Rich people have no idea what you're thinking

The life cycle of a pop-psych news story:

1. Respectable paper comes out in respectable journal. Author's institution notes that the research could be spun to sound interesting to the general public, so they send out a press release.

2. First round of over-sensationalization, in the sciencey-news sector of the media.

3. One week later, the bottom-feeding media gets a hold of the story via a vague skimming of the over-sensationalized version, and sensationalizes it even more.

4. For the next forty years some randomly twisted version of the article becomes "common knowledge".

Welcome to stage 3, courtesy msn.com and the Department of Completely Missing the Point.

I'm reminded of this article: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o... TL;DR Essentially, senior executives are sociopaths. Since senior executives are typically rich, these articles are related.

From my personal experience, I find the thesis to be incorrect though.

Classic example of bad popular science writing. Linkbait title. What is effect size? What was sample size?

I wonder if the HN guidelines could use a line or two on criteria to use when deciding whether or not to submit a science story.