Looks like it's been updated now, but I can't edit my comment, alas.
As a topical comment, the research on this subject is still pretty uncertain, though with some interesting studies. A somewhat-contrary finding is that one proxy measure of altruism, probability of a dropped letter being returned, was found to be lower in poorer neighborhoods of the UK: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
The authors of that study have a brief discussion of possible differences in the scenarios:
Our overall findings replicate and expand on previous studies using similar methodology [9], [10] but are in contrast with the findings of Piff et al [11] who find that wealthy individuals in Berkeley, U.S.A. are more likely to not give way to other cars or pedestrians, and are more likely to behave selfishly or unethically in economic games. One possible explanation for these contradictory results is that Piff et al [11] findings are likely due to individual level differences, whilst our findings may stem mainly from contextual neighbourhood effects. Therefore our results may not be in conflict, if good socio-economic conditions in an area lead to increased trust and long-term thinking, even though, within any one neighbourhood, wealthier individuals are less altruistic than poorer people. If this is the case, we would predict that the lost letters in our experiment were more likely to be returned by the poorer individuals in the area, and that the wealthy residents of Berkeley would behave even less altruistic when in a poorer neighbourhoods. These latter hypotheses have yet to be tested. Alternatively, these contradictory results may be highlighting domain specific differences of altruistic behaviour between rich and poor people; for example anti-social behaviours involving competition (such as aggressive driving or cheating in an economic game) may be more common amongst the wealthy, whereas in a non-competitive task (such as returning a lost letter) wealthy individuals behave more altruistically than poor individuals.
In this study, we have shown that individuals living in poor neighbourhoods are less altruistic than individuals living in wealthier neighbourhoods. However, we have not been able to identify the specific neighbourhood characteristic behind this, due to income being strongly correlated with other factors, such as crime. Further research should focus on attempting to disentangle these two factors, possibly by comparing equally deprived neighbourhoods with different levels of crime.
I'm not saying this haphazardly, this is a genuine thought - maybe it's not having a nice car that lets you drive aggressively, but the other way around, unethical behavior yields nicer cars.
The rich tend to come from rich families, and it's likely that they model their ethics and behavior on their parents, who may have gotten to where they are through a disregard for ethics.
I would guess (of course this is just an observation, no real evidence) that both scenarios are plausible, and there is actually a feedback loop between them. Roughly:
Superiority complex -> unethical behavior economically -> economic superiority -> increased sense of superiority -> unethical behavior in general -> ad infinitum
I'm surprised this passed peer review. The underlying studies seem pretty iffy, for example in a few of the studies that made the assumption that "nice car" == "upper class" and in others they had students self-assess social class status rather than using any of the normal socioeconomic classification approaches used in social research.
(disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist, but I've read a lot of papers on social stratification as I used to work on social mobility stuff)
Studies 1 & 2 didn't examine ethical behavior by any actual determination of social class, but rather by the kind of car a person was driving.
Studies 3 & 4 were conducted entirely with undergraduate participants taking a laboratory class for course credit.
Studies 5 & 7 were done entirely online. It's not clear how participants were recruited.
Study 6 was done by recruiting volunteers through Craigslist with a "chance to win" a $50 gift card.
There's a lot more here to make me skeptical of any conclusions from this "science".
EDIT: Here are the first three tested "unethical behaviors" from study 4[1]:
1. Use office supplies, Xerox machine, and stamps for personal purposes.
2. Make personal long-distance phone calls at work.
3. Waste company time surfing on the internet, playing computer games, and socializing.
They get a little worse, but it's easy to see why some "upper class" respondents might measure as "more unethical" in this survey: Employers who predominantly hire high skill workers for high salary positions generally don't care about these behaviors and employees act and respond accordingly. Does Google consider it unethical if you photocopy a few "Lost Dog" posters?
EDIT2: Oh god. And as the link danielweber supplies below points out, study 4 wasn't even run with real participants from different classes, instead, "We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior."
That a paper like this can be published (and funded by the NSF!) seems like an awful reflection of the state of the social sciences.
Regarding social class and cars, is your theory here that social class and kind of car is uncorrelated? Or just that you'd like them to demonstrate it as well?
I own two vehicles: an expensive sport sedan for commuting and a crappy old SUV for hauling stuff. I drive aggressively in the sport sedan because it's made for it, and slowly in the SUV because it doesn't respond as quickly. If I went through Study 1 in both vehicles, I might support their conclusion even though I'm the same person with the same social class.
