The Rich, They're Not Like You and I...

[JackRiddler]

At least, so F. Scott Fitzgerald reportedly said.

Comrades! You had best seat yourselves to receive the most surprising social science finding since the beginning of the universe:

PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/ ... ea894cf968

Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior

1. Paul K. Piffa,1,
2. Daniel M. Stancatoa,
3. Stéphane Côtéb,
4. Rodolfo Mendoza-Dentona, and
5. Dacher Keltnera

+ Author Affiliations

1. aDepartment of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; and
2. bRotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3E6

1. Edited* by Richard E. Nisbett, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, and approved January 26, 2012 (received for review November 8, 2011)

Abstract

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

It's easy for the rich to cheat - study
Independent Online - ‎10 hours ago‎
By FIONA MACRAE Micheal Douglas's character Gordon Gekko learns the hard way in Wall Street that it doesn't pay to be a rich cheat. London - They may think of themselves as the more respectable and upstanding members of society.

Upper class people likelier to behave unethically
Indian Express - ‎10 hours ago‎
Upper class people have a higher tendency for unethical behaviour as they are more likely to believe that “greed is good,” researchers say. In seven separate studies, researchers from University of California, Berkeley consistently found that upper ...

Wealthy more likely to lie, cheat: Study
Indian Express - ‎15 hours ago‎
They may be the more respectable and upstanding members of society, but the rich are also more likely to lie, cheat and engage in other kinds of unethical activities than those in lower classes, claims a new study. But these findings, published in the ...

Rich drivers are jerks, study says
San Francisco Chronicle (blog) - ‎19 hours ago‎
Upper-class participants in a new study were found to be more likely to engage in unethical behavior, cheat and cut people off while driving. (Jason Henry/The Chronicle) Rich people are more likely to be rude drivers, in addition to being more prone to ...

BMW, Mercedes, Prius owners more likely to cheat, steal: study
Calgary Herald - ‎20 hours ago‎
People from the wealthy upper classes are more likely than poorer folks to break laws while driving, take candy from children and lie for financial gain, said a joint Canada-US study on Monday. The seven-part study by psychologists at the University of ...

Study: Wealthy More Likely to Behave Unethically
Slate Magazine - ‎20 hours ago‎
Research conducted at UC Berkeley suggests that the rich are more likely to break the rules to get ahead. By Rachael Levy | Posted Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012, at 3:35 PM ET MySlate is a new tool that you track your favorite parts Slate.

Why the Rich Are Less Ethical: They See Greed as Good
TIME - ‎20 hours ago‎
By Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz | February 28, 2012 | + While stereotypes suggest that poor people are more likely to lie and steal, new research finds that it's actually the wealthy who tend to behave unethically. In a series of experiments — involving ...

Rich people are meaner, latest studies show
gulfnews.com - ‎21 hours ago‎
London: A raft of studies into unethical behaviour across the social classes has delivered a withering verdict on the upper echelons of society. Privileged people behaved consistently worse than others in a range of situations, with a greater tendency ...

Are the rich really different from you and me?
Philadelphia Inquirer - ‎Feb 28, 2012‎
By Randy Dotinga Some high-end cars come equipped with drivers who aren't the best-behaved around pedestrians and stop signs, according to a new study that looked at whether wealthy people acted as if their needs were more important than those of other ...
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Rich drivers are jerks, study says
19 hours ago‎ - San Francisco Chronicle (blog)

Rich People More Likely to Lie and Cheat: Study
‎Feb 28, 2012‎ - CNBC.com

Rich people more likely to cheat, behave badly, research finds
‎Feb 27, 2012‎ - msnbc.com (blog)

Are rich people more unethical?
‎Feb 27, 2012‎ - CNN

I'm working to acquire the full version of the study by these university-educated liberals, so that we can learn more about their class war on the job creators. Do they hate America?!

Feb 27, 2012 5:48pm
Are Rich People Unethical?

By Mikaela Conley
@mikaelaconley

At last, an explanation for Wall Street’s disgrace, Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and other high-society crimes and misdemeanors: A new study published in the Proceedings of that National Academy of Sciences found that wealthier people were more apt to behave unethically than those who had less money.

Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed a person’s rank in society (measured by wealth, occupational prestige and education) and found that those who were richer were more likely to cheat, lie and break the law than those who were poorer.

“We found that it is much more prevalent for people in the higher ranks of society to see greed and self-interest … as good pursuits,” said Paul Piff, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Berkeley. “This resonates with a lot of current events these days.”

