Greed is not good
Dr Karl outlines a series of studies that show the wealthier you become, the more unethically you behave.
In the movie Wall Street, the anti-hero, Gordon Gekko, preaches to an enraptured room that, "Greed is good". However, it seems that the opposite is true. Greed is a big reason why the wealthier you are, the more unethically you behave. And that's bad.
A few thousand years ago, the Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle believed that greed, and desires for material wealth, would come at the expense of one's ethics — and that, "Greed would be at the root of personal immorality".
Plato's and Aristotle's ancient wisdom has been corroborated by a series of studies carried out by Drs Keltner and Piff at the University of California, and their colleagues.
Their first two studies showed drivers of more expensive cars were more likely to break the California vehicle code — either in pushing their way through intersections, or by cutting off pedestrians at marked pedestrian crossings.
The third study showed that upper-class individuals were more likely to act unethically or dishonestly in a series of eight different scenarios.
In the fourth study, upper-class participants were more likely to take individually wrapped candies, that were kept for children.
In the fifth study, participants carried out staged negotiations — and the more wealthy were more likely to tell lies.
In the sixth study, the upper-class were again more likely to lie and cheat in order to increase their chances of winning a prize.
And in the seventh study, people from upper-class backgrounds were more likely to endorse unethical behaviour at work.
Other researchers have shown that the wealthier are more likely to steal by shoplifting than their poorer cousins. And yet another study has shown that wealthy people give less money to charity than do the poor. (Mind you, let's happily acknowledge the philanthropy of some of the fabulously wealthy people, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett).
What's going on? The United States is, from an economic point of view, the most stratified society in the Western world. On one hand, some 14,000 American families (a microscopic top 0.01 per cent of the population) hold 22.2 per cent of the wealth. That's nearly one-quarter of all the wealth in the USA. On the other hand, the bottom 90 per cent (more than 133 million families) have to share just four per cent of the United States' wealth — between all of them. Even during the recent global financial crisis, wealth increased for the top five per cent of American families.
Poverty creates inequalities in health. In the USA, between 1983 and 1999, the life expectancy for women decreased in more than 900 of their counties — that's more than one quarter of all the counties in the USA. With regard to life expectancy, the USA is no longer on top — today, it's not even in the top 40 countries in the world.
But why does higher social class predict increased unethical behaviour?
It might be the upper-class have greater resources, greater freedom to act as they choose, and greater independence from others. This can give them "self-focused patterns of social cognition and behaviour" — so they care only about themselves, not others.
A study by Kraus found that lower-class individuals were more likely to be able to accurately judge the emotions of another person, close up.
Poorer people were also more likely to detect what emotions were being felt, just by looking at still pictures of the muscles around another person's eyes. You see, poor people have less control over their lives, and external forces often determine what happens to them. As a result, they are more dependent upon other people in their lives, and so it makes sense that poor people develop more skill in reading the emotions of the people around them.
Paul Krugman, who in 2008 won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics wrote: "Self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable … a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold."
Today, governments are heavily influenced by the wealthy and the powerful. But these people often lack empathy, as compared with the poor.
Maybe it's not just that the wealthy have more money than sense, but that they also have more money than morals.
Published 01 October 2013
© 2017 Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd