 36 years; cultural background = 76% white, 10% Asian, 6% Black, 5% Hispanic/Latinx, 3% prefer not to answer). A power analysis indicated that a sample size of 302 participants would provide 80% power to detect a between-condition difference in the relationship between greed and acquisition pride of size Cohen’s q = .33.6 Procedure. Participants first completed the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α = .84) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .93). They were then randomly assigned to either a Recollection or Imagination experimental condition. In the recollection condition, participants completed the same procedure as in Study 1: they recalled a recent non-essential purchase, reported its cost and the date they acquired it, and how it made them feel at the moment of acquisition and currently in their daily lives.7 In the imagination condition, participants were asked to imagine “a substantial purchase [they] want for [themselves] that you would PLAN to make for some time before actually acquiring the item,” and were given the same examples as provided in the recollection condition, including appliances, smartphones, and clothing. They then reported the item they had in mind, estimated 6 As detailed in our pre-registration, we aimed for sufficient statistical power to detect a smaller effect size of r = .16 (q = .161), but after data were collected we learned that the power analysis we used was meant for analyses with two continuous predictors, not one continuous and one categorical predictor. Our pre-registered sample size of N = 302 therefore provided statistical power to detect a difference of q = .326 and our final sample size of N = 294 provided power to detect a difference of q = .330. 7 As in Study 1, participants in the recollection condition also reported how the purchase made them feel after they decided they wanted it but before they actually acquired it, for exploratory purposes. In the imagination condition, participants reported how they thought they would feel while anticipating making the purchase; that is, we asked participants to report how they expected to feel after deciding they wanted their imagined purchase but before actually acquiring it. 67 its cost, and anticipated how the imagined item would make them feel at the moment they acquired it as well as after owning it for two weeks and for one month. For all time points in both conditions, participants completed the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αAuthentic Pride .93-.96, αHubristic Pride = .93-.96), the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al., 1988; αPA .93-.95, αNA.87-.93), and the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998; αPleasantness = .58-.74, αActivation = .15-.42) regarding how the purchased (imagined) item made (would make) them feel. Finally, participants reported demographics before being debriefed. Results Descriptive statistics and correlations between all trait-level variables are included in Table 11. Table 11 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 6. Participants’ purchases in the recollection condition were categorized as follows: electronics (31%), apparel (30%), home improvement (20%), non-electronic leisure (7%), experiences (6%), automotive (5%), and health and beauty (2%). On average, participants purchased the item 35.3 days prior to participating in the study. Participants in the imagination condition imagined making purchases in the following categories: automotive (35%), electronics (24%), home improvement (20%), apparel (10%), non-electronic leisure (6%), experiences (4%), Variable Mean SD 1 1. Greed 3.37 1.20 — 2. Self-esteem 5.35 1.21 -.19** 68 and health and beauty (>1%). Consistent with this apparent qualitative difference between conditions, those in the imagination condition imagined significantly more expensive purchases (range = $12.25-$380,000, median = $1500) than those in the recollection condition actually purchased (range = $10-$195,000, median = $200, t(168) = -3.93, d = .46, p < .001). Greedy participants in the imagination condition imagined making significantly more expensive purchases than did less greedy individuals, r(142) = .19, p = .03, but greedy participants in the recollection condition did not actually buy more expensive items than did less greedy people, r(148) = -.09, p = .26. To test whether greedy people imagined a different emotional response pattern in the imagination condition than what actually occurred for greedy people in the recollection condition, we conducted six mixed linear effects models in which each emotion was regressed onto greed, experimental condition, timepoint (i.e., Acquisition vs. Ownership), and a three-way interaction between greed, experimental condition, and timepoint, controlling for cost and self-esteem. Results are reported below in Table 12. 69 Table 12 Mixed Linear Effects Models Comparing Imagined and Recollected Emotions, Study 6 Notes: For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .08 1.00 .32 [-.07, .23] .06 0.78 .43 [-.09, .21] .07 0.95 .34 [-.08, .23] Greed .18 (.10) 2.23 (2.73) .03 (.01) [.02, .33] ([.03, .18]) .36 (.35) 4.56 (4.57) <.001 (<.001) [.21, .52] ([.20, .50]) .09 (-.06) 1.11 (-1.36) .27 (.17) [-.07, .25] ([-.13, .02]) Self-Esteem .28 5.22 <.001 [.17, .38] -.04 -0.79 .43 [-.15, .06] .24 4.40 <.001 [.13, .35] Cost .13 2.41 .02 [.03, .24] .06 1.13 .26 [-.05, .17] .12 2.15 .03 [.01, .23] Condition .17 1.54 .13 [-.05, .39] -.02 -0.14 .88 [-.23, .20] .19 1.67 .10 [-.03, .41] Greed x Condition interaction .01 (-.01) 0.05 (-0.21) .96 (.84) [-.21, .22] ([-.11, .09]) .05 (.04) 0.47 (0.41) .64 (.68) [-.16, .27] ([-.16, .25]) .03 (.03) 0.27 (0.47) .79 (.64) [-.19, .25] ([-.08, .13]) Time 2 -.23 -5.05 <.001 [-.32, -.14] -.08 -2.22 .03 [-.15, -.01] -.33 7.89 <.001 [-.41, -.24] Greed x Time 2 interaction -.08 (-.05) -1.74 (-1.32) .08 (.19) [-.18, .01] ([-.12, .02]) -.07 (-.07) -1.76 (-1.87) .08 (.06) [-.14, .01] ([-.15, .002]) -.02 (.05) -0.38 (1.39) .71 (.17) [-.10, .07] ([-.02, .12]) Greed x Condition x Time 2 interaction .02 (.0001) 0.30 (0.002) .77 (.998) [-.11, .15] ([-.10, .10]) -.03 (-.03) -0.62 (-0.54) .54 (.59) [-.14, .07] ([-.13, .08]) .01 (-.01) 0.15 (-0.14) .89 (.89) [-.11, .12] ([-.11, .09]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .16 2.08 .04 [.01, .32] .002 0.03 .98 [-.15, .15] .07 0.83 .41 [-.09, .22] Greed .19 (.02) 2.29 (0.25) .02 (.80) [.03, .35] ([-.12, .16]) .06 (-.05) 0.77 (-0.86) .44 (.39) [-.09, .22] ([-.17, .07]) .07 (-.01) 0.90 (-0.20) .37 (.84) [-.09, .23] ([-.15, .13]) Self-Esteem -.20 -3.64 <.001 [-.30, -.09] .31 5.85 <.001 [.20, .41] .20 3.81 <.001 [.09, .30] Cost .15 2.77 .006 [.05, .26] .02 0.32 .75 [-.09, .12] .03 0.59 .56 [-.07, .13] Condition -.14 -1.26 .21 [-.37, .08] .27 2.36 .02 [.05, .48] .25 2.22 .03 [.03, .48] Greed x Condition Interaction -.14 (-.17) -1.27 (-1.74) .21 (.08) [-.36, .08] ([-.35, .02]) -.03 (-.03) -0.25 (-0.37) .81 (.71) [-.24, .19] ([-.19, .13]) .03 (.03) 0.31 (0.33) .76 (.74) [-.19, .26] ([-.16, .22]) Time 2 -.23 -5.03 <.001 [-.32, -.14] -.27 -4.96 <.001 [-.38, -.16] -.34 -5.05 <.001 [-.47, -.21] Greed x Time 2 Interaction -.001 (.03) -0.02 (0.65) .99 (.52) [-.09, .09] ([-.06, .12]) -.11 (-.06) -2.01 (-1.21) .046 (.23) [-.22, -.003] ([-.16, .04]) .02 (.06) 0.22 (0.84) .83 (.40) [-.12, .15] ([-.07, .19]) Greed x Condition x Time Interaction .02 (.03) 0.28 (0.51) .78 (.61) [-.11, .15] ([-.09, .16]) .06 (.04) 0.73 (0.64) .47 (.52) [-.10, .21] ([-.09, .18]) -.03 (-.04) -0.35 (-0.47) .73 (.64) [-.22, .16] ([-.22, .14]) 70 control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Consistent with Study 1, which used the same recall method, greedy people felt elevated authentic and hubristic pride at acquisition, and these relationships held controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. Also consistent with Study 1, greedy people did not report elevated positive affect at acquisition, nor did they report elevated pleasantness or activation. Importantly, we did not observe a significant interaction between greed and experimental condition for any emotion at acquisition, suggesting that greedy people do not show a unique deficit in their ability to accurately anticipate their emotions at the moment they acquire something. In contrast to Study 1, we did not observe a significant decline in authentic pride after acquisition, but consistent with Study 1, we did not observe a significant decline in hubristic pride over time among greedy participants. We also did not observe significant three-way interactions for any emotion, suggesting that greedy people also do not show a unique deficit in their ability to anticipate how their emotions will change after acquisition. Discussion In summary, Study 6 suggests that greedy people’s affective forecasts about their acquisitions are no less accurate compared to those of people low in greed. However, the between-subjects design used here precludes conclusions regarding whether greedy people make accurate forecasts about their own acquisitions. Furthermore, although results suggested that there were not significant differences between conditions for any emotion at any time point, our ability to compare between conditions was limited by differences in the type and cost of acquisitions made versus imagined. We therefore sought to complement these results with Study 71 7, in which we examined this same process for participants in Study 2, who, in addition to reporting their actual pride experiences, were asked to anticipate their future feelings about a recently acquired possession two weeks and one month after their first time participating in the study. By comparing these affective forecasts to the feelings these individuals actually reported at those later time points, we can test whether greedy people are especially poor affective forecasters in another way. STUDY 7 Participants All participants from Study 2 (N = 314) completed several items in addition to those detailed above during the first survey completed in that study. Method After reporting their current feelings about a recent acquisition (at Time 1), participants reported “how you think owning [the item] will make you feel TWO WEEKS FROM NOW” and immediately after, “how you think owning [the item] will make you feel OME MONTH FROM NOW”. For both prompts, participants completed the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αAuthentic Pride = .92, .94, αHubristic Pride= .93, .93), the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al., 1988; αPA = .94, .95, αNA = .94, .95), and the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998; αPleasantness = .75, .748). Results 8 We do not report Cronbach’s alpha for activation at either assessment because both reliabilities were below zero. We examined the data and found that a majority of participants selected “1 not at all” for five of the six items (ns range from 210-267 participants who selected “1 not at all” for each of these 5 items for anticipated emotions two weeks later, and ns ranged from 215-260 for anticipated emotions one month later). Given that three of these items were reverse-coded, this resulted in extremely low reliability for the total scale. In both cases, the one item in which the majority of participants did not select “1” was “Alert” (ns = 136 and 150, respectively), which is the item shared between the PANAS and this scale. 72 To test whether greedy people made more inaccurate forecasts about their future feelings, we conducted two multiple regression analyses in which authentic pride two weeks after acquisition and one month after acquisition, respectively, were regressed onto greed, forecasted authentic pride at this time, and an interaction between greed and forecasted authentic pride. We then repeated these analyses for hubristic pride. We did not observe a significant interaction between greed and forecasted authentic pride for authentic pride two weeks after acquisition, β = .06, t(200) = 1.29, p = .20, or one month after acquisition, β = -.05, t(190) = -0.96, p = .34. These results indicate that greedy people were no less accurate than people low in greed when they forecasted their future feelings of authentic pride (see Figure 6). 73 Figure 6 Correspondence Between Anticipated and Actual Authentic Pride Two Weeks (top) and One Month (bottom) After Acquisition, Study 7 Notes: Both the x and y-axis are in unstandardized units. 74 We also did not observe significant interactions for hubristic pride two weeks later, β = .10, t(200) = 1.56, p = .12, but we found a significant interaction for hubristic pride one month later, β = -.14, t(190) = -2.81, p = .006. This interaction indicates that greedy people’s forecasts of hubristic pride one month later were significantly less accurate than the forecasts of people low in greed, such that they tended to underestimate the hubristic pride they would feel at this time. Given that the studies reported in Chapter 2 suggested that the authentic pride process is more critical to individual acquisition experiences whereas the elevated hubristic pride seems to reflect a trait-level association between greed and hubristic pride, one possible explanation for this effect is that greedy people expected to feel very little (if any) hubristic pride in their acquisition at this point, but when they reported their feelings during the follow-up survey, they reported higher levels of hubristic pride due to their general tendency to feel this emotion more frequently and intensely across contexts than people low in greed. However, more research is necessary to test whether this pattern is replicable before we can feel confident in any explanation. Chapter Summary In Chapter 3, I reported two studies that tested whether greedy people are less able to accurately predict their future feelings about their purchases compared to people low in greed. Two studies tested this idea using two different methods, and across both studies, results suggested that greedy people are not particularly poor affective forecasters, at least for their feelings of authentic pride. Given that Study 2 suggested that their feelings of authentic pride are more relevant to greedy people’s relentless acquisitiveness than feelings of hubristic pride, Studies 6 and 7 suggest that deficient affective forecasting is not a causal factor driving greedy people’s desire to acquire because they showed no differences in forecasting authentic pride 75 compared to people low in greed. Regarding hubristic pride, Study 7 provided some evidence that greedy people might grow to feel greater hubristic pride in their item than they anticipate when they purchase it, but it is unclear how this kind of affective misforecasting would lead them to desire to acquire, and this may be explained by their higher trait-level hubristic pride. In summary, Studies 6 and 7 suggest that greedy people are no different from people low in greed when forecasting their future feelings of authentic pride in their purchases, which implies that they intentionally pursue acquisitions for short-lived emotional benefits all the while expecting these feelings to fade shortly afterwards. 76 Chapter 4: Is the dynamic emotional process observed among greedy individuals specific to acquisitions purchased for themselves? In Chapter 4, I report four studies that test the generalizability of this dynamic emotional process. In Study 8, I test whether greedy people report a short-lived boost of pride in response to gifts from others as well as purchases they make for themselves (Study 8). In Study 9, I test whether greedy people show short-lived boosts of pride in response to personal achievements in addition to acquisitions. Next, Studies 10 and 11 test whether this process is unique to greed and material acquisitions, or applies more broadly to highly motivated people, and the targets of their motivation, across domains. We test this possibility by examining whether people high in achievement motivation show the same pattern of pride responses for a recent personal achievement. To further test the breadth of this dynamic emotional process, Studies 10 and 11 also employ an adapted measure of greed that specifically applies to achievement (henceforth “achievement greed”) to test whether people who describe themselves as greedy for other things than money and material wealth show the same emotional response pattern for the things they desire, which, in this case, are personal achievements. Study 8 In Study 8, we sought to investigate whether the pattern observed for self-initiated purchases in Studies 1-5 also emerges for acquisitions that are received as gifts from others. This study thus addresses whether the pride that greedy people feel in their acquisitions is derived from the act of purchasing something for oneself or from the experience of acquiring something, regardless of how that occurs. For self-initiated purchases, we expected to replicate effects found previously. Our primary hypothesis was that greedy people would not feel elevated authentic pride upon receiving gifts because authentic pride is typically elicited by successes attributed to 77 one’s own efforts (Tracy & Robins, 2007). However, if greedy people are driven by a goal of acquiring more regardless of how these acquisitions occur, then we should see a similar pattern of authentic pride responses in both conditions. We therefore pre-registered both our primary hypothesis and this alternative one (http://bit.ly/3V67MZC). Method Participants. Four hundred participants were recruited from Mturk to participate in the current study. Following the criteria specified in our pre-registration, 22 participants were excluded for failing an attention check. Five additional participants were excluded for not following the instructions of the experiment. This resulted in a final sample of 373 participants (55% female, age range = 18-73, median = 34 years; cultural background = 71% white, 11% Black, 10% Asian, , 6% Hispanic/Latinx, 1% prefer not to answer). A power analysis indicated that a sample size of 343 participants would be sufficient to detect a between-condition difference in the relationship between greed and acquisition pride of size q = .305.9 Procedure. Participants first completed the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α =. 82) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .91). They were then randomly assigned to either a Purchase or Gift condition. The purchase condition was identical to Study 1; participants recalled a recent non-essential purchase, reported its cost, the date they acquired it, and how it made them feel at the moment of acquisition and currently in their daily lives. The gift condition followed a similar procedure except that participants described a recent gift, estimated its cost, and reported the date they acquired it, their feelings 9 As detailed in our pre-registration, we had aimed to obtain sufficient statistical power to detect a smaller effect size of r = .15 (Cohen’s q = .15), but after the data were collected we learned that the power analysis we used was meant for analyses with two continuous predictors, not one continuous and one categorical predictor. Our pre-registered sample size of N = 343 and our final sample size of N = 373 therefore provided 80% statistical power to detect a difference of q = .305 and q = .29 between conditions, respectively. 78 about it at the moment they received the gift, and their feelings about it currently in their daily lives. To maximize the likelihood that participants had recently received a gift from someone else, we conducted this study in early January 2019, shortly after the holiday season. For both time points in both conditions, participants completed the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αAuthentic Pride.90-.93, αHubristic Pride .91-.96), the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al., 1988; αPA = .88-.94, αNA = .93-.97), and the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998; αPleasantness = .69-.7710) regarding their feelings about the acquisition. Finally, participants reported demographics before being debriefed. Results Participants’ acquisitions in the purchase condition were categorized as follows: apparel (36%), electronics (30%), non-electronic leisure (14%), home improvement (9%), experience (6%), health and beauty (3%), and automotive (1%). The cost of purchases ranged from $3 to $29,900 with a median cost of $52.50. On average, participants made their purchase 16.9 days before participating in the study. Participants’ gifts in the gift condition were categorized as follows: apparel (30%), electronics (21%), non-electronic leisure (16%), home improvement (15%), cash or gift cards (12%), experience (5%), automotive (2%), and health and beauty (<1%). The estimated cost of gifts ranged from $2 to $34,500 with a median estimated cost of $63. On average, participants 10 We do not report Cronbach’s alpha for activation for either assessment here because reliabilities for some assessments were below zero. Exploring the data revealed that many participants selected “1 not at all” for 5 of the 6 items (ns range from 178-309 of 373 participants who selected “1 not at all” for each of these 5 items for the acquisition time point, and ns ranged from 211-310 of 373 participants for the current time point), and, because 3 of these items were reverse-coded, this resulted in an extremely low alpha for the total scale. In both cases, the one item in which the majority of participants did not select “1 not at all” was “Alert” (ns = 107 and 124, respectively), which is the item shared between the PANAS and this scale. 79 acquired their gift 14.0 days before participating in the study (Christmas Day (the modal day of gift receipt) was 13 days before the study took place). Data from both timepoints were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We tested our predictions by conducting the same linear mixed-effects models as in Study 1, and we also included experimental condition in the model, an interaction between greed and condition, and a three-way interaction between greed, timepoint, and condition. We included random intercepts for each participant, but did not have enough observations to include a random slope of greed (see Table 13). 80 Table 13. Mixed-Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time and Between Conditions, Study 8. Notes: DSA=days since acquisition. For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .12 1.55 .12 [-.03, .26] .13 1.98 .049 [.002, .27] .08 1.05 .29 [-.07, .23] Greed .32 (.08) 4.77 (2.13) <.001 (.03) [.19, .45] ([.01, .16]) .39 (.23) 6.30 (5.03) <.001 (<.001) [.27, .51] ([.14, .31]) .30 (.05) 4.44 (1.19) <.001 (.24) [.17, .43] ([-.03, .12]) Self-Esteem .24 5.11 <.001 [.15, .34] -.14 -3.01 .003 [-.22, -.05] .19 3.93 <.001 [.10, .28] Gift Condition -.04 -0.45 .65 [-.23, .15] -.11 -1.25 .21 [-.29, .06] .29 2.99 .003 [.10, .48] Cost .12 2.54 .01 [.03, .21] .10 2.17 .03 [.01, .18] .06 1.27 .21 [-.03, .15] DSA .04 1.21 .23 [-.03, .11] .04 1.61 .11 [-.01, .10] .07 2.03 .04 [.003, .14] Greed x Gift Condition -.07 (.05) -0.72 (0.85) .47 (.40) [-.27, .12] ([-.06, .16]) -.05 (-.03) -0.55 (-0.42) .58 (.67) [-.23, .13] ([-.15, .10]) -.15 (-.09) -1.52 (-1.68) .13 (.09) [-.34, .04] ([-.20, .02]) Time 2 -.28 -3.79 <.001 [-.43, -.14] -.16 -2.81 .005 [-.28, -.05] -.45 -5.76 <.001 [-.60, -.30] Greed x Time 2 interaction -.05 (.01) -1.11 (0.21) .27 (.83) [-.13, .04] ([-.06, .08]) -.03 (-.03) -0.90 (-0.82) .37 (.41) [-.10, .04] ([-.10, .04]) -.07 (-.04) -1.64 (-1.00) .10 (.32) [-.16, .01] ([-.11, .04]) Greed x Time 2 x Gift Condition interaction .001 (-.06) 0.01 (-1.11) .99 (.27) [-.13, .13] ([-.17, .05]) -.02 (-.01) -0.42 (-0.21) .68 (.84) [-.12, .08] ([-.12, .09]) .08 (.08) 1.20 (1.42) .23 (.16) [-.05, .21] ([-.03, .19]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) -.44 -6.49 <.001 [-.57, -.30] -.07 -0.97 .33 [-.21, .07] .04 0.48 .63 [-.11, .18] Greed .18 (.02) 3.38 (0.48) <.001 (.63) [.08, .29] ([-.07, .12]) .03 (-.07) 0.51 (-1.08) .61 (.28) [-.09, .16] ([-.19, .05]) .34 (.20) 5.19 (3.64) <.001 (<.001) [.21, .47] ([.10, .31]) Self-Esteem .02 0.80 .43 [-.04, .08] .31 6.85 <.001 [.22, .40] -.01 -0.18 .85 [-.10, .08] Gift Condition -.11 -1.37 .17 [-.27, .05] .46 4.85 <.001 [.27, .64] .14 1.44 .15 [-.05, .32] Cost .06 1.85 .06 [-.003, .11] -.01 -0.25 .80 [-.10, .07] .03 0.69 .49 [-.06, .12] DSA .15 3.16 .002 [.05, .23] .01 0.32 .75 [-.06, .08] .05 1.59 .11 [-.01, .12] Greed x Gift Condition -.001 (.02) -0.01 (0.28) .99 (.78) [-.16, .16] ([-.12, .16]) -.19 (-.17) -2.00 (-1.87) .046 (.06) [-.38, -.01] ([-.34, .01]) -.14 (-.11) -1.41 (-1.29) .16 (.20) [-.33, .05] ([-.27, .05]) Time 2 .80 7.29 <.001 [.58, 1.01] -.34 -4.31 <.001 [-.50, -.19] -.25 -3.44 <.001 [-.38, -.11] Greed x Time 2 interaction -.02 (-.01) -0.30 (-0.14) .76 (.89) [-.16, .12] ([-.14, .12]) -.05 (-.03) -1.01 (-0.71) .31 (.48) [-.14, .04] ([-.12, .06]) -.01 (.01) -0.23 (0.26) .81 (.80) [-.09, .07] ([-.07, .09]) Greed x Time 2 x Gift Condition interaction -.06 (-.05) -0.57 (-0.45) .57 (.65) [-.28, .15] ([-.24, .15]) .09 (.09) 1.34 (1.39) .18 (.17) [-.04, .23] ([-.04, .23]) .01 (.002) 0.08 (0.04) .93 (.97) [-.12, .13] ([-.12, .12]) 81 Replicating Study 1, greedy people felt elevated authentic pride and hubristic pride at acquisition, and these relationships were not significantly different in the gift condition, suggesting greedy people felt elevated authentic and hubristic pride in both purchases they made for themselves and gifts they received from others. In contrast, after controlling for authentic pride, greedy people reported no greater positive affect in their purchases or gifts compared to people low in greed. Consistent with Study 1, greedy people did not show elevated negative affect or pleasantness after controlling for pride, but in contrast to Study 1, we found a robust effect of greed on activation, indicating that greedy people felt significantly higher activation in response to acquisition than people low in greed, and this occurred for both purchases and gifts. This result is difficult to interpret, however, because of the extremely low reliability for activation (see Footnote 10). When positive affect, pleasantness, and activation were included as covariates in models predicting authentic and hubristic pride, to control for shared variance with both facets of pride, greed remained a significant predictor of authentic and hubristic pride at acquisition for both purchases and gifts, demonstrating the robust association between greed and pride at acquisition. Importantly, however, we found no evidence of a drop in authentic pride after acquisition for either purchases or gifts. Greedy people’s feelings of hubristic pride and positive affect also did not decline significantly after acquisition. Discussion This study suggests that greedy people respond to purchases and gifts with similar feelings of pride, suggesting that purchases do not need to be self-initiated in order to foment feelings of pride in greedy people. Instead, these results suggest that the pride they feel in response to acquisitions occurs for acquisitions obtained in any manner. 82 Nevertheless, there are several limitations of this study that render it difficult to draw strong conclusions. First, as noted in Footnote 9, this study was underpowered to detect the effect size that we originally planned due to an error in our power analysis. Second, like Study 1, this study used a suboptimal recall method in which participants were asked to report past feelings that occurred up to several weeks ago, which might bias their reports of their emotions at acquisition. In addition, reporting their emotions at acquisition immediately prior to reporting their current emotions might also bias reports of their current emotions. Future studies are necessary to rectify these limitations to get a better sense of how greedy people respond emotionally to receiving gifts at the moment of receipt and how those feelings change in the subsequent weeks. Study 9 In Study 9, we tested whether the emotional process observed for greedy people in response to new acquisitions in fact characterizes these individuals’ pride responses more broadly. Although our theoretical model suggests that greedy individuals experience dynamic shifts in pride specifically in response to acquisitions, it is also possible that greedy individuals experience pride in brief bursts regardless of the elicitor. In other words, the construct of greed may characterize individuals who regularly experience boosts of pride in response to a range of events, followed by declines shortly after. To address this possibility, in Study 9 participants reported their emotional responses to either a recent acquisition or a recent personal achievement. We expected to replicate the previously found effects of greed for participants reporting responses to acquisitions. In contrast, we did not predict that greedy people would feel greater authentic pride in their achievements than less greedy people, because if they receive the same emotional benefits from achievements 83 as acquisitions, it would raise questions about why they specifically desire to acquire money and goods. At the same time, however, greedy people tend to be motivated toward productivity and efficiency across domains (Krekels & Pandelaere, 2015), so it is possible that the pattern observed for acquisitions generalizes to achievements. We therefore pre-registered both our primary hypothesis of a difference between the acquisition and achievement condition, and the competing hypothesis of a similar pattern of pride responses in both conditions, along with interpretations of what results in support of each would indicate (bit.ly/40VP0XM). Method Participants. Three hundred and seventy-nine undergraduates were recruited to participate in the current study. Following the criteria specified in our pre-registration, 51 participants were excluded for failing an attention check. This resulted in a final sample of 328 participants (71% female, age range = 18-43, median = 20 years; cultural background = 63% Asian, 23% white, 3% Hispanic/Latinx, <1% Black, 11% prefer not to answer). A power analysis indicated that a sample size of 326 participants would be sufficient to detect a between-condition difference in the relationship between greed and pride of size q = .315.11 Procedure. Participants first completed the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α =. 74) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .92). They were then randomly assigned to either a Purchase or Achievement condition. The purchase condition was identical to Study 1 and the recollection condition of Study 6; participants recalled a recent 11 As detailed in our pre-registration, we aimed for sufficient statistical power to detect a smaller effect size of r = .181 (q = .183), but after data had been collected, we learned that the power analysis we used was meant for analyses with two continuous predictors, not one continuous and one categorical predictor. Our pre-registered sample size of N = 326 and our final sample size of N = 328 thus provided the statistical power to detect a difference of q = .315 between conditions. 84 non-essential purchase, reported its cost and date it was acquired, and how it made them feel at the moment of acquisition and currently in their daily lives. Participants in the achievement condition followed a similar procedure, but reported their feelings about a recent personal achievement instead of a recent purchase. They were told that the achievement could be anything “you did or accomplished that may ultimately help you attain a personal goal” within the last month, and were provided with example domains including academic, career, fitness, relationships, and hobbies. For both time points in both conditions, participants completed the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αAuthentic Pride = .89-.95, αHubristic Pride = .77-.87), the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al., 1988; αPA = .88-.95, αNA = .81-.86), and the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998; αPleasantness = .65-.75, αActivation = .12-.44) regarding their feelings about the acquisition or achievement. Finally, participants reported demographics before being debriefed. Results Participants’ acquisitions in the purchase condition were categorized as follows: apparel (55%), electronics (16%), experiences (11%), non-electronic leisure (10%), home improvement (5%), automotive (1%), and four participants (2%) either recalled purchases that did not meet our criteria (i.e., school supplies) or left this field blank. Results do not change when these participants are excluded, so we included them in all analyses reported below. The cost of participants’ purchases ranged from $2.75 to $26,000 with a median cost of $70. On average, participants acquired the item 16.8 days before participating in the study. Participants’ achievements in the achievement condition were categorized into the following domains: academic (42%), fitness (22%), hobbies (16%), social (10%), career (6%), 85 romantic (2%), and two participants left this field blank. On average, participants’ achievement experiences occurred 17.5 days prior to participating in the study. Data from both timepoints were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We tested our predictions by conducting the same linear mixed-effects models as in Study 8. We included random intercepts for each participant, but did not have enough observations to include a random slope of greed (see Table 14). 86 Table 14 Mixed-Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 9. Notes: DSA=days since acquisition/achievement. For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) -.37 -5.87 <.001 [-.50, -.25] .16 2.17 .03 [.02, .31] -.13 -1.90 .06 [-.26, .003] Greed .25 (.12) 4.07 (3.58) <.001 (<.001) [.13, .38] ([.05, .18]) .20 (.13) 2.65 (1.90) .008 (.06) [.05, .34] ([-.003, .27]) .19 (-.02) 2.84 (-0.58) .005 (.56) [.06, .32] ([-.09, .05]) Self-Esteem .24 5.48 <.001 [.15, .32] .10 2.02 .04 [.003, .20] .21 4.58 <.001 [.12, .31] Achievement Condition 1.08 11.88 <.001 [.90, 1.26] -.02 -0.16 .88 [-.23, .19] .73 7.52 <.001 [.54, .92] DSA .05 1.08 .28 [-.04, .13] .13 2.62 .009 [.03, .23] .08 1.82 .07 [-.006, .17] Greed x Achievement Condition -.22 (-.09) -2.46 (-1.95) .01 (.052) [-.40, -.05] ([-.19, -.0004]) -.03 (.005) -0.59 (0.05) .56 (.96) [-.24, .18] ([-.19, .20]) -.15 (.03) -1.58 (0.60) .11 (.55) [-.34, .04] ([-.07, .14]) Time 2 -.21 -4.56 <.001 [-.31, -.12] -.29 -5.18 <.001 [-.40, -.18] -.46 -10.14 <.001 [-.54, -.37] Greed x Time 2 interaction -.07 (-.11) -1.53 (-3.23) .13 (.001) [-.16, .02] ([-.17, -.04]) -.03 (-.03) -0.59 (-0.41) .56 (.68) [-.14, .07] ([-.13, .07]) -.02 (.09) -0.36 (2.70) .72 (.007) [-.05, .12] ([.03, .16]) Greed x Time 2 x Achievement Condition interaction .05 (.06) 0.79 (1.28) .43 (.20) [-.08, .19] ([-.03, .16]) -.02 (-.02) -0.21 (-0.27) .84 (.79) [-.17, .14] ([-.17, .13]) -.01 (-.06) -0.18 (-1.09) .86 (.27) [-.14, .12] ([-.15, .04]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .11 1.43 .15 [-.04, .26] .15 2.00 .046 [.004, .29] .08 1.08 .28 [-.07, .23] Greed .08 (.03) 1.16 (0.36) .25 (.72) [-.06, .23] ([-.11, .16]) .07 (-.11) 1.02 (-2.07) .31 (.04) [-.07, .21] ([-.22, -.01]) .10 (-.03) 1.31 (-0.51) .19 (.61) [-.05, .24] ([-.17, .10]) Self-Esteem -.14 -2.74 .007 [-.24, -.04] .22 4.55 <.001 [.12, .31] .18 3.52 <.001 [.08, .27] Achievement Condition .11 1.03 .30 [-.10, .32] .18 1.74 .08 [-.02, .38] .11 1.01 .32 [-.10, .32] DSA .01 0.22 .82 [-.08, .11] .10 2.04 .04 [.004, .19] -.02 -0.41 .68 [-.12, .08] Greed x Achievement Condition -.05 (.02) -0.41 (0.03) .68 (.98) [-.26, .17] ([-.24, .16]) -.17 (-.01) -1.65 (-0.10) .10 (.92) [-.38, .03] ([-.16, .15]) -.08 (.04) -0.70 (0.41) .48 (.68) [-.29, .14] ([-.15, .23]) Time 2 -.40 -6.22 <.001 [-.53, -.27] -.46 -7.02 <.001 [-.59, -.33] -26 -3.90 <.001 [-.39, -.13] Greed x Time 2 interaction -.01 (.002) -0.13 (0.03) .90 (.98) [-.13, .11] ([-.12, .12]) .09 (.14) 1.39 (2.54) .17 (.01) [-.04, .21] ([.03, .25]) -.04 (.03) -0.40 (0.56) .69 (.58) [-.13, .13] ([-.09, .16]) Greed x Time 2 x Achievement Condition interaction .06 (.06) 0.61 (0.68) .54 (.50) [-.12, .24] ([-.12, .24]) -.003 (-.04) -0.03 (-0.53) .97 (.60) [-.19, .18] ([-.20, .12]) .08 (.05) 0.82 (0.56) .41 (.57) [-.11, .27] ([-.13, .23]) 87 pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Consistent with prior studies, we found that greedy people reported elevated authentic and hubristic pride in response to acquisition. After controlling for both facets of pride, we observed no significant differences between greedy and less greedy people’s feelings of positive affect, negative affect, pleasantness, or activation at acquisition. Also consistent with prior studies, greedy people’s elevated authentic pride at acquisition was robust to controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation; however, their feelings of hubristic pride at acquisition were not robust to these covariates. We did not observe a significant interaction between greed and timepoint for authentic pride, indicating that greedy people’s authentic pride did not decline significantly after acquisition; we therefore did not support that hypothesis in this study. However, after controlling for positive affect, this interaction became significant. Thus, greedy people’s feelings of authentic pride, specifically, declined after acquisition, but this was only observable after removing shared variance with positive affect. In addition, we observed a significant interaction between greed and condition for authentic pride, indicating that the relationship between greed and authentic pride was significantly weaker in response to personal achievements compared to acquisitions. Examining the simple slopes revealed that greedy people did not differ from those low in greed in terms of their authentic pride in response to an achievement, β = .03, t(415) = 0.43, p = .67, but they did feel greater authentic pride than less greedy people in response to purchases, β = .25, t(415) = 4.07, p < .001. We did not observe any other significant interactions between greed and condition, indicating no differences between how greedy people respond to acquisitions versus achievements in terms of the other five affective states measured in this study, as well as no 88 differences in how any of the six affective states measured in this study change over time following an acquisition or achievement. Discussion In Study 9, we found that greedy people felt significantly greater authentic pride in their acquisitions, but not in their achievements, compared to people low in greed. This result suggests that greedy people’s tendency to feel elevated authentic pride in response to acquisitions does not generalize to personal achievements. As in past studies, greedy people's feelings of authentic pride in acquisitions declined significantly over time, after removing shared variance with positive affect, pleasantness, and activation, but this was not observed for achievements. The results of this study therefore provide support for our theoretical expectation that authentic pride, and not other positive emotions, is the critical emotional consequence of greedy acquisition—as well as our expectation that the dynamic emotional pattern observed here is specific to acquisitions, and does not generalize to other, more prototypical pride-eliciting events. We also again observed that greedy people felt greater hubristic pride in their acquisitions than less greedy people, but this relationship was not robust to controlling for other emotions. This same pattern emerged for feelings of hubristic pride in achievements. This finding suggests that greedy people’s feelings of hubristic pride are unlikely to reflect a unique psychological response to acquisitions, but rather a tendency for greedy people to experience higher levels of hubristic pride from a range of positive events than less greedy people. Together, these findings imply that dynamic shifts in authentic pride, specifically, may be the emotional mechanism that drives greedy people’s pervasive acquisitiveness. STUDY 10 89 Thus far we have argued that greedy people experience a unique pattern of pride responses to acquisitions, and this emotional dynamic is likely to provide the affective motivation that drives greedy acquisition. If this model is correct, authentic pride plays a critical role in shaping greed, and, in particular, the core behavioral pattern that characterizes this disposition. However, there is an alternative possibility consistent with the data collected thus far. The emotional pattern uncovered here may be indistinct to greed, but instead apply more broadly to highly motivated individuals across domains. In this view, people highly motivated to attain any particular goal—be it acquisitions in the case of greed, or achievements in the case of those high in achievement motivation—would show this same pattern of dynamic emotional responses, with boosts of pride following goal attainment, and declines shortly after, leading to a repetition of the cycle. If this is the case, the present results would still shed light on the emotional dynamics that shape greed, but would do so by highlighting a more general dynamic emotional response pattern to goal attainment rather than something specific to this disposition. To test this alternative account, in Study 10 we measured participants’ level of achievement motivation and their emotional responses to a recent achievement. By doing so, we were able to test whether the dynamic pattern of pride responses observed in the previous studies is specific to greed and acquisitions, or generalizes to highly motivated individuals across domains. For the purposes of this study, we adapted the Dispositional Greed Scale included in previous studies so that it would assess “achievement greed” by changing the scale items to refer to achievements instead of money and possessions. This adapted scale thus captures the same dispositional tendency but in the achievement domain: an insatiability for achievements accompanied by the belief that one can never achieve too much. Importantly, this scale assesses a different disposition than achievement motivation, which is a desire for achievement and 90 willingness to work hard to reach goals. By including this “achievement greed” scale, we were able to test whether people high in this disposition report the same pattern of pride responses to a recent achievement as dispositionally greedy people do to acquisitions. If they do, it would suggest that the dynamic emotional pattern uncovered here applies to greedy individuals regardless of what their greed is directed toward. Importantly, this is a different question than the primary one addressed by this study: whether the same dynamic emotional pattern applies to those high in achievement motivation, following achievements. By including both measures—greed for achievements and achievement motivation—we were able to directly examine whether greed leads to a different pattern of emotional responding than does high motivation, albeit in a different domain than acquisition. This is also a different question than that addressed by Study 9, where we examined whether individuals high in greed for material possessions showed the same dynamic emotional pattern in response to achievements as they do to acquisitions. Although that study demonstrated that greedy people do not feel short-lived boosts of authentic pride in response to achievements, it remains possible that individuals who are greedy for achievements, specifically, rather than acquisitions, show a similar response pattern to the achievement events they are insatiable for. As described in our pre-registration (https://bit.ly/3Unu5KG), we made three competing hypotheses for this study: (H1) Achievement greed, but not achievement motivation, will predict the same pattern of authentic pride in response to recent achievements as was found in our prior studies for dispositional greed and recent acquisitions. Support for this hypothesis would imply that greed is conceptually distinct from other forms of motivation, and results in the same dynamic emotional response across domains to indicators of progress. Such a finding would also support prior 91 research showing that greedy people are prone to over-acquire things beyond material goods, and suggest that this extends to achievements (Seuntjens et al., 2015b). (H2) Achievement greed will not predict the same pattern of authentic pride responses to achievements as was found previously for acquisitions. Findings along these lines would suggest that the emotional dynamics uncovered previously characterize only those individuals who are greedy for wealth, and thus that this disposition, or at least the emotional reaction that may drive greedy people’s acquisitive behavior, is somewhat narrower than may have been assumed. (H3) Achievement motivation will predict the same pattern of authentic pride in response to achievements as was observed for dispositional greed in response to acquisitions in previous studies. Support for this hypothesis would suggest that the emotional dynamics uncovered in the prior studies for greed are not specific to greed, but instead reflect a more general affective process that occurs across domains of motivation, and may be the causal factor that drives highly motivated individuals to persistently strive for whatever outcomes they care about. Such findings would also suggest that dispositional greed can be understood as a strong motivation for acquisitions. Method Participants. Two-hundred, fifteen participants were recruited from Mturk to participate in the current study. Following the criteria specified in our pre-registration, 24 participants were excluded for failing an attention check. This resulted in a final sample of 191 participants (44.5% female, age range = 20-74, median = 33 years; cultural background = 68% white, 14% Black, 12% Hispanic/Latinx, 6% Asian, 1% prefer not to answer). Given that this study employed different measures than the previous studies, we did not have any basis for estimating the effect size between the trait measures and pride in achievements, so we conducted a power analysis for 92 a medium effect size in individual differences research (r = .20; Gignac & Szodorai, 2016), which indicated that a sample size of 191 participants provided 80% statistical power to detect effects of this size or greater. Procedure. Participants first completed two measures of achievement motivation: the International Personality Item Pool representation of the NEO-PI-R Achievement Striving subscale (Costa & McCrae, 1992; α = .85) and the Hope for Success facet of the Revised Achievement Motives Scale (Lang & Fries, 2005; α = .86). They also completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .92) and the dispositional greed scale adapted to apply specifically to achievements (α = .80; items like “One can never have too much money” and “It doesn’t matter how much I have. I’m never completely satisfied” were revised to “One can never achieve too much” and “It doesn’t matter how much I’ve accomplished. I’m never completely satisfied”). Participants then recalled a personal achievement that occurred within the past month and followed the same procedure as was used in the achievement condition of Study 9. As in prior studies, reliabilities for the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αAuthentic Pride = .90, .92, αHubristic Pride = .92, .92) and the Positive & Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al., 1988; αPA = .89, .94, αNA = .94, .94) were high, and reliabilities for the Current Mood Questionnaire were lower (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998; αPleasantness = .75, .74, αActivation = .27, .24). Results Correlations among dispositional variables are available in Table 15. 93 Table 15 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 10. ***p < .001 Participants’ achievements were categorized into the following domains: fitness (27%), career (27%), financial (19%), academic (7%), hobbies (6%), personal growth (i.e., quitting smoking, developing greater empathy, etc.; 4%), home improvement (3%), family (2%), social (1%), romantic (<1%), and 4% of participants left this field blank or entered nonsensical responses. On average, participants’ achievement experiences occurred 25.3 days prior to participating in the study. To test whether achievement motivation or achievement greed predicted the same pattern of emotional responses as found in prior studies, data from both timepoints were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We tested our predictions by conducting the same linear mixed-effects models as in Study 1; we conducted 18 models in total because this study included two measures of achievement motivation and one measure of achievement greed, and we conducted one model for each of the six measured emotions, consistent with past studies. As in Study 1, we included random intercepts for each participant, but did not have enough observations to include a random slope of greed (see Table 16). Variable Mean SD 1 2 3 1. IPIP Achievement Motivation 5.34 0.99 — 2. Hope for Success 5.45 1.03 .74*** — 3. Achievement Greed 4.64 1.14 .48*** .55*** — 4. Self-Esteem 5.21 1.38 .65*** .48*** .12 94 Table 16 Mixed-Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 10. Top: IPIP Achievement Motivation Scale, Middle: Hope for Success, Bottom: Achievement Greed IPIP Achievement Motivation: Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .14 2.21 .03 [.02, .26] .02 0.31 .76 [-.11, .15] .14 2.21 .03 [.02, .27] IPIP AM .29 (-.02) 3.61 (-0.48) <.001 (.63) [.13, .44] ([-.10, .06]) -.14 (-.14) -1.63 (-1.85) .10 (.07) [-.30, .03] ([-.28, .01]) .38 (.16) 4.61 (3.37) <.001 (<.001) [.22, .54] ([.07, .25]) Self-Esteem .23 3.01 .003 [.08, .37] -.25 -2.95 .004 [-.41, -.08] .05 0.60 .55 [-.11, .20] DSA .05 0.79 .43 [-.07, .16] .28 4.40 <.001 [.16, .40] .10 1.64 .10 [-.02, .22] Time 2 -.28 -5.63 <.001 [-.37, -.18] -.04 -1.28 .20 [-.10, .02] -.28 -6.50 <.001 [-.38, -.20] IPIP AM x Time 2 interaction .06 (-.01) 1.13 (-0.39) .26 (.70) [-.04, .15] ([-.09, .06]) .01 (.03) 0.43 (0.83) .67 (.41) [-.05, .08] ([-.04, .10]) .08 (.04) 1.83 (1.02) .07 (.31) [-.01, .16] ([-.04, .11]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .005 0.08 .94 [-.12, .13] .11 1.92 .06 [-.002, .23] .10 1.49 .14 [-.03, .23] IPIP AM -.08 (-.07) -1.02 (-0.88) .31 (.38) [-.24, .08] ([-.23, .09]) .24 (.08) 3.29 (1.43) .001 (.15) [.10, .39] ([-.03, .20]) .31 (.20) 3.62 (2.49) <.001 (.01) [.14, .47] ([.04, .36]) Self-Esteem -.39 -4.90 <.001 [-.55, -.24] .36 5.03 <.001 [.22, .49] -.02 -0.21 .83 [-.17, .14] DSA .19 3.14 .002 [.08, .31] -.07 -1.33 .18 [-.18, .03] -.13 -2.15 .03 [-.25, -.01] Time 2 -.01 -0.30 .76 [-.07, .05] -.23 -4.85 <.001 [-.32, -.13] -.20 -3.23 .001 [-.32, -.08] IPIP AM x Time 2 interaction -.01 (-.01) -0.40 (-0.34) .69 (.73) [-.08, .05] ([-.08, .05]) -.08 (.05) 1.71 (1.20) .09 (.23) [-.01, .17] ([-.03, .13]) .11 (.09) 1.74 (1.46) .08 (.15) [-.01, .23] ([-.03, .21]) 95 Hope for Success subscale: Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .14 2.29 .02 [.02, .25] .02 0.31 .76 [-.11, .15] .14 2.31 .02 [.02, .26] Hope for Success .37 (.05) 5.16 (1.31) <.001 (.19) [.24, .51] ([-.02, .12]) .07 (.04) 0.92 (0.67) .36 (.50) [-.08, .22] ([-.08, .17]) .42 (.14) 6.02 (3.29) <.001 (.001) [.28, .55] ([.06, .23]) Self-Esteem .25 3.90 <.001 [.12, .37] -.36 -4.96 <.001 [-.50, -.22] .09 1.42 .16 [-.03, .22] DSA .01 0.26 .80 [-.09, .12] .27 4.18 <.001 [.14, .39] .06 1.07 .28 [-.05, .17] Time 2 -.28 -5.62 <.001 [-.37, -.18] -.04 -1.28 .20 [-.10, .02] -.28 -6.53 <.001 [-.37, -.20] Hope for Success x Time 2 interaction .03 (-.03) 0.46 (-0.90) .64 (.37) [-.07, .12] ([-.11, .04]) -.01 (-.03) -0.26 (-0.83) .80 (.41) [-.07, .05] ([-.10, .04]) .09 (.08) 2.17 (2.13) .03 (.03) [.01, .18] ([.01, .15]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .005 0.08 .94 [-.12, .13] .11 1.90 .06 [-.003, .23] .10 1.46 .15 [-.03, .23] Hope for Success .06 (.01) 0.83 (0.21) .41 (.83) [-.08, .20] ([-.07, .09]) .22 (-.003) 3.23 (-0.06) .001 (.95) [.09, .35] ([-.11, .10]) .21 (.07) 2.73 (0.87) .007 (.39) [.06, .36] ([-.08, .17]) Self-Esteem -.49 -6.94 <.001 [-.62, -.35] .43 6.99 <.001 [.31, .56] .10 1.46 .15 [-.03, .24] DSA .18 2.95 .004 [.06, .30] -.09 -1.57 .12 [-.19, .02] -.14 -2.31 .02 [-.26, -.02] Time 2 -.01 -0.30 .76 [-.07, .05] -.23 -4.82 <.001 [-.32, -.13] -.20 -3.21 .002 [-.32, -.08] Hope for Success x Time 2 interaction .02 (.03) 0.68 (0.86) .50 (.39) [-.04, .09] ([-.04, .09]) -.0002 (-.01) -0.003 (-0.34) .997 (.74) [-.09, .09] ([-.09, .07]) .05 (.04) 0.80 (0.69) .42 (.49) [-.07, .17] ([-.08, .16]) 96 Achievement Greed: Notes: DSA=days since achievement. For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .005 0.08 .94 [-.12, .13] .11 1.86 .06 [-.01, .23] .10 1.45 .15 [-.03, .24] Achievement Greed .20 (.02) 3.21 (0.44) .002 (.66) [.08, .32] ([-.06, .09]) .02 (-.13) 0.37 (-2.74) .71 (.007) [-.10, .14] ([-.22, -.04]) .08 (-.02) 1.13 (-0.27) .26 (.78) [-.06, .22] ([-.08, .17]) Self-Esteem -.48 -7.92 <.001 [-.59, -.36] .53 9.41 <.001 [.42, .64] .20 3.15 .002 [.08, .32] DSA .17 2.86 .005 [.05, .29] -.07 -1.22 .22 [-.18, .04] -.13 -2.10 .04 [-.25, -.01] Time 2 -.01 -0.30 .76 [-.07, .05] -.23 -4.85 <.001 [-.32, -.13] -.20 -3.25 .002 [-.32, -.08] Achievement Greed x Time 2 interaction .001 (-.01) 0.06 (-0.15) .96 (.88) [-.06, .07] ([-.07, .06]) .08 (.03) 1.62 (0.80) .11 (.42) [-.02, .17] ([-.05, .11]) .13 (.11) 2.15 (1.76) .03 (.08) [.01, .25] ([-.01, .22]) Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .14 2.24 .03 [.02, .26] .02 0.32 .75 [-.10, .14] .14 2.23 .03 [.02, .26] Achievement Greed .25 (.08) 3.94 (2.40) <.001 (.02) [.12 .37] ([.02, .15]) .25 (.21) 3.91 (3.65) <.001 (<.001) [.13, .38] ([.10, .32]) .26 (.07) 4.01 (1.91) <.001 (.06) [.13, .38] ([-.002, .15]) Self-Esteem .40 6.93 <.001 [.28, .51] -.36 -5.86 <.001 [-.48, -.24] .28 4.57 <.001 [.16, .39] DSA .03 0.52 .60 [-.08, .14] .25 4.11 <.001 [.13, .37] .08 1.35 .18 [-.04, .20] Time 2 -.28 -5.64 <.001 [-.37, -.18] -.04 -1.28 .20 [-.10, .02] -.28 -6.66 <.001 [-.37, -.20] Achievement Greed x Time 2 interaction .07 (-.04) 1.44 (-1.04) .15 (.30) [-.03, .17] ([-.11, .04]) .01 (.01) 0.29 (0.40) .77 (.69) [-.05, .07] ([-.05, .08]) .15 (.10) 3.52 (2.69) <.001 (.008) [.07, .23] ([.03, .17]) 97 These analyses showed that people high in achievement motivation felt elevated authentic pride in response to achievements, and this was found with both measures of achievement motivation, but these relationships did not hold controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. Achievement greed also predicted elevated authentic pride at the moment of achievement, and this effect held controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. However, neither measure of achievement motivation nor achievement greed predicted a decline in authentic pride after the moment of achievement. These results are inconsistent with Hypotheses 1 and 3, but are somewhat consistent with Hypothesis 2, indicating that achievement greed and achievement motivation do not predict the same dynamic emotional process in response to achievements as was found for greed in response to acquisitions in our prior studies. Regarding hubristic