Amusing flamebait - are the rich less moral?

rhadamanthus · Feb 28, 2012

For fans of the British upstairs-downstairs TV series Downton Abbey, skullduggery may seem evenly distributed among the social ranks. But in real life, it's the upper classes that are more likely to behave dishonorably, according to new research.

Observers of human nature have long puzzled over the possibility of an ethical class divide. On the one hand, people with fewer resources and dimmer prospects might be expected to do whatever's necessary to get ahead. On the other, wealthy types may be more focused on themselves, because money, independence, and freedom can insulate people from the plight of others. They may also be less generous: Studies involving money games show that upper-class subjects keep more for themselves, and U.S. surveys find that the rich give a smaller percentage of their income to charity than do the poor.

To see whether dishonesty varies with social class, psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues devised a series of tests, working with groups of 100 to 200 Berkeley undergraduates or adults recruited online. Subjects completed a standard gauge of their social status, placing an X on one of 10 rungs of a ladder representing their income, education, and how much respect their jobs might command compared with other Americans.

The team's findings suggest that privilege promotes dishonesty. For example, upper-class subjects were more likely to cheat. After five apparently random rolls of a computerized die for a chance to win an online gift certificate, three times as many upper-class players reported totals higher than 12—even though, unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged so that 12 was the highest possible score.

When participants were manipulated into thinking of themselves as belonging to a higher class than they did, the poorer ones, too, began to behave unethically. In one test, subjects were asked to compare themselves with people at the top or the bottom of the social scale (Donald Trump or a homeless person, for example.) They were then permitted to take candies from a jar ostensibly meant for a group of children in a nearby lab. Subjects whose role-playing raised their status in their own eyes took twice as many candies as those who compared themselves to "The Donald," the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In another test, participants were asked to list several benefits of greed; they were given the example that greed can help further one's professional goals, then asked to come up with three additional benefits. Again, lower-class subjects whose attitudes toward greed had been nudged in this way became just as likely as their wealthier counterparts to sympathize with dishonest behavior (taking home office supplies, laying off employees while increasing their own bonuses, overcharging customers to drive up profits).

In a final experiment, the researchers took their hypothesis to the streets. At a busy intersection in the San Francisco Bay area, the team stationed "pedestrians" at crosswalks, with instructions to approach the crossing at a point when oncoming drivers would have a chance to stop. Observers coded the status of the cars' drivers based on the vehicles' age, make, and appearance. Drivers of shiny, expensive cars were three times more likely than those of old clunkers to plow through a crosswalk, failing to yield to pedestrians as required by California state law. High-status motorists were also four times more likely than those with cheaper, older cars to cut off other drivers at a four-way stop.

In an interesting twist, about one-third of Prius drivers broke crosswalk laws, putting the hybrid among the highest "unethical driving" car brands. "This is a good demonstration of the 'moral licensing' phenomenon, in which hybrid-car drivers who believe they're saving the Earth may feel entitled to behave unethically in other ways," Piff says. (The Prius results were observed but not analyzed for statistical significance in the study.)

Piff says the study may shed light on the hotly debated topic of income inequality. "Our findings suggest that if the pursuit of self-interest goes unchecked, it may result in a vicious cycle: self-interest leads people to behave unethically, which raises their status, which leads to more unethical behavior and inequality."

"It's a great study," says sociologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has shown that those with power are more apt to condemn behavior that they themselves engage in. He says that the findings of Piff and colleagues may tap into something more fundamental than class—namely, power. "Unequal power can exist between social classes but also between an employee and boss, a wife and a husband, or two people in a negotiation."
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link

Lots of interesting considerations here...and they leave me agreeing and disagreeing. Except on the Prius bit lol.

DonnyMost · Feb 28, 2012

Man, this thing has been plastered all over the webbernets the last 48 hours.

My general feeling is this. A sense of entitlement is the real culprit here. Not wealth itself.

Being rich does not automatically make one less moral anymore than being poor makes you more moral.

Humility ftw.

rhadamanthus · Feb 28, 2012

DonnyMost said: ↑

Man, this thing has been plastered all over the webbernets the last 48 hours.

My general feeling is this. A sense of entitlement is the real culprit here. Not wealth itself.

Being rich does not automatically make one less moral anymore than being poor makes you more moral.

Humility ftw.
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Good point. I'd also argue it systemic - for example, a flat $200 fine for speeding is naturally of less significance to a rich person than a poor person. Inasmuch as our penal code is defined in terms of fixed monetary penalties for wrongdoing - the ability to rationalize risky immorality increases proportionally with wealth.

thadeus · Feb 28, 2012

There have been a number of these studies coming out over the past few years.

Here's one:

'Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/social-class-as-culture.html

Social class is more than just how much money you have. It’s also the clothes you wear, the music you like, the school you go to—and has a strong influence on how you interact with others, according to the authors of a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People from lower classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world than people in upper classes—a fact that should figure into debates on public policy, according to the authors.

“Americans, although this is shifting a bit, kind of think class is irrelevant,” says Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley, who cowrote the article with Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Paul K. Piff of UC-Berkeley. “I think our studies are saying the opposite: This is a profound part of who we are.”