In the first of two studies, researchers found that those who drove more expensive cars (an admittedly questionable indicator of economic worth) were more likely to cut off other cars and pedestrians at a busy San Francisco four-way intersection than those who drove older, less-expensive vehicles.

In other experiments, wealthier study participants were more likely to admit they would behave unethically in a variety of situations and lie during negotiations. In another, researchers found wealthier people were more likely to cheat in an online game to win a $50 prize.

Greed is a “robust” determinant of unethical behavior, according to the study.

“This has some pretty clear implications,” said Piff. “Inequality is very much on Americans’ minds, and the potential effects of severe inequality on individual levels of behavior are major.”

Large sums of money may give people greater feelings of entitlement, causing those people to be the most averse to wealth distribution, Piff continued. Poorer people may be less likely to cheat, because they are more dependent on their community at large, he said. In other words, they don’t want to rock the boat.

“People in power who are more inclined to behave unethically in the service of gains and self-interest can have great effects on society as a whole,” said Piff.

And it’s difficult to say whether richer people get to the top because of their unethical behavior or whether wealth causes people to become this way. “It seems like a vicious cycle,” he said.

Nevertheless, Piff said these results obviously don’t apply to all wealthy people. He noted that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were among the wealthiest people in the world and also the most philanthropic. He also pointed to high rates of violent crime in the poorest neighborhoods in the country that counteract the study’s findings.

Piff said he hoped to further his research by figuring out ways to curb these patterns of behavior among wealthier individuals.

“What it comes down to, really, is that money creates more of a self-focus, which may account for larger feelings of entitlement,” said Piff. “We hope to further study how we can curb these patterns and how that will affect our social environment.”

Jokes aside: I don't think the rich are worse people. I think capitalist society as currently constituted advances the wrong values and rewards the worst behavior. See "Inside Job" to see the consequences of a perverse system of incentives. Or look around you right now.

.

[Elihu]

"not entirely stable. so glad you're here to tell us these things. chewy, take the professor in the back and hook him up to the hyper-drive"

[wordspeak2]

"Jokes aside: I don't think the rich are worse people. I think capitalist society as currently constituted advances the wrong values and rewards the worst behavior."

Right. Therefore, overall, the rich are worse people.

[Nordic]

This is why I stay poor.

(I'm not entirely kidding. I don't want to be one of those people. Really)

[brekin]

Simon & Garfunkel - Richard Cory 1966 live

They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,
With political connections to spread his wealth around.
Born into society, a banker's only child,
He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.

But I, I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

The papers print his picture almost everywhere he goes:
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show.
And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht!
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he's got.

But I, I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were grateful for his patronage and they thanked him very much,
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."

But I, I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

[Freitag]

Yeah the most dangerous drivers you see on the road are inevitably in Mercedes, BMW etc.

I've always said the best test for psychopathy is not a written test, or an interview with a psychologist, but rather just put them in a car and watch how they drive.

[Nordic]

Yeah the most dangerous drivers you see on the road are inevitably in Mercedes, BMW etc.

I've always said the best test for psychopathy is not a written test, or an interview with a psychologist, but rather just put them in a car and watch how they drive.

Here in Los Angeles, it's the Escalade drivers who are the biggest dicks on the road. Prior to the Escalade's existence, it was the BMW's. Now the BMW's are fairly nice, and my theory is that the old asshole-BMW drivers bought Escalades.

[JackRiddler]

Yeah the most dangerous drivers you see on the road are inevitably in Mercedes, BMW etc.

I've always said the best test for psychopathy is not a written test, or an interview with a psychologist, but rather just put them in a car and watch how they drive.

Agree with you!

Also, as from Repo Man: "Driving lowers your intelligence."

I quit driving more or less because I thought I was careless. Not psychopathic, not angry, just not interested enough in the process to focus for hours on all of the details I considered essential. Probably nothing bad would have happened, but probably wasn't good enough given the stakes. How does anyone bear it after killing someone because they were in a mild rush to get to a goddamn store? For travel, proper rail trains so much more enjoyable. In the city, subway maybe not so pleasant much of the time, but far the superior alternative.

.

[Simulist]

The Rich, They're Not Like You and I...

Well, no. They're rich. For one thing.

Power does tend to corrupt.

[Simulist]

Abstract

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

It had always been a curiosity to me that very wealthy people — often not churchgoers themselves — were often so adamant about the value of religion.