pride, only achievement greed predicted elevated hubristic pride at acquisition, and this effect held controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation; both measures of achievement motivation showed null relationships with hubristic pride at the moment of achievement. Consistent with the results for authentic pride, neither measure of achievement motivation nor achievement greed predicted a decline in hubristic pride after achievement. Regarding the other emotions measured in this study, results showed consistent evidence that individuals high in achievement motivation (measured with either scale) and achievement greed reported elevated positive affect at the moment of achievement, and this relationship held controlling for authentic pride for both measures of achievement motivation but not for achievement greed. We observed a similar pattern for pleasantness for both measures of achievement motivation but not for achievement greed. Thus, for both measures of achievement 98 motivation, there appears to be a robust effect of positive affect such that people high in achievement motivation feel greater positive affect when they achieve personal goals compared to people low in achievement motivation. After controlling for this positive affect felt upon achievement, people high in achievement motivation report no greater authentic or hubristic pride in their achievements. Discussion Study 10 showed that people high in achievement motivation show a markedly different emotional response to achievements compared to what greedy people show to acquisitions. Specifically, people high in achievement motivation do not report elevated pride at the moment of achievement after controlling for other positive emotions. In contrast, their elevated positive affect in response to achievement was robust to controlling for authentic pride. This is the exact opposite pattern to what we find for greed and acquisitions in past studies wherein the effects on authentic pride are robust to controlling for positive affect. Thus, whereas greedy and less greedy people seem to differ in terms of self-conscious emotions (e.g., pride) in response to acquisition, people high and low in achievement motivation seem to differ in terms of more hedonic emotions (e.g., positive affect and pleasantness) in response to the target of their motivation, personal achievements. Given the high mean level of authentic pride reported in response to achievement (4.00 on a five-point scale), the lack of a significant effect of achievement motivation suggests a possible ceiling effect, such that everyone, regardless of their level of achievement motivation, seems to feel high levels of pride in response to achievements. Where people high and low in achievement motivation seem to differ, however, is in terms of broader positive affect such that people high in achievement motivation feel more generally positive in response to achievement compared to people low in achievement motivation. This is the 99 converse of what we find for greed and acquisition across studies: everyone, regardless of their level of greed, seems to feel positive affect in response to new, desirable acquisitions, but greedy people differ from people low in greed in that they feel more pride in their acquisitions than do people low in greed. In contrast, achievement greed was associated with a boost in authentic pride upon the moment of achievement, and this was robust to controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation; we also found that achievement greed did not predict a boost in positive affect after controlling for authentic pride. We did not observe evidence of a drop in authentic pride among people high in achievement greed. Thus, this study revealed some similarities between greed and achievement greed that suggest a potentially similar emotional process at the moment of achievement, specifically, as to what greedy people feel at the moment of acquisition. We test the reliability of this pattern in Study 11. For hubristic pride, we found that achievement greed predicted elevated hubristic pride in achievements, and this was robust to controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. We also found no evidence that feelings of hubristic pride did not decline among those high in achievement greed. This is consistent with what we find for dispositional greed and acquisitions across past studies, suggesting that insatiability for several different rewards (e.g., material acquisitions, achievements) is associated with hubristic pride. Nonetheless, this study is quite limited by the recall method used, which introduces potential memory and hindsight biases to the research. We address this limitation in Study 11 with a daily diary design akin to Study 3 to test these hypotheses more rigorously. STUDY 11 100 In Study 11, we recruited a sample of undergraduate students and examined their emotional responses to outcomes of recent exams over time. Method Participants. To determine sample size, we used the effect size estimate from Study 2 for the relationship between greed and the change in authentic pride between acquisition and Time 1 (r = -.18) for a regression with three predictors (achievement greed, time since the exam, and how the achievement fits with personal standards). This power analysis indicated that a sample of 330 participants would provide 80% power to detect an effect of size r = .18 with an alpha of .05, and we aimed to recruit 400 participants to ensure 330 participants for analyses after exclusions for failed attention checks. In total, 392 participants (83% female, age range = 18-36, median = 20; cultural background = 62% Asian, 31% white, 1% Hispanic/Latinx, <1% Black, 5% prefer not to answer) completed Part 1, 227 completed the two-week follow-up assessment (57.9% of original sample) and 175 completed the four-week follow-up assessment (44.6% of original sample). Procedure. Participants first participated in an intake session in which they completed the same achievement greed scale from Study 10 (adapted from Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α = .84), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .90), and a measure of academic achievement motivation (Elliott & Murayama, 2008; α = .86). Beginning the following day, participants received daily emails each evening asking if they received a grade on an exam or a paper in one of their courses that day. If they did, they then reported how well this grade meets their personal standards using a one-item Likert measure from 1 (Far below my personal standards) to 7 (Far exceeding my personal standards). We asked participants about their personal standards to determine whether the grade represented an achievement for the 101 participant; we decided that any response greater than or equal to “4 (Met my personal standards)” qualified as an achievement for this study. Participants then rated their emotional response to learning about their grade using the same emotion measures as in prior studies. If they did not receive a grade in one of their courses on that day, they were emailed again the following day, and these emails were sent to participants every day until they indicated that they received a grade back. Once participants reported their emotions about their grade on the day they learned about it, they were contacted two weeks and four weeks later to assess their current emotions about the grade. Specifically, they responded to the prompt “please rate how the grade you received on [assignment] makes you feel RIGHT NOW”; they reported the same six emotions as at Time 1. Results Descriptive statistics and correlations among dispositional variables are provided in Table 17. Table 17 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between All Trait-Level Variables, Study 11. To test whether achievement motivation or achievement greed predicted the same pattern of emotional responses as found in prior studies with this longitudinal design, data from both timepoints were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. Variable Mean SD 1 2 1. Achievement Greed 4.42 1.14 — 2. Academic Achievement Motivation 5.25 0.84 .41*** — 3. Self-Esteem 4.42 1.09 -.20*** -.04 102 We tested our predictions by conducting the same linear mixed-effects models as in Study 2, without including cost as a covariate because that variable is not applicable to this study. We conducted these analyses for academic achievement motivation and achievement greed. For both independent variables, we conducted these analyses in two ways. In the first analysis, we remove all participants who indicated that their grade was below their personal standards because these participants are unlikely to consider their grade an achievement. In the second set of analyses, we include fit with personal standards as an interaction term with the independent variable. These analyses are reported in Table 18 below. 103 Table 18 Mixed-Effects Models for all Measured Emotions Across Time, Study 11. Academic Achievement Motivation, subsample of participants who met or exceeded standards (n = 176) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .05 0.62 .54 [-.10, .19] .34 4.78 <.001 [.20, .47] .13 1.72 .09 [-.03, .24] Achievement Motivation .02 (.02) 0.33 (0.24) .74 (.81) [-.12, .17] ([-.12, .16]) .12 (.01) 1.77 (0.14) .08 (.89) [-.01, .26] ([-.09, .11]) .11 (.04) 1.50 (0.63) .13 (.53) [-.06, .22] ([-.09, .18]) Self-Esteem -.33 -4.68 <.001 [-.46, -.19] .23 3.74 <.001 [.11, .35] .20 3.44 <.001 [.08, .32] Time -.05 -1.25 .21 [-.12, .03] -.42 -9.17 <.001 [-.50, -.33] -.16 -2.88 .004 [-.32, -.08] Achievement Motivation x Time interaction .02 (.02) 0.63 (0.62) .53 (.54) [-.05, .09] ([-.05, .09]) .01 (.06) 0.12 (1.82) .90 (.07) [-.08, .09] ([-.004, .12]) -.01 (.02) -0.20 (0.40) .84 (.69) [.01, .25] ([-.08, .12]) Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .34 4.98 <.001 [.21, .48] .24 3.06 .003 [.09, .40] .39 5.55 <.001 [.26, .53] Achievement Motivation .17 (.05) 2.49 (1.46) .01 (.14) [.04 .31] ([-.02, .11]) .06 (.01) 0.80 (0.16) .43 (.87) [-.09, .22] ([-.13, .15]) .12 (-.01) 1.76 (-0.32) .08 (.75) [-.01, .26] ([-.09, .07]) Self-Esteem .23 4.01 <.001 [.12, .34] -.09 -1.26 .21 [-.23, .05] .11 1.81 .07 [-.01, .23] Time -.43 -8.78 <.001 [-.52, -.33] -.27 -5.81 <.001 [-.36, -.18] -.48 -10.51 <.001 [-.56, -.39] Achievement Motivation x Time interaction -.08 (-.06) -1.68 (-2.28) .09 (.02) [-.18, .01] ([-.11, -.01]) -.02 (.001) -0.45 (0.03) .65 (.98) [-.11, .07] ([-.08, .08]) -.04 (.02) -1.00 (0.69) .32 (.49) [-.13, .04] ([-.03, .07]) 104 Achievement Greed, subsample of participants who met or exceeded standards (n = 176) Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .35 4.98 <.001 [.21, .48] .24 3.13 .002 [.09, .39] .40 5.58 <.001 [.26, .53] Achievement Greed .10 (.04) 1.45 (1.19) .15 (.24) [-.04, .24] ([-.03, .10]) .23 (.18) 2.93 (2.48) .004 (.01) [.08, .38] ([.04, .33]) .10 (.02) 1.42 (0.46) .16 (.64) [-.04, .24] ([-.06, .10]) Self-Esteem .24 4.10 <.001 [.13, .36] -.05 -0.75 .46 [-.19, .08] .13 2.03 .04 [.01, .25] Time -.43 -8.77 <.001 [-.52, -.33] -.27 -5.84 <.001 [-.37, -.18] -.48 -10.51 <.001 [-.56, -.39] Achievement Greed x Time interaction -.04 (-.04) -0.95 (-1.44) .34 (.15) [-.14, .05] ([-.08, .01]) -.07 (-.06) -1.63 (-1.53) .10 (.13) [-.16, .01] ([-.14, .02]) -.02 (.01) -0.49 (0.46) .62 (.64) [-.11, .06] ([-.04, .06]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .05 0.65 .52 [-.10, .19] .34 4.75 <.001 [.20, .48] .13 1.74 .08 [-.02, .27] Achievement Greed .14 (.12) 1.91 (1.62) .06 (.11) [-.003, .29] ([-.02, .26]) -.01 (-.08) -0.10 (-1.52) .93 (.13) [-.15, .13] ([-.18, .02]) .06 (.02) 0.83 (0.33) .41 (.74) [-.08, .20] ([-.11, .16]) Self-Esteem -.29 -4.18 <.001 [-.43, -.16] .23 3.59 <.001 [.10, .35] .21 3.60 <.001 [.10, .33] Time -.04 -1.21 .23 [-.11 .03] -.42 -9.18 <.001 [-.50, -.33] -.16 -2.86 .005 [-.27, -.05] Achievement Greed x Time interaction .03 (.04) 0.88 (1.04) .38 (.30) [-.04, .10] ([-.03, .11]) .01 (.04) 0.25 (1.25) .80 (.21) [-.07, .10] ([-.02, .10]) .02 (.04) 0.38 (0.76) .71 (.45) [-.09, .13] ([-.06, .14]) 105 Academic Achievement Motivation, interaction with personal standards Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .12 2.77 .006 [.03, .21] .24 3.18 .002 [.57, .84] .39 5.65 <.001 [.26, .52] Achievement Motivation .15 (.04) 3.24 (1.20) .001 (.23) [.06, .23] ([-.02, .10]) .02 (-.01) 0.31 (-0.17) .76 (.87) [-.12, .17] ([-.15, .13]) .11 (-.01) 1.52 (-0.27) .13 (.78) [-.03, .24] ([-.09, .07]) Self-Esteem .23 5.97 <.001 [.15, .30] -.06 -0.85 .40 [-.19, .07] .14 2.30 .02 [.02, .26] Standards .73 17.22 <.001 [.65, .81] .31 4.30 <.001 [.17, .46] 31 4.60 <.001 [.18, .44] Achievement Motivation x Standards -.02 (-.05) -0.41 (-1.70) .68 (.09) [-.11, .07] ([-.12, .01]) -.18 (-.15) -2.47 (-2.18) .01 (.03) [-.32, -.04] ([-.28, -.02]) -.07 (.01) -0.98 (0.36) .33 (.72) [-.19, .06] ([-.06, .09]) Time -.19 -6.41 <.001 [-.25, -.13] -.27 -5.84 <.001 [-.36, -.18] -.47 -10.69 <.001 [-.56, -.39] Achievement Motivation x Time interaction -.04 (-.05) -1.41 (-2.09) .16 (.04) [-.10, .02] ([-.10, -.004]) -.01 (.01) -0.32 (0.18) .75 (.86) [-.11, .08] ([-.08, .09]) -.05 (.01) -1.04 (0.54) .30 (.59) [-.13, .04] ([-.04, .06]) Achievement Motivation x Time x Standards interaction -.01 (.03) -0.48 (1.06) .63 (.29) [-.08, .05] ([-.02, .07]) .05 (.06) 1.14 (1.44) .26 (.15) [-.04, .14] ([-.02, .14]) -.01 (-.03) -0.25 (-1.19) .80 (.24) [-.09, .07] ([-.08, .02]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .05 0.63 .53 [-.09, .19] .33 4.83 <.001 [.20, .46] .13 1.78 .08 [-.01, .27] Achievement Motivation .01 (.003) 0.10 (0.05) .92 (.96) [-.13, .15] ([-.13, .14]) .12 (.02) 1.69 (0.40) .09 (.69) [-.02, .25] ([-.08, .12]) .08 (.03) 1.14 (0.39) .26 (.70) [-.06, .22] ([-.11, .16]) Self-Esteem -.31 -4.61 <.001 [-.44, -.18] .25 4.12 <.001 [.13, .36] .20 3.44 <.001 [.09, .31] Standards .10 1.52 .13 [-.03, .24] .31 4.66 <.001 [.18, .44] .13 1.89 .06 [-.003, .27] Achievement Motivation x Standards -.09 (-.07) -1.30 (-1.11) .20 (.27) [-.22, .04] ([-.20, .06]) .01 (.07) 0.11 (1.51) .91 (.13) [-.12, .13] ([-.02, .17]) -.13 (-.10) -1.84 (-1.46) .07 (.15) [-.27, .01] ([-.22, .03]) Time -.05 -1.24 .22 [-.12, .03] -.41 -9.44 <.001 [-.50, -.33] -.16 -2.98 .003 [-.27, -.06] Achievement Motivation x Time interaction .02 (.02) 0.43 (0.42) .67 (.67) [-.06, .09] ([-.06, .09]) .01 (.06) 0.18 (1.78) .86 (.08) [-.08, .09] ([-.01, .12]) .01 (.04) 0.26 (0.83) .79 (.41) [-.09, .12] ([-.06, .14]) Achievement Motivation x Time x Standards interaction -.03 (-.03) -0.79 (-0.91) .43 (.36) [-.10, .04] ([-.10, .04]) .01 (-.01) 0.24 (-0.18) .81 (.86) [-.07, .09] ([-.07, .05]) .16 (.15) 3.03 (3.00) .003 (.003) [.06, .26] ([.05, .25]) 106 Achievement Greed, interaction with personal standards Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .34 5.15 <.001 [.21, .47] .24 3.12 .002 [.09, .38] .39 5.66 <.001 [.26, .53] Achievement Greed .12 (.04) 1.69 (1.26) .09 (.21) [-.02, .25] ([-.02, .11]) .21 (.16) 2.63 (2.15) .009 (.03) [.05, .36] ([.02, .30]) .11 (.01) 1.50 (0.29) .13 (.77) [-.03, .25] ([-.07, .09]) Self-Esteem .27 4.75 <.001 [.16, .39] -.03 -0.45 .65 [-.16, .10] .16 2.52 .01 [.04, .28] Standards .40 6.20 <.001 [.28, .53] .32 4.35 <.001 [.17, .46] 31 4.67 <.001 [.18, .44] Achievement Greed x Standards -.08 (-.02) -1.31 (-0.65) .19 (.52) [-.21, .04] ([-.08, .04]) .08 (.09) 1.11 (1.32) .27 (.19) [-.06, .22] ([-.04, .22]) -.04 (.02) -0.64 (0.63) .53 (.53) [-.17, .09] ([-.05, .10]) Time -.42 -9.10 <.001 [-.51, -.33] -.27 -5.88 <.001 [-.36, -.18] -.47 -10.68 <.001 [-.56, -.39] Achievement Greed x Time interaction -.05 (-.05) -1.16 (-1.81) .25 (.07) [-.14, .04] ([-.09, .003]) -.06 (-.05) -1.32 (-1.22) .19 (.22) [-.15, .03] ([-.13, .03]) -.02 (.02) -0.42 (0.92) .68 (.36) [-.10, .07] ([-.03, .07]) Achievement Greed x Time x Standards interaction .04 (.04) 0.94 (1.58) .35 (.12) [-.04, .12] ([-.01, .08]) -.05 (-.04) -1.06 (-1.12) .29 (.26) [-.13, .04] ([-.12, .03]) -.0003 (-.03) -0.01 (-1.28) .99 (.20) [-.08, .08] ([-.08, .02]) Negative Affect Pleasantness Activation Coefficient β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .04 0.60 .55 [-.10, .18] .34 4.89 <.001 [.20, .47] .13 1.81 .07 [-.01, .27] Achievement Greed .13 (.11) 1.72 (1.46) .09 (.15) [-.02, .27] ([-.03, .25]) .01 (-.06) 0.20 (-1.23) .84 (.22) [-.12, .15] ([-.16, .04]) .10 (.06) 1.37 (0.85) .17 (.39) [-.04, .25] ([-.08, .20]) Self-Esteem -.29 -4.25 <.001 [-.42, -.16] .25 4.11 <.001 [.13, .37] .22 3.70 <.001 [.10, .33] Standards .11 1.69 .09 [-.02, .24] .32 4.74 <.001 [.19 .44] .14 1.97 .049 [.002, .28] Achievement Greed x Standards .05 (.04) 0.69 (0.59) .49 (.56) [-.08, .18] ([-.09, .17]) .10 (-.05) -1.52 (-0.97) .13 (.33) [-.23, .03] ([-.14, .05]) -.18 (-.15) -2.61 (-2.28) .009 (.02) [-.31, -.05] ([-.27, -.02]) Time -.04 -1.17 .24 [-.11, .03] -.41 -9.45 <.001 [-.50, -.33] -.16 -2.86 .005 [-.26, -.05] Achievement Greed x Time interaction .02 (.03) 0.58 (0.69) .56 (.49) [-.05, .09] ([-.05, .10]) .01 (.04) 0.15 (1.28) .88 (.20) [-.08, .09] ([-.02, .10]) -.01 (.01) -0.25 (0.13) .80 (.90) [-.12, .09] ([-.10, .11]) Achievement Greed x Time x Standards interaction .05 (.05) 1.44 (1.61) .15 (.11) [-.02, .11] ([-.01, .12]) .01 (-.01) 0.26 (-0.48) .80 (.63) [-.07, .09] ([-.07, .04]) .12 (.10) 2.37 (2.13) .02 (.03) [.02, .22] ([.01, .20]) 107 Notes: For authentic and hubristic pride, numbers in parentheses control for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. For positive affect, pleasantness, activation, numbers in parentheses control for authentic pride. For negative affect, numbers in parentheses control for hubristic pride. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Consistent with Study 10, we found that people high in academic achievement motivation felt elevated authentic pride in response to achievements, but this relationship did not hold controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation. This was found both among the subsample whose grade met or exceeded their personal standards and when including personal standards as an interaction term with the entire sample. In contrast to Study 10, achievement greed did not predict elevated authentic pride on the day participants learned about their grades, with or without controlling for related positive emotions and with both analysis methods. Also consistent with Study 10, we did not find significant interactions between achievement motivation or achievement greed and time, indicating that people high in achievement motivation or achievement greed did not experience a significant decline in authentic pride over time. That said, after controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation, the interaction between achievement motivation and time became significant with both analysis methods, suggesting that their feelings of authentic pride, specifically, might decline over time after achievements whereas their feelings of positive affect, pleasantness, and activation do not decline as much. This is further supported by the lack of significant interactions indicating a decline in those three affective states over time. In sum, this study might provide some tentative evidence that people high in academic achievement motivation show a similar decline of authentic pride in response to academic achievements as observed with greedy people and acquisitions, but future studies must seek to replicate these associations before drawing conclusions because suppressor effects are notoriously unreliable (Paulhus et al., 2004) and the 108 same findings did not emerge in Study 10 with two different measures of achievement motivation. Regarding hubristic pride, we replicated the findings of Study 10 such that only achievement greed predicted elevated hubristic pride at acquisition, and this effect emerged across both analysis methods and held controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation, whereas achievement motivation did not predict elevated hubristic pride upon achievement. Consistent with Study 10, neither achievement motivation nor achievement greed predicted a decline in hubristic pride over time. Importantly, we did not replicate the findings for positive affect that we found in Study 10 here. Whereas achievement motivation and achievement greed predicted elevated positive affect at the moment of achievement in Study 10, we found no evidence of this in this study for either achievement motivation or achievement greed with either analysis method. We also found no significant relationships with pleasantness for either measure with either analysis method, which is inconsistent with Study 10 for achievement motivation but consistent for achievement greed. Discussion Study 11 was designed to provide additional evidence for the hypotheses proposed for Study 10 with a more rigorous method. We found some consistencies between the two studies: in both studies, we found that people high in achievement motivation reported greater authentic pride at the moment of achievement, but in both studies, this relationship did not hold controlling for related positive affective states. We also found that neither achievement motivation nor achievement greed predicted a decline in authentic pride over time in both studies, but we found a suppressor effect in Study 11 suggesting these feelings did decline over time after controlling 109 for related emotions. Furthermore, both studies showed that achievement greed predicts elevated hubristic pride at the moment of achievement, whereas achievement motivation does not, and neither one predicts a decline in hubristic pride over time. There are also noteworthy inconsistencies between studies. In Study 10, achievement greed predicted elevated authentic pride at the moment of achievement, and this was robust to controlling for positive affect, pleasantness, and activation, but this did not occur in Study 11 with or without controls. Similarly, the findings for positive affect and pleasantness were not replicated between studies. Overall, the results of these studies paint a complicated picture in terms of how people high in achievement motivation and achievement greed respond emotionally to their achievements and how this changes over time. More research is necessary to determine the reliable and robust patterns of emotional response that occur for people high in these dispositions. Nevertheless, these studies more clearly indicate that the process observed for greed and acquisitions in prior studies does not seem to be an instance of an emotional process that occurs more broadly among highly motivated people across domains. Instead, the 12 studies conducted thus far suggest that greedy people’s tendency to respond emotionally to acquisitions with a robust, short-lived boost in authentic pride is unique to them. That said, one commonality found between greed and achievement greed across studies was the robust, elevated level of hubristic pride upon achievement that does not seem to dissipate over time. This finding likely represents that same trait-level association between greed and hubristic pride, highlighted in Studies 4 and 5, suggesting that elevated hubristic pride across contexts co-occurs with insatiability for both money and material things and personal achievements. Future research might explore why 110 hubristic pride and insatiability are linked in this way and examine if this association replicates in additional contexts. Chapter Summary In Chapter 4, I presented four studies examining the boundary conditions of the process observed in Studies 1-5. Study 8 revealed that a similar emotional process seems to occur for both purchases and gifts, suggesting that greedy people’s goal to acquire more is unconcerned with the mode of acquisition. They do not need to be the ones making the purchase to feel pride, but rather, they seem to feel pride by acquiring in multiple different ways. Nevertheless, although Study 8 provided tentative evidence that the way by which greedy people acquire something is irrelevant, more research is necessary to replicate this pattern, ideally with a study design that can overcome the limitations of the recall method used here. Study 9 showed that greedy people do not experience a short-lived boost of pride in response to personal achievements. This indicates that greedy people do not feel pride in a unique way across contexts; consistent with our theoretical model, this pattern only emerges for acquisitions, which we propose results from greedy people’s chronic goal to acquire more. Given that greedy people respond to achievements much like everyone else, but respond to acquisitions differently, the dynamic emotional process uncovered in these studies might be a crucial emotional mechanism that helps explain why greedy people are uniquely motivated to acquire, but not uniquely motivated to achieve for its own sake. Studies 10 and 11 tested whether this emotional process occurs more broadly among highly motivation people across domains, and whether people who self-define as greedy for things besides money and material goods show the same emotional responses to their targets of interest. We tested this specifically by studying the emotional responses to achievements among 111 people high in achievement motivation and those high in “achievement greed”. Results from these studies did not provide much clarity regarding how people high in these dispositions respond emotionally to achievements, yet they simultaneously demonstrated that the same process found for greed in prior studies does not generalize to these dispositions. As a result, it seems that this dynamic emotional process is unique to greed rather than symptomatic of strong motivation across domains, and there is no evidence that greed, and the associated emotional processes, can be easily generalized as a form of motivation that can be applied to targets besides money and material things. That said, a key limitation of both Studies 10 and 11 is a rudimentary adaptation of the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b) to apply to achievements, rather than a rigorously developed measure of achievement greed. Recently, Weib and colleagues (2023) developed measurement tools for domain-specific greed, including greed for performance, which is quite similar to achievement greed as conceptualized here. For example, one item on this scale is, “I push myself from one achievement to the next”. It would be fruitful to replicate these studies with this measure of performance greed to examine whether different results emerge with this improved measure. 112 Chapter 5: Is greedy acquisition driven by a desire to increase pride at times when it is low? In Chapter 5, I report three studies that test an important implication of the theoretical model. We propose that greedy people seek to acquire, in part, to regulate their self-esteem by boosting feelings of authentic pride. If this is the case, then it is possible that greedy people are most motivated to acquire when feeling negatively about themselves because these are times when they are most in need of positive emotions. We test this possibility in multiple ways across three studies. In Study 12, we experimentally manipulate high or low feelings of authentic pride and test whether greedy people manipulated to feel low authentic pride show a stronger desire to acquire. In Studies 13 and 14, we examine data from Studies 4 and 5, respectively, wherein participants reported their emotional state both on days when they made purchases and days without making purchases. Specifically, we test whether low pride or elevated negative emotions on one day predict making a purchase on the following day for greedy people. STUDY 12 In Study 12, we tested our theoretical model by examining whether pride has a causal impact on greedy people’s desire to acquire, such that greedy people become more acquisitive in response to feelings of low pride, and less acquisitive in response to feelings of high pride. Interestingly, prior studies have shown that authentic pride tends to make people more, not less, interested in purchasing luxury goods (McFerran, Aquino, & Tracy, 2014). If our account is correct, then, greedy people may respond to pride feelings in the opposite way from the average person; whereas most people feel licensed by pride to treat themselves (McFerran et al., 2014), these same feelings may decrease greedy individuals’ typically insatiable desire to acquire by providing the emotional reward they seek through acquisitions. We tested this pre-registered hypothesis in Study 12 by manipulating authentic pride, then asking participants to view images 113 of various consumer products and report their desire to purchase each (https://bit.ly/41q6R97). We also included a behavioral measure of acquisition, by offering participants the opportunity to earn raffle tickets to win an Amazon.ca gift card—giving them the means to purchase the items they viewed—by volunteering to complete a difficult task at the end of the study. We targeted authentic rather than hubristic pride in this study because it is strongly and positively related to self-esteem, whereas hubristic pride is negatively related to self-esteem (Tracy & Robins, 2007; Tracy et al., 2009). Therefore, if greedy individuals use acquisitions as a way of regulating low-self-esteem, they are most likely to do so because of the boosts of authentic pride these purchases bring. This would also be consistent with Studies 2 and 3, which found that self-esteem moderated the intensity of both the boost and drop of greedy people’s feelings of authentic, but not hubristic, pride in their purchases. We also again measured trait materialism, to ensure that observed effects on participants’ desire for material products were not attributable to this disposition. Method Participants. Five hundred and one undergraduate students were recruited to participate in the current study. Following the criteria specified in our pre-registration, 45 participants were excluded from analyses for failing an attention check. This resulted in a final sample of 464 participants (76% female; age range = 18-40, Median = 20 years; cultural background = 62% Asian, 26% white, 2% Hispanic/Latinx, 1% Black, 7% prefer not to answer). A power analysis indicated that a sample of 343 participants would be sufficient to detect a between-condition difference of size Cohen’s q = .30 in the relationship between greed and desirability ratings.12 As 12 As detailed in our pre-registration, we originally designed the study with the goal of detecting a smaller effect size of r = .15 (q = .15), but after data had been collected, we learned that the power analysis we used was meant for analyses with two continuous predictors, rather than one continuous and one categorical predictor. Our pre- 114 described in our pre-registration, we continued collecting data until the end of the academic term, even though we surpassed our pre-registered sample size. Procedure. Participants were informed that the study was investigating the influence of emotions on brand attitudes. They first completed the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens et al., 2015b; α = .76), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965; α = .90), and the six-item Material Values Scale (Richins, 2004; α = .79). They also reported demographics at this time, so that we could show them gender-targeted consumer goods. Next, participants were randomly assigned to either a High or Low Authentic Pride condition. In the high pride condition, participants completed a relived emotion task (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983) in which they were asked to write for five minutes about “an occasion when you felt PRIDE because you were doing really well in your courses as a result of your hard work and effort. This should be a time when you just felt good about your accomplishments in school – but not necessarily superior to any of your classmates”. In the low pride condition, participants were asked to write for five minutes about “an occasion when you DID NOT feel PRIDE because you were not doing very well in your courses. This may have been a time when you weren’t working as hard as you could have, and just not putting in the effort you needed to succeed. As a result, you just did not feel very good about your accomplishments in school – though not necessarily inferior to any of your classmates”. We included specific information about effort attributions and an absence of perceived superiority because both of these features differentiate authentic pride from hubristic pride (Tracy & Robins, 2007). They then reported their current feelings of authentic pride as a manipulation check (Tracy & Robins, 2007; α = .94). registered sample size of N = 343 therefore had the statistical power to detect a difference of q = .30 and our final sample of N = 464 provided power to detect a difference of q = .265. 115 After completing the emotion induction, participants viewed Amazon.ca listings for four consumer products that cost between $50 and $100 (see https://bit.ly/3KyynKD for stimuli). The products were a pair of boots, a jacket (both targeted to the participant’s gender identity), a pair of over-ear headphones, and an e-reader tablet; these were chosen on the basis of having been listed as non-essential items acquired by undergraduate participants in a separate study (Study 9). After viewing each product, participants reported how desirable they found it and how much they wanted to buy it at that moment (αs ranged from .80-.90 across products). Participants also reported their anticipated feelings of authentic and hubristic pride (Tracy & Robins, 2007; αs for authentic pride ranged from .91-.94, αs for hubristic pride ranged from .88-.91) and positive and negative affect (Watson et al., 1988; αs for PA ranged from .92-.94, αs for NA ranged from .89-.91), if they were to purchase each product at this time. Finally, participants were given the option to complete a spot-the-difference task to earn raffle tickets for a $50 Amazon.ca gift card. This task involved viewing two extremely similar pictures and searching for subtle differences between them, and has been used in past research to measure intrinsic motivation (e.g., Woolley & Fishbach, 2018). All participants were given one raffle ticket for participating in the study, and could earn an additional ticket for each difference found. Participants were told that the pictures contained seven differences, but in fact there were only five; our critical dependent variable was the amount of time participants spent searching, reflecting a willingness to work for the opportunity to win a gift card that could be used to acquire something desirable. Results We first examined mean levels of authentic pride in the two conditions to assess the efficacy of our manipulation. A Welch’s t-test confirmed that participants in the high pride 116 condition, M = 3.05, SD = .87, felt significantly greater authentic pride than those in the low pride condition, M = 2.37, SD = .87, t(462) = 8.52, d = 0.79, p < .001. Did greedy people’s ratings of desirability vary based on whether they were feeling high or low pride? We next collapsed ratings of the desirability of each product and wanting to purchase it into an index reflecting overall desirability. We regressed this desirability index onto greed, experimental condition (dummy coded so that high pride served as the reference group), and an interaction term between greed and experimental condition. In this analysis and all others described below, we included gender identity as a covariate, given the gender-specificity of two of the products. In contrast to our pre-registered predictions, no significant interaction between greed and condition emerged, β = .12, t(459) = 1.31, p = .19; but, given our specific pre-registered hypotheses, we nonetheless examined the simple slopes for the relation between greed and desirability in each condition. We found no effect of greed on desirability in the high pride condition, β = -.01, t(459) = -0.08, p = .93, but a marginally significant effect in the predicted direction in the low pride condition, β = .12, t(459) = 1.74, p = .08. We also conducted this analysis without controlling for gender identity and found a nearly identical interaction, β = .12, t(459) = 1.27, p = .21. We next conducted the same analysis including materialism as a covariate. A main effect of materialism emerged, β = -.18, t(459) = -2.89, p = .004, indicating that highly materialistic individuals judged the products as generally less desirable, regardless of experimental condition. The interaction between greed and condition remained unchanged in this analysis, β = .13, t(459) = 1.42, p = .16, but including materialism as a covariate resulted in a significant effect of greed 117 on desirability in the low pride condition, β = .24, t(459) = 3.06, p = .002, and, as expected, no significant effect in the high pride condition, β = .11, t(459) = 1.50, p = .14. Given that Studies 2 and 3 showed that greedy people with low self-esteem experienced a more intense boost and decline in pride, we next tested whether the hypothesized pattern was stronger among greedy people with low self-esteem and weaker among greedy people with high self-esteem. As in prior studies, greedy people tended to report low self-esteem, r(462) = -.27, p < .001. We conducted a regression analysis in which desirability was regressed onto greed, self-esteem, experimental condition, and a three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and condition; see Table 19 for full results from this regression model. We found the expected three-way interaction, β = -.24, t(455) = -2.65, p = .008, and including materialism as a covariate did not significantly change this interaction term, β = -.22, t(459) = -2.49, p = .01. We next conducted simple slopes analysis using the pequod package in R (Mirisola & Seta, 2016) to assess the effect of greed on product desirability within each condition for individuals low (-1 SD) and high (+1 SD) in self-esteem. As shown in Figure 7, when manipulated to feel high authentic pride, greedy people with low self-esteem judged the products as significantly less desirable than individuals low in both greed and self-esteem, β = -.21, t(227) = -2.06, p = .04. When manipulated to feel low authentic pride, however, greedy people with low self-esteem judged those same products to be marginally more desirable than did individuals low in both greed and self-esteem, β = .16, t(229) = 1.73, p = .09. In contrast, greedy people with high self-esteem did not differ in their desirability ratings compared to individuals low in greed with high self-esteem in either the high pride condition, β = .10, t(227) = 1.19, p = .24, or the low pride condition, β = .01, t(229) = 0.94, p = .94. 