People who come from a lower-class background have to depend more on other people. “If you don’t have resources and education, you really adapt to the environment, which is more threatening, by turning to other people,” Keltner says. “People who grow up in lower-class neighborhoods, as I did, will say,’ There’s always someone there who will take you somewhere, or watch your kid. You’ve just got to lean on people.’”

Wealthier people don’t have to rely on each other as much. This causes differences that show up in psychological studies. People from lower-class backgrounds are better at reading other people’s emotions. They’re more likely to act altruistically. “They give more and help more. If someone’s in need, they’ll respond,” Keltner says. When poor people see someone else suffering, they have a physiological response that is missing in people with more resources. “What I think is really interesting about that is, it kind of shows there’s all this strength to the lower class identity: greater empathy, more altruism, and finer attunement to other people,” he says. Of course, there are also costs to being lower-class. Health studies have found that lower-class people have more anxiety and depression and are less physically healthy.

Upper-class people are different, Keltner says. “What wealth and education and prestige and a higher station in life gives you is the freedom to focus on the self.” In psychology experiments, wealthier people don’t read other people’s emotions as well. They hoard resources and are less generous than they could be.

One implication of this, Keltner says, is that’s unreasonable to structure a society on the hope that rich people will help those less fortunate. “One clear policy implication is, the idea of nobless oblige or trickle-down economics, certain versions of it, is bull,” Keltner says. “Our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back. The ‘thousand points of light’—this rise of compassion in the wealthy to fix all the problems of society—is improbable, psychologically.”

The ability to rise in class is the great promise of the American Dream. But studies have found that, as people rise in the classes, they become less empathetic. Studies have also found that as people rise in wealth, they become happier—but not as much as you’d expect. “I think one of the reasons why is the human psyche stops feeling the need to connect and be closer to others, and we know that’s one of the greatest sources of happiness science can study,” Keltner says.
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The best thing about these sorts of articles is that they contribute to the (true) idea that class is the single most important division in American society. Also, the fact that all these studies are coming out really shows what's on the minds of people who do research at an academic level.

FranchiseBlade · Feb 28, 2012

This is very interesting. What it does for me personally is make me appreciate the honest ones even more.

Johndoe804 · Feb 28, 2012

Is there really anything unethical about not stopping at a crosswalk when you know with confidence that there are no pedestrians using it? I don't think that a person's financial state has anything to do with the morality of breaking crosswalk laws. Its obvious that somebody who is broke would be more hesitant to break the law knowing that there could be financial penalties for doing so, regardless of whether its moral or not.

JuanValdez · Feb 28, 2012

Does anyone rich or poor stop at crosswalks because they fear a traffic ticket? I don't think so. BUT: I think driving without car insurance does change driving behaviors. And, people driving beaters are less likely to be insured.

glynch · Feb 28, 2012

FranchiseBlade said: ↑

This is very interesting. What it does for me personally is make me appreciate the honest ones even more.
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I agree. Those who are rich and don't mind paying higher taxes and assisting the poor deserve a lot of credit as opposed to those who jus lobby for even lower taxes and subscribe to philosophies that pretend most of the poor deserve their condition due to personal failings or that is just the way the market falls.

rhadamanthus · Mar 5, 2012

A similar outlook:

Scientists Say People Aren't Smart Enough For Democracy To Flourish

From the slashdot summary:

From the article: 'The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies. The research shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments...democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.
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An excerpt from the research:

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries.

He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as "above average" — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile.

We're just as undiscerning about the skills of others as about ourselves. "To the extent that you are incompetent, you are a worse judge of incompetence in other people," Dunning said. In one study, the researchers asked students to grade quizzes that tested for grammar skill. "We found that students who had done worse on the test itself gave more inaccurate grades to other students." Essentially, they didn't recognize the correct answer even when they saw it.
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rimrocker · Mar 5, 2012

Go to Vail, CO. There are no major 4-way stops in Vail. Instead, they have redesigned their intersections to be traffic circles/roundabouts.

In large part, they did it because they were having so many accidents at 4-way stops as the ass in the Mercedes and the jerk in the BMW both think they are important enough to go first.

After they put the first one in, accidents with injuries decreased by 75% at the intersection.

pirc1 · Mar 5, 2012

rhadamanthus said: ↑

A similar outlook:

Scientists Say People Aren't Smart Enough For Democracy To Flourish

From the slashdot summary:

An excerpt from the research:
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Yup, all democracy does is hopefully you don't get the worst leaders, sometimes even that is not true (see Hitler).

meh · Mar 5, 2012

Rather than the rich being less moral, I would say being able to get away with immoral behavior makes one less moral.

Therefore people with "power" would obviously behave less morally. Regardless of whether this power comes from more wealth, more knowledge, better looks, better charm, or whatever inherent advantage a person may have.

Pole · Mar 5, 2012

I bet all of these studies were conducted purely without agenda.

I wonder if the Prius bit was a smoke screen or a mirror.

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