Who’s more ethical, the rich or the poor?

Who’s more likely to lie when negotiating, cut people off while driving, or endorse unethical behavior in the workplace?

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley conducted seven related experiments and determined that, in each instance, upper-class participants were more likely to exhibit unethical behavior than their middle- or lower-class counterparts. 

Study author and doctoral student Paul Piff, quoted in a UC Berkeley press release, hypothesized that “the increased unethical tendencies of upper-class individuals are driven, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.”  Added Piff, in a news interview: “When tempted, the less affluent paid attention to fairness while the wealthy were more likely to cheat.” 

More than 1,000 individuals of lower-, middle- and upper-class backgrounds participated in the study, which revealed the following:

·         Negotiating in the workplace – Picture this: you’re a manager, interviewing candidates who want a two-year contract position, but you know that the job will last for only six months. Plus, you’ll receive a bonus for negotiating a lower salary.  What did the study find?  People of upper-class participants were more likely to deceive job candidates by withholding information.

·         Aggressive driving behavior – the study found that upper-class motorists were four times more likely than other drivers to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection and three times more likely to cut off a pedestrian waiting to enter a crosswalk.   

·         Helping yourself – in a unique study, participants in a lab-setting were assigned a series of tasks. Nearby was a jar of candy, reserved for visiting children, and participants were invited to take a candy or two.  Who took twice as much candy as their counterparts?  You guessed it.

·        Attitudes about greed – In this experiment, participants were primed to think about the advantages of greed and then presented with bad behavior-in-the-workplace scenarios, such as stealing cash, accepting bribes and overcharging customers.  The study revealed that participants NOT in the upper class – if sufficiently primed – were just as likely to engage in unethical behavior.

Where's the good news? Priming, apparently, works in reverse, that is, people can easily be primed to behave more generously.  In an article by Maia Szalavitz, a health writer at time.com, Szalavitz noted: "In an earlier study, Piff and his colleagues found that rich people were less likely to help a person who entered the lab in distress — except when they’d just watched a video about child poverty.”  This led Szalavitz to wonder: “. . . if we are concerned about negative media content harming the moral development of children, we might want to place positive depictions of greed near or even above sex and violence on the list of exposures that are unsuitable for youth.”