118 Table 19. Regression model testing the interaction between greed, self-esteem, and pride condition, predicting consumer product desirability, Study 12. Notes: Condition is dummy coded such that high pride is the reference group. All coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. Bolded values indicate statistical significance, p < .05. Coefficient β t p 95% CI (Intercept) .02 0.29 .77 [-.12, .16] Greed -.05 -0.78 .44 [-.18, .08] Pride Condition -.16 -1.67 .10 [-.35, .03] Self-esteem -.09 -1.35 .18 [-.22, .04] Gender .23 2.11 .04 [.02, .44] Greed x Self-esteem interaction .16 2.38 .02 [.03, .29] Greed x Condition interaction .13 1.38 .17 [-.06, .32] Condition x Self-esteem interaction .02 0.21 .83 [-.17, .21] Greed x Self-esteem x Condition interaction -.24 -2.65 .008 [-.41, -.06] 119 Figure 7 Left: Interaction between greed and self-esteem predicting product desirability for participants in Low Authentic Pride Condition; Right: Same interaction for participants in High Authentic Pride Condition; Study 12. Notes: Desirability of consumer products is plotted in terms of standardized units. 120 How did greedy people expect to feel if they were to acquire the products at this time? We next examined whether greedy people anticipated different levels of authentic pride when imagining purchasing the products in the different conditions. To do so, anticipated authentic pride at purchase was regressed onto greed, experimental condition, and an interaction term between greed and condition. No significant interaction between greed and condition emerged, β = .14, t(459) = 1.55, p = .12. Examining the simple slopes for the relation between greed and anticipated authentic pride in each condition revealed that greed did not significantly predict anticipated authentic pride in the high pride condition, β = -.05, t(459) = -0.78, p = .43, nor in the low pride condition, β = .09, t(459) = 1.39, p = .17. Although we did not observe significant differences between conditions in the anticipated emotions of greedy people, this analysis did not account for the perceived desirability of each purchase. Given that perceiving a product as desirable is likely pivotal in anticipating positive emotions upon acquiring it, we next examined whether greedy people anticipated feeling authentic pride in response to acquiring the products to the extent that they judged those products as desirable. This analysis, therefore, examines whether our hypothesized effect of experimental condition on anticipated authentic pride applies specifically to acquiring desirable products, and not to products deemed undesirable. To do so, we regressed anticipated authentic pride onto greed, desirability, experimental condition, and a three-way interaction term between greed, desirability, and condition. No significant three-way interaction emerged, β = -.004, t(459) = -0.05, p = .96, but a significant two-way interaction between greed and desirability emerged, β = .15, t(459) = 2.76, p = .006. Given that there was no difference between conditions, we conducted follow-up simple slopes analyses controlling for experimental condition rather than incorporating it into the model 121 as an interaction term. Simple slopes analyses (Mirisola & Seta, 2016) indicated that greedy people anticipated feeling significantly greater authentic pride for purchases they found highly desirable (+1 SD) than did less greedy people, β = .16, t(459) = 2.63, p = .009, and they anticipated feeling less authentic pride for purchases viewed as undesirable (-1 SD) than did less greedy people, β = -.14, t(459) = -2.62, p = .009. This interaction held controlling for anticipated positive affect, β = .07, t(459) = 3.71, p < .001, indicating that greedy people expect to feel authentic pride from desirable acquisitions, independent of any positive affect they expect to feel. In fact, when examining greedy people’s anticipated positive affect from purchasing desirable products controlling for their anticipated authentic pride, a significant interaction emerged in the opposite direction, β = -.04, t(459) = -2.26, p = .02, suggesting that greedy people do not expect to derive positive affective benefits from their purchases beyond authentic pride. These findings are highly consistent with the findings from Studies 1-5 regarding greedy people’s emotional responses to making non-essential purchases, which are by definition desirable (i.e., “something you wanted but did not need”). They are also consistent with the findings from Studies 6-7, which suggested that greedy people are aware of how this process unfolds before the drop in pride occurs. Thus, Study 12 provides further support that greedy people uniquely feel authentic pride in response to acquisition and they are aware of their own emotional response pattern. Were greedy people more willing to work for raffle tickets when feeling low authentic pride? Finally, we examined whether greedy people feeling low authentic pride would spend more time working on the spot-the-difference task than greedy people feeling high authentic pride. We regressed time spent on the spot-the-difference task onto greed, experimental condition (dummy coded so that high pride served as the reference group), and an interaction 122 between greed and experimental condition. Of the 464 participants in this experiment, 306 (66%) chose to complete the spot-the-difference task. The participants who chose not to complete the task were assigned a time of zero seconds for this dependent variable. Results revealed no significant interaction between greed and condition predicting time spent on the spot-the-difference task, β = -.13, t(440) = -1.33, p = .18. Examining the simple slopes for the relation between greed and time spent in each condition revealed that greed did not significantly predict time spent on the task in the high pride condition, β = .06, t(218) = 0.82, p = .42, nor in the low pride condition, β = -.07, t(222) = -1.06, p = .29. Discussion In Study 12, we tested whether feeling pride reduces greedy people’s desire to acquire. Although results did not support our primary hypothesis in terms of a main effect, we did observe the predicted effect among greedy individuals with low self-esteem. Specifically, greedy people with low self-esteem who were manipulated to feel low authentic pride reported somewhat greater desire for various consumer products compared to individuals low in both greed and self-esteem. In contrast, when manipulated to feel high authentic pride, greedy people with low self-esteem desired those same products significantly less than did individuals low in greed and self-esteem. This pattern of results—the presence of a predicted interaction with self-esteem but absence of a main effect—is consistent with the pattern that emerged in Study 3, which drew its sample from the same population, suggesting that authentic pride may drive greedy acquisition only among greedy people with low self-esteem in undergraduate samples. Thus, these results support our theoretical expectation that greedy people use acquisition as an instrumental means to regulate their self-esteem. Greedy people with low self-esteem feeling high authentic pride showed a diminished desire to acquire, presumably because the 123 manipulation provided the emotional reward that they would normally seek from acquisition. In contrast, these individuals desired such acquisitions marginally more when manipulated to feel low pride, presumably because acquiring something would provide a (short-lived) boost of the emotion they were lacking. It is also important to note that predicted effects did not emerge for the behavioral measure we included, assessing how much time participants spent working for raffle tickets that might allow them to buy the items they viewed. The absence of an effect on this measure may be attributable to limitations in that task, namely that the opportunity to earn raffle tickets that provide a small chance of winning a gift card is a fairly indirect and improbable route to acquisition. Also, one-third of participants chose not to complete the task at all, which may have been due to this task occurring at the very end of the study when participants likely had other commitments. Nonetheless, it is also possible that the desire to acquire, observed here among greedy individuals with low self-esteem who were manipulated to feel low authentic pride, did not translate into actual acquisition-oriented behaviors; future research is needed to address this possibility. Study 12 also found that greedy people accurately anticipate that they will feel authentic pride in response to desirable acquisitions, and this forecast is unique to authentic pride; they did not anticipate increased positive affect after controlling for authentic pride. This finding suggests that greedy people understand the emotional benefits they receive from acquisitions, consistent with the results of Studies 6-7. Importantly, this study has two key limitations. First, we used a standard set of products in this study, so it is possible that many participants did not find these products desirable and would be unlikely to purchase them in their daily life. Second, we measured their desire to 124 acquire rather than actual acquisition behaviors. We address both limitations in Studies 13 and 14 by analyzing data from Studies 4 and 5 where participants reported their general emotional state daily and specific emotional reactions to purchases they actually make. This allowed us to test whether low pride led greedy people to make a purchase the following day, and we can also investigate whether negative affect leads to acquisition given that low pride is not the only undesirable affective state that greedy people might aim to resolve with acquisition. STUDY 13 Study 13 uses data from Study 4 to test whether low pride or elevated negative emotions lead greedy people to make a purchase the following day. Method Participants. Participants for Study 13 come from Study 4, but this sample is larger than the sample reported for Study 4 because participants need not make a purchase in order to be included in these analyses. The necessary inclusion criterion here is that participants completed the daily survey on at least two consecutive days during the week they received daily surveys in the study, regardless of whether they made a purchase or not on those two days. This led to a sample of 1643 participants for these analyses (62% women; age range = 18 – 89, median = 39). Procedure. As described in Study 4, participants in this study received daily emails each day for one week following Part 1 in which they reported whether they had engaged in nine different activities that day, one of which was making a non-essential purchase. If participants made a purchase, they reported their emotional response to the purchase; otherwise, they reported their general emotional state that day using the same emotion measures as in Study 4. Results 125 To test whether feelings of low pride or elevated negative emotions predict making a purchase the following day among greedy people, data from the week-long diary period were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We tested our predictions by conducting mixed-effect logistic regression models wherein a binary purchase variable (1 = purchase made that day, 0 = no purchase that day) was regressed onto greed, their feelings of authentic pride the day prior, and an interaction between these two variables. To account for the nested structure of the data and for consistency with prior studies, we also included a random intercept for participant and a random slope of greed as terms in the model. We repeated this analysis for all five emotion variables measured in this study (see Table 20). We also conducted these models including self-esteem as a predictor and a three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and prior day emotions given that Studies 2, 3, and 12 suggested that our proposed process is more pronounced among greedy people low in self-esteem (see Table 21). 126 Table 20 Mixed Effects Models Examining the Interaction Between Dispositional Greed and Emotions the day prior predicting making a non-essential purchase, Study 13. Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.96 -20.28 <.001 [-3.24, -2.67] -2.96 -19.34 <.001 [-3.25, -2.66] -2.96 -20.09 <.001 [-3.25, -2.67] Greed .42 4.07 <.001 [.22, .62] .40 3.74 <.001 [.19, .61] .42 4.06 <.001 [.22, .62] Prior Day Emotion .16 2.40 .02 [.03, .30] .14 1.61 .11 [-.03, .32] .14 2.07 .04 [.01, .27] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.03 -0.50 .62 [-.15, .09] -.06 -0.98 .33 [-.18, .06] -.04 -0.59 .55 [-.15, .08] Negative Affect Pleasantness Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.97 -19.38 <.001 [-3.27, -2.67] -2.97 -19.46 <.001 [-3.27, -2.67] Greed .41 3.79 <.001 [.20, .62] .43 3.96 <.001 [.22, .64] Prior Day Emotion .04 0.53 .60 [-.10, .18] .09 1.22 .22 [-.05, .22] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.01 -0.20 .84 [-.11, .09] .001 0.02 .99 [-.11, .11] 127 Table 21 Mixed Effects Models Examining the Interaction Between Dispositional Greed, Self-Esteem, and Emotions the day prior predicting making a non-essential purchase, Study 13. Negative Affect Pleasantness Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.92 -19.20 <.001 [-3.22, -2.62] -2.97 -19.20 <.001 [-3.28, -2.68] Greed .40 3.74 <.001 [.19, .61] .43 3.84 <.001 [.21, .65] Self-Esteem .07 0.83 .41 [-.09, .23] -.02 -0.27 .79 [-.20, .15] Prior Day Emotion .11 1.30 .19 [-.06, .28] .10 1.19 .24 [-.07, .27] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.04 -0.51 .61 [-.17, .10] .0001 0.002 >.99 [-.15, .15] Greed x Self-esteem interaction .01 0.11 .91 [-.13, .14] .01 0.08 .94 [-.14, .15] Greed x Self-esteem x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.05 -1.14 .25 [-.14, .04] -.01 -0.13 .90 [-.10, .09] Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.89 -20.53 <.001 [-3.17, -2.62] -2.94 -19.50 <.001 [-3.24, -2.65] -2.94 -19.74 <.001 [-3.23, -2.65] Greed .37 3.32 <.001 [.15, .58] .41 3.76 <.001 [.20, .63] .41 3.79 <.001 [.20, .62] Self-Esteem -.12 -1.25 .21 [-.30, .07] .04 0.53 .60 [-.11, .19] -.06 -0.69 .49 [-.23, .11] Prior Day Emotion .24 2.76 .006 [.07, .41] .15 1.68 .09 [-.03, .33] .17 2.07 .04 [.01, .33] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.06 -0.79 .43 [-.22, .09] -.06 -0.98 .33 [-.19, .06] -.05 -0.69 .49 [-.19, .09] Greed x Self-esteem interaction .06 0.73 .46 [-.10, .22] .01 0.09 .93 [-.11, .12] .04 0.53 .60 [-.10, .17] Greed x Self-esteem x Prior Day Emotion interaction .01 0.10 .92 [-.11, .12] -.01 -0.11 .91 [-.12, .11] .001 0.03 .98 [-.11, .12] 128 Across all five emotions, we did not observe any significant interactions with greed such that we found no evidence that greedy people were more likely to buy something based on their emotional state the prior day. Including self-esteem as an interaction term did not change any of these results or reveal significant three-way interactions between greed, self-esteem, and prior day emotions. Thus, Study 13 does not support the implication of our theoretical model that low pride or elevated negative emotions the prior day would lead greedy people to acquire something. Consistent with theoretical notions of greed (e.g., Seuntjens et al., 2015b), we found that greedy people were more likely to make purchases during their time in the study compared to people low in greed. Also consistent with past research (McFerran et al., 2014), we found that feelings of authentic pride on the prior day led participants to make a purchase, suggesting that participants might have been rewarding themselves with a non-essential purchase for an accomplishment that made them feel authentic pride. We also found that elevated positive affect the day prior predicted making a purchase, which is consistent with the notion that positive affect leads people to view the environment through “rose-colored glasses” such that things seem generally more desirable when in a positive mood (Griskevicius et al., 2010). Discussion Study 13 did not provide evidence that greedy people are more likely to buy things in response to negative emotional experiences the day prior. We test this possibility again in Study 14 to gather more evidence. STUDY 14 Method 129 Participants. Participants for Study 14 come from Study 5, but this sample is larger than the sample reported for Study 5 because participants need not make a purchase in order to be included in these analyses. The necessary inclusion criterion here is that participants completed the daily survey on at least two consecutive days during the week they received daily surveys in the study, regardless of whether they made a purchase or not on those two days. This led to a sample of 961 participants for these analyses (80% women; age range = 18 – 69, median = 20). Procedure. The procedure of this study is identical to Study 14. Results To test whether feelings of low pride or elevated negative emotions predict making a purchase the following day among greedy people, data from the week-long diary period were combined into a multi-level model with observations nested within participants. We tested our predictions by conducting mixed-effect logistic regression models wherein a binary purchase variable (1 = purchase made that day, 0 = no purchase that day) was regressed onto greed, their feelings of authentic pride the day prior, and an interaction between these two variables. To account for the nested structure of the data and for consistency with prior studies, we also included a random intercept for participant and a random slope of greed as terms in the model. We repeated this analysis for all five emotion variables measured in this study (see Table 22). We also conducted these models including self-esteem as a predictor and a three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and prior day emotions given that Studies 2, 3, and 13 suggested that our proposed process is more pronounced among greedy people low in self-esteem (see Table 23). 