Money is the cause of all evil (G. Flaubert)

Rich people are really nasty

Marysia Zlobek, Slon.ru

The stereotype that says that rich people have some problems with morality, of course, is just a stereotype. A person can be immoral regardless of his financial situation. Social psychologist Paul Piff, however, argues that in a certain sense, the presence of money and status still corrupts, exerting a bad influence on behavior and attitude towards others. In a lecture delivered on the TED platform, Piff presented the unpleasantly surprising results of many years of research. Slon gives his own translation of the lecture (Paul Piff: Does money make you mean?).

Imagine the game "Monopoly", but with one interesting trick: everything is set up in such a way that, as in life, a combination of talents, skills and luck goes to one of the players by chance. And it turned out that this player turned out to be you. You have more money, opportunities and ways to access resources. Think about how this privileged position could change your attitude to yourself and to a less fortunate participant in the game.

To answer exactly this question, we launched a study at Berkeley. We took 100 pairs of players and threw a hundred coins to determine who would be rich and lucky in each pair, and who would not. The rich man was given twice as much money, plus he rolled the dice not once, but twice, so he moved around the playing field much more. The game lasted 15 minutes, during which we filmed everything that was happening on a hidden camera. Today I'm going to demonstrate for the first time some of the results of the study, share what we saw.

Rich Gambler: So, how many times did you get 500?
Poor player: One.
Rich Gambler: Seriously?
Poor player: Yeah.
Rich player: And to me – three times. (Laughs) I don't know why they gave me so much.

Yes, the players quickly realized that something is wrong here: one has more money, and he walks more often. Nevertheless, during the course of the game, there were quite obvious changes in behavior. Rich even began to move around the board somehow noisily, banging chips on the field. On a verbal and nonverbal level, the "rich" demonstrated superiority, complacency and showed who was in charge here.

Next to the players, we put a bowl of pretzels. They registered who would eat how many pretzels.

Rich player: Is pretzels also some kind of provocation?
Poor player: I don't know.

Well, people are not stupid either, they want to understand why this bowl is here at all. But, you know, despite these doubts, the situation clearly developed in such a way that rich players ate significantly more pretzels than poor ones.

Rich Player: I love pretzels!

The further, the more clearly the sad trend was outlined: the rich began to behave rudely and show less and less tact towards the poor, poor players, inhumanly boasting of their successes without any remorse.

Rich Player: I can buy anything!
Poor player: How much does it cost?
Rich gambler: You owe me 24 bucks. Your money was crying! And I'll buy it soon, I have plenty of money, I can buy anything you want.

Rich player number 2: Yes, I can buy this whole field!
Rich Player number 3: You're about to lose all your money. And I'm completely safe in this sense, you can't catch up with me.

And the most interesting thing is that when, after 15 minutes of the game, we asked the players to tell us something about this experience, the "rich" were happy to share how they managed to win such a convincing victory in Monopoly with, let me remind you, an initially falsified result. They told me with what dexterity they bought all sorts of enterprises and achieved success. It seems that they have completely lost touch with the reality in which the coin that determined their fate was thrown. An amazing feature of a person is to interpret and assign the results of pure luck in this way.

One can rely on the metaphor of this game when talking about the hierarchical structure of society, where some receive money, access to resources and status, while others have neither one nor the other, nor the third. For seven years, my colleagues and I have been studying the influence of this kind of hierarchy on human behavior. So, the main conclusion from dozens of studies involving thousands of subjects is this: the richer we are, the less inclined we are to empathize with others and the stronger our confidence that we are in our right and deserve everything we have. In addition, a high level of material well-being determines the idea of avarice as a virtue, as well as the desire to represent the desire for personal gain as natural and highly moral. I want to talk about the actual and possible consequences of this view of life, about why it is important and what we can do here.

One of the first studies concerned willingness to help, one of the aspects of social interaction. It was important and interesting to understand who is more inclined to help others – rich or poor. During the experiment, we gathered rich and poor people in the laboratory and handed each of them $ 10, explaining that they could keep the money for themselves or share the amount with a complete stranger whom they would never see. As a result, the subjects whose annual income is in the range of 15-25 thousand dollars, gave 44% more money than those whose income is from 150 to 200 thousand dollars a year.

We also studied the situation of the game: who cheats more often to achieve a win. In some cases, better-off players cheated 3-4 times more often.

Another experiment: we put two vases of sweets in the room. The subjects were told that in the first – candy for them, and in the second – for children from the development center, now they are in class. You think I'm joking, but I'm completely serious. The participants of the experiment, who positioned themselves as well-off people, took twice as many sweets from a children's vase as those who did not consider themselves rich.

Another subject of study is cars, that is, the behavior of the driver on the road, depending on whether he drives an expensive or cheap car brand. So, owners of expensive cars break the rules twice as often as those who drive something economical: they do not let pedestrians on a zebra, for example. We also found out that rich people are more likely to lie in negotiations, take bribes, steal cash at work and deceive customers.

No, of course, I'm not going to say that only the rich behave like that. On the contrary, rather, I tend to believe that in everyday life each of us is constantly faced with a dilemma – to break the rule, to act immorally, but to extract momentary benefits, or to act on general grounds? And this is understandable, because the American dream tells us that everyone has equal opportunities, you have to work hard, then you will succeed, and it is quite normal that from time to time you should put your own interests above the interests of other people. However, the problem, as we managed to find out, is that with the growth of wealth, there is a growing willingness to benefit from zero-sum situations, that is, to gain at the expense of what others lose. Over the past twenty years, the gap between rich and poor in America has widened to previously unknown proportions, it is practically a Grand Canyon of social space. Up to 90% of resources and capital are concentrated in the hands of 20% of the population, and this leads to the fact that all doors are initially open to some, while others are forced to accept that the American dream will remain a dream for them. The former tend to spit on the interests of others when it comes to the opportunity to extract at least a small benefit for themselves. There is no reason to believe that the situation will change for the better, rather there is every reason to expect it to worsen.

Economic inequality is an important topic of conversation today, but not only because the poor suffer from it. Society as a whole has problems, they penetrate into all its strata. This is a time bomb that threatens us in a number of aspects, such as: social mobility, values, mental health, the level of trust. All this and much more is directly dependent on the level of socio-economic inequality. The higher it is, the lower the positive indicators. And, on the contrary, its growth leads to an increase in crime, aggression, and even an aggravation of the problem of obesity. These consequences affect again not only those who are at the bottom of the social ladder, no, this is a complex disease of society.

What to do? The unpleasant phenomena described above are actively self-reproducing and, it seems, their growth is getting out of control. But, as our research shows, it takes very little to push a person to a healthier perception, to learn to empathize and help others again. Sometimes it's enough just to remind people of the need and advantages of mutual assistance. One of our experiments demonstrated that watching a very short 46-second video about how children live in poverty has quite a strong impact on the psyche. An hour after viewing, the rich subjects helped a stressed stranger (everything, of course, was rigged) just as willingly as the poor. This means that the deformation is not permanent, it is reversible, moreover, it is reversible quite easily.

And behind the walls of the laboratory, something is also changing. For example, Bill Gates, one of the richest people in America, in his Harvard speech spoke about how important it is today to solve the problem of inequality. "The future is not about discoveries per se, but about how they can help eliminate injustice," Gates said.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru16.01.2014