Well, it makes some sense now. If you can keep "the little people" behaving "ethically" and "playing by the rules" (which your wealthy dynasties helped to create, by the way), you limit the competition.

[justdrew]

is this a followup study (in the OP)? I seem to remember a very similar story coming out a couple years ago.

[Laodicean]

Bonus Drop Means Trading Aspen for Coupons

By Max Abelson - Feb 29, 2012

Andrew Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam in California this month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.

“I’m not Zen at all, and when I’m freaking out about the situation, where I’m stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it’s very hard,” Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., said in an interview.

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.

“I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”

The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”

Bonus Caps

Facing a slump in revenue from investment banking and trading, Wall Street firms have trimmed 2011 discretionary pay. At Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Barclays Capital, the cuts were at least 25 percent. Morgan Stanley (MS) capped cash bonuses at $125,000, and Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) increased the percentage of deferred pay.

“It’s a disaster,” said Ilana Weinstein, chief executive officer of New York-based search firm IDW Group LLC. “The entire construct of compensation has changed.”

Most people can only dream of Wall Street’s shrinking paychecks. Median household income in 2010 was $49,445, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, lower than the previous year and less than 1 percent of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s $7 million restricted-stock bonus for 2011. The percentage of Americans living in poverty climbed to 15.1 percent, the highest in almost two decades.

House of Mirth

Comfortable New Yorkers assessing their discomforts is at least as old as Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel “The House of Mirth,” whose heroine Lily Bart said “the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”

Wall Street headhunter Daniel Arbeeny said his “income has gone down tremendously.” On a recent Sunday, he drove to Fairway Market in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn to buy discounted salmon for $5.99 a pound.

“They have a circular that they leave in front of the buildings in our neighborhood,” said Arbeeny, 49, who lives in nearby Cobble Hill, namesake for a line of pebbled-leather Kate Spade handbags. “We sit there, and I look through all of them to find out where it’s worth going.”

Executive-search veterans who work with hedge funds and banks make about $500,000 in good years, said Arbeeny, managing principal at New York-based CMF Partners LLC, declining to discuss specifics about his own income. He said he no longer goes on annual ski trips to Whistler (WB), Tahoe or Aspen.

He reads other supermarket circulars to find good prices for his favorite cereal, Wheat Chex.

“Wow, did I waste a lot of money,” Arbeeny said.

$17,000 on Dogs

Richard Scheiner, 58, a real-estate investor and hedge-fund manager, said most people on Wall Street don’t save.

“When their means are cut, they’re stuck,” said Scheiner, whose New York-based hedge fund, Lane Gate Partners LLC, was down about 15 percent last year. “Not so much an issue for me and my wife because we’ve always saved.”

Scheiner said he spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester and a gun club in upstate New York. A labradoodle named Zelda and a rescued bichon frise, Duke, cost $17,000 a year, including food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker who charges $17 each per outing, he said.

Still, he sold two motorcycles he didn’t use and called his Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet “the Volkswagen of supercars.” He and his wife have given more than $100,000 to a nonprofit she founded that promotes employment for people with Asperger syndrome, he said.

‘Crushing Setback’

Scheiner pays $30,000 a year to be part of a New York-based peer-learning group for investors called Tiger 21. Founder Michael Sonnenfeldt said members, most with a net worth of at least $10 million, have been forced to “re-examine lots of assumptions about how grand their life would be.”

While they aren’t asking for sympathy, “at their level, in a different way but in the same way, the rug got pulled out,” said Sonnenfeldt, 56. “For many people of wealth, they’ve had a crushing setback as well.”

He described a feeling of “malaise” and a “paralysis that does not allow one to believe that generally things are going to get better,” listing geopolitical hot spots such as Iran and low interest rates that have been “artificially manipulated” by the Federal Reserve.

Poly Prep

The malaise is shared by Schiff, the New York-based marketing director for Euro Pacific Capital, where his brother is CEO. His family rents the lower duplex of a brownstone in Cobble Hill, where his two children share a room. His 10-year- old daughter is a student at $32,000-a-year Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. His son, 7, will apply in a few years.

“I can’t imagine what I’m going to do,” Schiff said. “I’m crammed into 1,200 square feet. I don’t have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand.”

He wants 1,800 square feet -- “a room for each kid, three bedrooms, maybe four,” he said. “Imagine four bedrooms. You have the luxury of a guest room, how crazy is that?”