130 Table 22 Mixed Effects Models Examining the Interaction Between Dispositional Greed and Emotions the day Prior Predicting Making a Non-Essential Purchase, Study 14. Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.77 -14.14 <.001 [-3.15, -2.39] -2.83 -12.44 <.001 [-3.27, -2.38] -2.77 -13.78 <.001 [-3.16, -2.37] Greed .42 2.75 .006 [.12, .72] .47 2.90 .004 [.15, .79] .43 3.05 .002 [.15, .70] Prior Day Emotion .02 0.28 .78 [-.14, .18] -.11 -1.07 .29 [-.30, .09] .01 0.09 .93 [-.15, .17] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.10 -1.33 .19 [-.24, .05] .06 0.94 .34 [-.07, .19] -.06 -0.78 .44 [-.20, .09] Negative Affect Pleasantness Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.81 -12.49 <.001 [-3.25, -2.37] -2.78 -13.84 <.001 [-3.17, -2.39] Greed .46 2.54 .01 [.10, .81] .43 2.80 .005 [.13, .73] Prior Day Emotion -.09 -1.01 .31 [-.26, .08] .08 0.94 .22 [-.08, .23] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction .02 0.30 .76 [-.12, .17] -.08 -1.18 .24 [-.23, .06] 131 Table 23 Mixed Effects Models Examining the Interaction Between Dispositional Greed, Self-Esteem, and Emotions the day Prior Predicting Making a Non-Essential Purchase, Study 14. Negative Affect Pleasantness Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.81 -12.82 <.001 [-3.24, -2.38] -2.74 -15.86 <.001 [-3.08, -2.40] Greed .47 3.01 .003 [.16, .78] .38 2.56 .01 [.09, .66] Self-Esteem -.03 -0.26 .79 [-.22, .17] -.05 -0.57 .57 [-.24, .14] Prior Day Emotion -.09 -0.90 .37 [-.27, .10] .07 0.82 .41 [-.10, .24] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction .11 1.32 .19 [-.05, .26] -.17 -2.00 .045 [-.33, -.003] Greed x Self-esteem interaction .01 0.12 .91 [-.16, .18] .07 0.78 .80 [-.11, .25] Greed x Self-esteem x Prior Day Emotion interaction .16 2.50 .01 [.03, .29] -.15 -2.31 .02 [-.28, -.02] Authentic Pride Hubristic Pride Positive Affect Coefficient β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI β z p 95% CI (Intercept) -2.78 -14.55 <.001 [-3.15, -2.40] -2.84 -12.95 <.001 [-3.27, -2.41] -2.74 -14.50 <.001 [-3.11, -2.37] Greed .44 2.57 .01 [.10, .78] .47 3.02 .003 [.17, .78] .43 2.82 .005 [.13, .72] Self-Esteem .01 0.12 .91 [-.19, .21] .003 0.03 .97 [-.18, .19] .01 0.1 .88 [-.17, .20] Prior Day Emotion -.0001 -0.002 >.99 [-.18, .18] -.18 -1.67 .10 [-.39, .03] -.005 -0.06 .95 [-.18, .17] Greed x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.13 -1.55 .12 [-.30, .03] .11 1.63 .10 [-.02, .25] -.08 -1.00 .32 [-.23, .08] Greed x Self-esteem interaction .10 1.04 .30 [-.09, .29] .03 0.31 .76 [-.14, .19] .07 0.76 .45 [-.10, .23] Greed x Self-esteem x Prior Day Emotion interaction -.08 -1.17 .24 [-.21, .05] .11 2.01 .04 [.003, .21] -.06 -0.94 .35 [-.19, .07] 132 Consistent with Study 13, in the models without self-esteem, we did not observe any significant interactions between greed and prior day emotions predicting making a purchase on that day for any of the five emotional states measured in this study. In contrast to Study 13, however, including self-esteem as an interaction term did change some of these results. Notably, after accounting for self-esteem, we observed an interaction between greed and pleasantness consistent with our predictions such that greedy people were more likely to buy something the following day if they felt low pleasantness. We also observed three-way interactions between greed, self-esteem, and prior day hubristic pride, negative affect, and pleasantness. These interactions are more difficult to interpret than the two-way interaction described previously. Consistent with the two-way interaction for pleasantness, one possible interpretation of these three-way interactions is that greedy people with low self-esteem who felt low pleasantness were more likely to buy something the next day than their counterparts who did not feel low pleasantness that day. For negative affect and hubristic pride, these interactions suggest that greedy people with high self-esteem were more likely to buy something the next day if they felt elevated hubristic pride or negative affect that day. Nevertheless, there are other possible interpretations of this effect that are consistent with these statistical results; for example, it is also possible that greedy people with low self-esteem who felt low negative affect or low hubristic pride were more likely to buy something the next day than their counterparts who felt higher negative affect or hubristic pride. That said, in a model testing all three of these three-way-interactions simultaneously, they are all rendered non-significant (βHubristic Pride = .06, z = 0.91, p = .36; βNA = .08, z = 0.72, p = .47; βPleasantness = -.08, z = -0.95, p = .34), and Study 13 did not find any of these interactions, so these effects should be interpreted with extreme caution at this time. 133 As in Study 13 and consistent with theoretical notions of greed (e.g., Seuntjens et al., 2015b), we found that greedy people were more likely to make purchases during their time in the study compared to people low in greed. However, we did not replicate the finding from Study 13 showing that high levels of authentic pride or positive affect on the prior day led participants to make a purchase. Chapter Summary Chapter 5 tested an important implication from our theoretical model: the notion that greedy people will be especially motivated to acquire to alleviate negative emotions. We tested this possibility in two ways. First, we conducted an experiment in which high or low feelings of authentic pride were manipulated among participants, and they then rated various consumer products on their desirability. In Studies 13 and 14, we tested this implication naturalistically by examining whether negative emotional states the prior day led participants in daily diary studies to make a purchase the following day. Across these studies, we found very tentative support for these predictions at best. Study 12 did not find the expected pattern of results among greedy people in general, but did among greedy people with low self-esteem, suggesting that this group might be more motivated to acquire something in response to negative emotions. Studies 13 and 14 were designed to overcome key limitations of Study 12, namely the lack of ecological validity. Study 13 provided no evidence whatsoever that greedy people, across the self-esteem spectrum, buy products in response to negative emotions the prior day, but Study 14 provided some support for this idea, specifically in regard to low feelings of pleasantness the prior day, and this effect seemed to be strongest among greedy people with low self-esteem in that study. One reason why these studies might have failed to show the predicted effect is because the one-day lag might have been too large. If greedy people make purchases to remedy 134 negative emotional states, they would likely do so on the same day that they are feeling negatively, which would make these studies a very conservative test of this idea. Future studies might address this issue by surveying participants multiple times throughout the day so that their emotional state can be measured very soon prior to a purchase rather than a full day prior. That said, it is also possible that greedy people do not buy things in response to negative emotion, and our theoretical model might need to be revised to account for the failure to find this effect. 135 Chapter 6: General Discussion Across 14 studies, I tested a theoretical model that proposes that greedy people desire to acquire more and are dissatisfied with never having enough, in part, because of a tendency to feel short-lived boosts of pride in response to acquisition. In Chapter 2, I tested this model in five studies that tracked participants’ emotions about recent, desirable purchases over time. Across studies, we found support for the two key hypotheses: (1) greedy people reported elevated authentic pride upon acquisition compared to people low in greed, and (2) greedy people’s authentic pride in their acquisitions fades more quickly compared to people low in greed. In Chapter 3, I presented three studies that examined whether greedy people’s relentless acquisitiveness might be due to deficits in affective forecasting, such that they expect their feelings of pride in the purchase to be more permanent when they acquire something, and once these feelings fade, they become motivated to buy something else that might provide lasting pride. These studies provided no evidence that greedy people are poor affective forecasters compared to individuals low in greed, suggesting that they understand the emotional benefits of acquisition are short-lived and pursue them for the temporary pride boost nonetheless. In Chapter 4, I presented four studies that tested the boundary conditions of this process. These studies showed that greedy people seem to show an equivalent pride boost for both purchases and gifts (Study 8), but greedy people do not get a unique pride boost from personal achievements (Study 9), suggesting that they experience short-lived pride boosts in response to acquisition specifically; it is not the case that greedy people feel pride in intense, yet ephemeral, bouts in response to any pride-eliciting event. Studies 10 and 11 were designed to test whether this dynamic emotional process applies more broadly to individuals who are highly motivated to pursue specific goals. If this was the case, it would indicate that what we found for greed is one 136 example of a broader phenomenon that occurs among highly motivated individuals across domains in response to relevant, successful experiences. Neither Study 10 nor Study 11 provided evidence that people high in achievement motivation feel short-lived boosts of authentic pride in response to personal achievements, suggesting that highly motivated people across domains do not respond to successful events the same way that greedy people respond to acquisitions. We also tested whether people who report high levels of “achievement greed” showed the same pattern in response to achievements, and we found that they did not. This suggests that greed is not simply a form of motivation that can be applied to any and all targets; it might be specific to money and material things, at least in terms of the emotional response to acquisition experiences. More work is necessary to delineate the emotional response pattern that generally describes the experience of highly motivated individuals when they succeed in their domain of interest, but based on Studies 10 and 11, it seems clear that it is not identical to the way greedy people respond emotionally to acquisitions. Finally, in Chapter 5, I presented three studies that test a direct implication of the model. Given that we propose that greedy people are motivated to acquire, in part, to engender feelings of pride, it follows that they would be especially motivated to acquire something when feeling negatively. Study 12 used an experimental design to manipulate high or low feelings of authentic pride before asking participants to rate the desirability of various potential purchases, and although we did not find the predicted interaction between greed and condition, we found the predicted pattern of results among greedy people with low self-esteem, consistent with some of the other studies (Studies 2 and 3) and with the theoretical model. In contrast, Study 13 showed no evidence that negative affective states lead greedy people to buy something the next day, and Study 14 did not provide clear or conclusive evidence, either. Thus, it is currently unclear 137 whether greedy people buy things to blunt negative emotional experiences, but there is some evidence that this might occur across these three studies, especially among greedy people low in self-esteem, and future research should explore this question further. See Table 24 below for a summary of the key results across studies. 138 Table 24 Key Results Across all Studies Study Research Question(s) Sample Method Crucial Results Study 1 Do greedy people report a short-lived boost of pride in response to non-essential purchases? 197 American Mturkers Recall Greedy people report a boost and drop in authentic pride. Greedy people report a boost of hubristic pride, but no significant drop. Study 2 See above 314 American Mturkers Longitudinal Greedy people report a boost and drop in authentic pride. Greedy people report a boost and drop in hubristic pride. Greedy people with low self-esteem report more intense boost and drop in authentic pride than greedy people with high self-esteem. Study 3 See above 183 UBC undergrads Daily Diary No evidence of boost or drop in authentic or hubristic pride. Greedy people with low self-esteem report more intense boost and drop in authentic pride than greedy people with high self-esteem. Study 4 See above 1082 American Mturkers Daily Diary Greedy people report a boost and drop in authentic pride. Greedy people report a boost of hubristic pride, but no significant drop. Study 5 See above 710 UBC undergrads Daily Diary Greedy people report a boost and drop in authentic pride. Greedy people report a boost of hubristic pride, but no significant drop. Study 6 Do greedy people show a deficit in forecasting their emotional response to purchases over time? 294 American Mturkers Experiment (recall condition vs. imagination condition) No differences between conditions in recalled vs. imagined experiences of authentic and hubristic pride at acquisition or how those feelings change over time. 139 Study 7 See above 314 American Mturkers (same as Study 2) Longitudinal No differences in affective forecasting accuracy between greedy and less greedy people for authentic pride. Study 8 Do greedy people experience the same emotional response to self-made purchases and gifts from others? 373 American Mturkers Experiment (recall purchase condition vs. recall gift condition) Greedy people report a boost in authentic pride for both purchases and gifts, but no significant drop. Greedy people report a boost in hubristic pride for both purchases and gifts, but no significant drop. Study 9 Do greedy people experience the same emotional response to self-made purchases and personal achievements? 328 American Mturkers Experiment (recall purchase condition vs. recall achievement condition) Greedy people report a boost in authentic pride for purchases, but not for achievements. No significant drop for either condition. Greed people report a boost in hubristic pride for purchases and achievements. No significant drop for either condition. Study 10 Do people high in achievement motivation experience the same emotional response to personal achievements as observed for greed and purchases? Do people high in “achievement greed” experience the same emotional response to personal achievements as observed for greed and purchases? 191 American Mturkers Recall No evidence that people high in achievement motivation respond to achievements similarly to how greedy people respond to acquisitions. People high in achievement greed report elevated hubristic pride in response to achievement, but no significant drop. Study 11 See above 392 UBC undergrads Longitudinal No evidence that people high in achievement motivation respond to achievements similarly to how greedy people respond to acquisitions. People high in achievement greed report elevated hubristic pride in response to achievement, but no significant drop. Study 12 Are greedy people more motivated to acquire in 464 UBC undergrads Experiment (high authentic pride condition vs. low No evidence that greedy people, in general, show a greater desire to acquire consumer products when 140 response to negative affective states? authentic pride condition) feeling low pride compared to high pride. Greedy people with low self-esteem, however, were more likely to desire to acquire consumer products when feeling low pride compared to high pride. Study 13 Are greedy people more motivated to acquire in response to negative affective states? 1643 American Mturkers Daily Diary No evidence that negative affective states lead greedy people to make a purchase the following day. Study 14 Are greedy people more motivated to acquire in response to negative affective states? 