The family rents a three-bedroom summer house in Connecticut and will go there again this year for one month instead of four. Schiff said he brings home less than $200,000 after taxes, health-insurance and 401(k) contributions. The closing costs, renovation and down payment on one of the $1.5 million 17-foot-wide row houses nearby, what he called “the low rung on the brownstone ladder,” would consume “every dime” of the family’s savings, he said.

“I wouldn’t want to whine,” Schiff said. “All I want is the stuff that I always thought, growing up, that successful parents had.”

Vegas, Ibiza

Hans Kullberg, 27, a trader at Wyckoff, New Jersey-based hedge fund Falcon Management Corp. who said he earns about $150,000 a year, is adjusting his sights, too.

After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, he spent a $10,000 signing bonus from Citigroup Inc. (C) on a six-week trip to South America. He worked on an emerging-markets team at the bank that traded and marketed synthetic collateralized debt obligations.

His tastes for travel got “a little bit more lavish,” he said. Kullberg, a triathlete, went to a bachelor party in Las Vegas in January after renting a four-bedroom ski cabin at Bear Mountain in California as a Christmas gift to his parents. He went to Ibiza for another bachelor party in August, spending $3,000 on a three-day trip, including a 15-minute ride from the airport that cost $100. In May he spent 10 days in India.

Wet T-Shirt

Earlier this month, a friend invited him on a trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The friend was going to be a judge in a wet T-shirt contest, Kullberg said. He turned down the offer.

It wouldn’t have been “the most financially prudent thing to do,” he said. “I’m not totally sure about what I’m going to get paid this year, how I’m going to be doing.”

He thinks more about the long term, he said, and plans to buy a foreclosed two-bedroom house in Charlotte, North Carolina, for $50,000 next month.

M. Todd Henderson, a University of Chicago law professor who’s teaching a seminar on executive compensation, said the suffering is relative and real. He wrote two years ago that his family was “just getting by” on more than $250,000 a year, setting off what he called a firestorm of criticism.

“Yes, terminal diseases are worse than getting the flu,” he said. “But you suffer when you get the flu.”

‘Have to Cut’

Dlugash, the accountant, said he’s spending more time talking with Wall Street clients about their expenses.

“You don’t necessarily have to cut that -- but if you don’t cut that, then you’ve got to cut this,” he said. “They say, ‘But I can’t.’ And I say, ‘But you must.’”

One banker who owes Dlugash $20,000 gained the accountant’s sympathy despite his six-figure pay.

“If you’re making $50,000 and your salary gets down to $40,000 and you have to cut, it’s very severe to you,” Dlugash said. “But it’s no less severe to these other people with these big numbers.”

A Wall Street executive who made 10 times that amount and now has declining income along with a divorce, private school tuitions and elderly parents also suffers, he said.

“These people never dreamed they’d be making $500,000 a year,” he said, “and dreamed even less that they’d be broke.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/201 ... -chex.html

[JackRiddler]

It had always been a curiosity to me that very wealthy people — often not churchgoers themselves — were often so adamant about the value of religion.

Well, it makes some sense now. If you can keep "the little people" behaving "ethically" and "playing by the rules" (which your wealthy dynasties helped to create, by the way), you limit the competition.

Santorum's sincerely explicit about it. College, says the business school graduate, is bad, nay evil, because it makes people less religious, by which he means less faithful to his extreme of Christendom. This is one step away from: Keep them out of school to keep them stupid and in terror of a wrathful god.

[Project Willow]

If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

This is why I stay poor.

(I'm not entirely kidding. I don't want to be one of those people. Really)

Are you sure you've got that right?

Which comes first, the assholery or the money? Seems to me it would be the former which argues against your statement, JR, besides, who made the system anyway.

is this a followup study (in the OP)? I seem to remember a very similar story coming out a couple years ago.

I think that was about conservatives. So of course it's rich conservatives ruining our world. Ah, what an enjoyable confirmation bias.

[Simulist]

It had always been a curiosity to me that very wealthy people — often not churchgoers themselves — were often so adamant about the value of religion.

Well, it makes some sense now. If you can keep "the little people" behaving "ethically" and "playing by the rules" (which your wealthy dynasties helped to create, by the way), you limit the competition.

Santorum's sincerely explicit about it. College, says the business school graduate, is bad, nay evil, because it makes people less religious, by which he means less faithful to his extreme of Christendom. This is one step away from: Keep them out of school to keep them stupid and in terror of a wrathful god.

I wholeheartedly agree. (Though I'm not sure that it's "one step away from.")