961 UBC undergrads Daily Diary No evidence that negative affective states lead greedy people to make a purchase the following day. 141 The primary contribution of this dissertation is to advance our theoretical understanding of greed and greedy behavior. Studies 1-5 revealed that greedy people experience a short-lived boost of authentic pride in response to acquisitions, and possibly a longer-lasting boost in hubristic pride. That said, we see several reasons why the effects on hubristic pride are unlikely to represent greedy people’s unique emotional response that might drive their pervasive acquisitiveness. Despite the significant effects, we believe that the interpretation of the results for hubristic pride requires greater caution than the results for authentic pride, for several reasons. Most notably, Studies 4 and 5 showed that greedy people were dispositionally lower in authentic pride and higher in hubristic pride compared to those low in greed, such that the boost in authentic pride goes against their general emotional tendencies whereas elevated hubristic pride is consistent with their general emotional tendencies. Consistent with this finding, exploratory analyses from both studies showed that greedy people experience a within-person boost in authentic pride on days they make purchases, but this is not the case for hubristic pride. As a result, we believe the evidence from these studies strongly suggests that the elevated hubristic pride greedy people report in response to acquisition reflects these individuals’ average emotional state rather than a specific, meaningful response to acquisition. These findings therefore suggest that greedy people’s self-esteem might be contingent on their ability to acquire desirable possessions. Authentic pride, in this view, is similar to “state self-esteem,” as it is a transient emotional experience that engenders the same kinds of self-evaluations that constitute high self-esteem (Tracy & Robins, 2004). Greedy people’s tendency to respond to acquisitions with elevated authentic pride can thus be interpreted to mean that acquisition experiences momentarily boost their self-esteem. Furthermore, given that these feelings do not seem to last long after the acquisition event, it is possible that greedy people soon 142 seek to acquire again, to feel more authentic pride. This dynamic emotional response pattern might therefore help explain greedy people’s defining characteristic: their insatiable desire to acquire more. However, given that the present studies did not directly test whether the desire for pride is causally related to greedy people’s acquisitiveness, more research is necessary to address this issue. Regarding practical implications, this research might be used to shape organizational strategy or design interventions. Ominously, it is possible that marketers might aim to engender negative emotional experiences among potential customers if they believe they target a greedy population. For example, Krekels and Pandalaere (2015) found that individuals who work in finance and management tend to be greedier than people who work in the service industry or the arts. Thus, if greedy people make purchases, in part, to boost their current feelings of self-worth, it might be strategic for companies that sell products to people in finance and management to induce negative affect, whereas companies that target service workers or artists are unlikely to benefit from this kind of strategy. Study 12 provides some support for this idea because greedy people with low self-esteem saw the same consumer products as more desirable when feeling low authentic pride compared to high authentic pride. Conversely, these findings might be leveraged to develop interventions for greedy people who are struggling to control their buying behaviors and want assistance. Participants in Study 12 were instructed to reflect upon a time they felt authentic pride from their academic coursework, and greedy individuals with low self-esteem were significantly less likely to find these products desirable after this manipulation compared to people low in greed with low self-esteem. This raises the possibility that feeling pride from another source besides acquisitions, such as academics or relationships, might curb greedy people’s desire to acquire momentarily. 143 Distinctions Between Greed and Models for Related Traits Importantly, the dynamic emotional process we propose for greedy acquisition is different from processes previously proposed to underlie materialism, conspicuous consumption, and indulgence. A number of models have been proposed regarding the emotional processes involved in materialism (Donnelly et al., 2016; Chan et al., 2015; Richins, 2017). Some models propose that materialistic consumption is driven by escapism (Donnelly et al., 2016; Richins, 2017); when people feel negatively about themselves, they lose cognitive resources, which results in a greater likelihood of irrational or impulsive behavior aimed at restoring a positive sense of self. For materialistic people, the specific kind of irrational and impulsive behavior they enact is material consumption, whereas people low in materialism may react to these feelings with different compensatory behaviors. Thus, whereas these models view materialistic consumption as a failure of self-regulation, our model views greedy consumption as an intentional self-regulatory activity that greedy people undertake to achieve pride. Although it is conceivable that greedy people might become particularly motivated to acquire when experiencing negative emotions, because of the palliative effects of the predicted boost in pride, this motivation is likely present regardless of current mood, because acquisition constitutes progress toward a greedy person’s identity goals, and pride is a positively reinforcing emotion that motivates all people to fulfill their goals (Weidman et al., 2016), regardless of current mood states. This might help explain the failure to find consistent evidence that negative mood motivated greedy people to desire purchases in Studies 13 and 14 because greedy people, in those studies, were more likely than people low in greed to make purchases regardless of their mood state. 144 Other research has proposed that materialism is driven by status concerns (e.g., Chan et al., 2015). In fact, one of the three facets of materialism is known as “possession defined success”, which is the notion that one’s success in life can be quantified by one’s possessions (Richins, 2017). This same idea has been applied to conspicuous consumption, which has been shown to be driven by status motives (Braun & Wicklund, 1989; Geiger-Oneto et al., 2013; Kastanakis & Balabanis, 2014). This process is distinct from that we propose for greed because we argue that greedy people’s acquisition motives are aimed at self-satisfaction via fulfilling a personal goal to acquire more, rather than impressing others. We did not assess whether greedy people were proud of their purchases because they anticipated that they would impress others in these studies, so future research is necessary to test this claim directly. Turning to indulgence, Ramanathan and Williams (2007) found that people tend to feel both positive and negative hedonic emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness) when they indulged. This pattern differs from our findings in two critical ways. First, greedy people responded to acquisition with the positive emotion of authentic pride, specifically, likely because acquisition constitutes successful goal pursuit; we did not observe elevated negative emotions to co-occur with this positive emotion in response to acquisition. Second, authentic pride is a self-conscious emotion, and we observed that this self-conscious emotion was the relevant emotion for greedy acquisition; we did not find that greedy people differed from less greedy people on positive affect of pleasantness (i.e., hedonic positive emotions) after acquisition. We interpret this effect to show that acquisitions bear identity-goal relevance for greedy people, suggesting that their pursuit of wealth and material goods is more eudaimonic than hedonic. Overall, our model and the empirical studies reported here aim to provide a unique explanation about greedy behavior that differs from previous models in the literature based around related traits and behaviors, and 145 we believe these studies showcase important differences between greed and these related traits in terms of the associated emotional processes that occur in response to acquisition. Limitations of the Present Research Although these conclusions emerged fairly robustly across studies, some aspects of this dynamic emotional process remain ambiguous. First, we observed inconsistent interactions between greed and self-esteem predicting the boost and the drop in authentic pride. These interactions emerged in Studies 2 and 3, but did not emerge in Studies 4 or 5, which had the strongest statistical power to test these interactions. Further complicating matters, Studies 12 and 14 provided some evidence that the predicted effects emerged among greedy people with low self-esteem in those studies even though they did not emerge for greedy people in general. More research is therefore necessary to determine whether the process uncovered in this research is experienced more intensely by greedy people with low self-esteem. We theorized that one reason for greedy individuals’ drive for acquisition is that acquiring new possessions elicits feelings of authentic pride, suggesting that greedy people with low self-esteem might reap the greatest emotional benefits from this process, as they start with lower baseline levels of self-esteem. However, we do not wish to imply that people with high self-esteem are not motivated to upregulate feelings of pride; in fact, given that people with high self-esteem are more likely to engage in activities that elicit pride such as actively pursuing goals and relationships (Chen et al., 2001; Kernis, 2003), it is conceivable that those with high self-esteem might be more likely to respond to internal states with approach behaviors like going out and making a purchase. People with low self-esteem, in contrast, may lack the self-efficacy to respond in an action-oriented way to their emotions. This might explain why we found the predicted effect among greedy people with low self-esteem in Study 12, but not in Studies 13 or 14, because Study 12 asked 146 participants to report how desirable they perceived the items to be and how much they wanted to buy them, whereas Studies 13 and 14 measured actual buying behaviors, which only captures fulfilled desires to acquire regardless of whether participants wanted to make a purchase or not that day. Future research exploring the conscious motivations for acquisitions among greedy people with high and low self-esteem might help determine whether the two groups are motivated to buy things for different psychological reasons such that those with low self-esteem are more likely to seek acquisition for the explicit purpose of eliciting authentic pride. Another limitation that emerged across studies was extremely low reliability of the activation measure of the Current Mood Questionnaire (Feldman-Barrett & Russell, 1998). We chose to incorporate this measure in addition to the other emotion measures used in these studies because it separates valence and activation in its subscales, whereas the PANAS measures high activation positive and negative emotions exclusively. That said, this measure was clearly not well-suited to the present research based on its low reliability, which might be due to the context of this research. As described under Footnote 10, participants tended to report 1 (not at all) for all six items, which results in very low reliability because three of the six items are then reverse-coded. A large body of past research shows that this is not an issue with the measure in general; thus, we see this as acquisition as a context where this specific measure is not viable. Future research should explore using different measures to assess how activated individuals feel in response to non-essential purchases. This research is also limited by the variability in power analysis techniques used throughout the studies. This is due to changing knowledge and norms in the field over the five-year period these studies were conducted as well as non-perfect overlap between power analysis techniques and study analysis plans. For example, the sample sizes for Studies 4 and 5 were 147 based on simulations used to determine the necessary sample size to detect a three-way interaction between greed, self-esteem, and time, but this simulation technique does not account for the multi-level structure of the data due to the longitudinal design of the research. Although it is possible that certain studies are underpowered due to these kinds of mismatches, replication across studies bolsters our confidence in the validity of certain effects and not others. In addition, the high degree of multicollinearity between the measures of greed and materialism used in Studies 3-5 makes it difficult to control for materialism and isolate the specific effect of greed. Materialism shows a similar, though not identical, pattern of results in these studies when we conduct our models with materialism as the focal variable instead of greed. For example, consistent with the effects of greed, in Study 4 we observed evidence of materialism predicting a boost and drop in authentic pride, but only after controlling for positive affect and pleasantness (notably, for greed these effects emerged regardless of whether positive affect and pleasantness were included as covariates). However, there are also important differences in the results for greed and materialism. We did not observe significant interactions between materialism and self-esteem in Study 3, but found these interactions for greed, consistent with our pre-registered predictions. In that study materialism also predicted a boost in positive affect upon acquisition, whereas greed did not. Furthermore, we observed an interaction between materialism and time predicting positive affect in Study 3, indicating that materialistic people’s positive affect about their purchase increased over time. This interaction was replicated in Study 4 after controlling for authentic pride, but no such interactions emerged for greed. These effects suggest that materialistic people might grow to feel more positively about their possessions once they own them, in stark contrast to the decline in authentic pride that greedy people experience after acquisition. Future research might explore this possibility. 148 Moreover, our theoretical model was developed on the basis of a critical theoretical distinction between greed and materialism: self-satisfaction vs. impression management. Greedy people are thought to amass wealth primarily to fulfill an internal desire to acquire more, and to mitigate their dissatisfaction with never having enough (Seuntjens et al., 2015a; 2015b). In contrast, materialistic people are thought to amass and display wealth, at least in part, to gain status in the eyes of others (Richins, 2017); in fact, one facet of materialism, “possession defined success”, is “the tendency to gauge the success of oneself and of others by possessions” (Richins, 2017, p. 481). This distinction highlights another potential future research direction: studies might test the prediction that greedy people are especially focused on the acquisition process and less concerned with the purchased item itself, whereas materialistic people show the opposite pattern. Furthermore, the measurement of greed using a self-report scale is another limitation of the present research because this measure is apt to suffer from social desirability bias due to high face-validity of the items (e.g., “Actually, I’m kind of greedy”). This is an unavoidable challenge of self-report scales for socially undesirable psychological dimensions; thus, future research would benefit from the development of a novel measurement tool that can assess greed more indirectly. Fortunately, recent advances in natural language processing provide an opportunity to develop a measurement tool to assess greed based on differences in language patterns between greedy and less greedy people. We have begun developing this kind of tool, and more work is necessary to craft it to assess dispositional greed. Currently, we have created tool for quantifying the extent to which a text source is discussing greed (The Greed Descriptive Dictionary), and we used this tool to show that US senators receive more support for their online messages that 149 discuss greed in society, suggesting that contemporary Americans view greed as an important political concern and reward politicians who address it (Mercadante et al., 2023). Future Directions In addition to the future directions mentioned above, there are also important future directions that are less directly tied to specific aspects of the studies reported here. Past research has found that greedy people are motivated to over-acquire things besides material goods, including food, sexual partners, and social media friends (Seuntjens et al., 2015b). This raises the question of whether greedy people experience the same short-lived boost of authentic pride in response to successful acquisition in these domains, and if that might be an emotional mechanism underpinning these tendencies. Similarly, Seuntjens and colleagues (2019) showed that greedy people are more likely to commit unethical behaviors, specifically those that result in a financial gain such as taking a bribe, so it is possible that short-lived boosts of authentic pride might help explain those behaviors as well. Given that Study 8 showed greedy people feel pride in both purchases and gifts, the mode of acquisition might be irrelevant to greedy people’s emotional experiences, and this might even extend to whether the acquisition was gained ethically or unethically. On a similar note, judgments of greed in others are driven by the notion that overconsumption causes harm to other people and society at large (Gilliland & Anderson, 2014), but it is unclear that greedy people’s behaviors in these studies fits this criterion. Future research is necessary to examine the consequences of greedy behavior for the well-being of both the greedy person and those in their environment. Furthermore, all of our studies were conducted with participants from the United States or Canada, so it is important for future research to examine the cultural generalizability of this phenomenon. Specifically, it would be worthwhile to examine this in countries where capitalist 150 economic systems and individualism are less prominent, such as the global East and South. It is possible that greed differs both conceptually and in its emotional consequences across cultures that vary in these particular ways, and future research is necessary to explore this possibility. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Psychology
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Tracy, Jessica L.
How does it feel to be greedy? : the role of pride in avaricious acquisition
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