I can't help noticing that the article lacked a study of the sort where they parked an open convertible with a MacBook in the back seat in several high-class neighborhoods and in several federal housing projects and measured mean time until theft. How might those numbers look, and might they be plausibly interpreted as saying something about ethics or greed?
Or maybe a professor could divide his undergrads randomly into two groups and send them one at a time for a 10pm stroll through either a high-class neighborhood or a housing project, keeping careful statistics of how many in each group have their money taken from them by violent means. Could differences in willingness to violently rob others be construed as saying something about differences in ethics or greed?
Of course the second study would never pass the research ethics board, but that's okay because, as it turns out, the police keep mountains of such statistics from the natural laboratory social scientists are supposed to be studying. Data on per capita "theft from vehicle" by neighborhood, per capita robbery, and so on, are easily available and could be incorporated into the study, except that...they wouldn't support the desired conclusion, making the study less helpful for promoting other agendas.
While your point about small-scale violence and theft of physical goods is well taken, the ultra rich have the opportunity to steal and commit violence on a scale undreamt of by the poor -- and these crimes are rarely the subjects of police statistics.
As the old saying goes, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. The elite and ultra-rich commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries, and start wars with hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties.
They get laws written in their favor, buy off politicians and judges, hide their gains in off-shore tax havens, and hire armies of high-paid lawyers to protect them -- with the effect that few of them suffer any consequences (rarely anything like the SWAT-style raids and hard jail time routinely inflicted upon the poor for far smaller offenses).
The elite and ultra-rich commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries...
Replace the first word, "the", with "some", and I'm with you. It's undeniably true. And "some" elite and ultra-rich do more good in the world than entire towns full of poor people. This is an observation about leverage, not about differences in average ethics by class.
It's reasonable to assume that the same housing project residents who are so willing to violently assault a passerby and take his wallet or swarm around a traffic accident, stealing what they can from the injured victims, would be willing to "commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries" if only they had the means to do so. That they don't do so is probably not a sign of higher ethical standards.
"If you were elected yourself, would you be corrupt and steal public money?"
The first had 90% of "YES" (no surprise here).
The second had a 60% of "YES"
This mean if you put a random person in office, 60% of chance they WILL steal. And 40% of chance they might fall into the group of real honest people, or people that steal but won't admit about it.
PBS did a piece entitled Exploring the Psychology of Wealth, 'Pernicious' Effects of Economic Inequality with Paul Piff (one of the authors of this paper) [1].
That's not a particularly critical analysis. He's not arguing that the experiments were bad, but that their findings should be interpreted carefully and in the light of the literature as a whole.
Ethical rules exist for a reason - they help people avoid major pitfalls in life with serious consequences.
People from higher social classes have a cushion that protects them from the consequences of their ethical lapses. A mistake that would consign a person of lower-class origins to a life of perpetual poverty or prison is frequently just an inconvenience to a higher-class person.
Because their consequences are less severe, of course the upper classes feel more free to ignore ethical guidelines. The real disaster happens when the lower classes decide to emulate them and get crushed.
That is actually pretty tame relative what some rich kids do with their fancy cars.
* Jewelry heir kills two men with his out of control Porsche, pays off the families, gets house arrest. This is after running over a cop a few years earlier. [0]
* Red Bull heir kills a police officer and drags the body with his Ferrari, pays off the family with a mere $97K. [1]
* Aspiring "interior designer" kills two men while driving recklessly in her mom's Porsche. One is killed instantly, she drags the other around a parking lot. [2]
Really? Because I thought the real disaster here was high social class actors who act unethically and harm lots of other people. E.g., the 2007-8 financial crisis.
A fucken nigger does not understand how thinking can take work. Go to fucken china and execute intellectuals in camps.
God's world is perfectly just. Do not covet.
God says...
land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he
said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for
the sons of the prophets.
4:39 And one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild
vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full, and came and
shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew them not.
4:40 So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as
they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou
man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof.
4:41 But he said, Then bring meal. And he cast it into the pot; and he
said, Pour out for the people, that they may eat. And there was no
harm in the pot.
4:42 And there came a man from Baalshalisha, and brought the man of
God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley, and full ears
of corn in the husk thereof. And he said, Give unto the people, that
they may eat.
4:43 And his servitor said, What, should I set this before an hundred
men? He said again, Give the people, that they may eat: for thus
saith the LORD, They shall eat, and shall leave thereof.
4:44 So he set it before them, and they did eat, and left thereof,
according to the word of the LORD.
----
In the movie titanic, the rich lived in straight jackets. Slavery
I have no desire to debate what is "ethical", but I'm a little surprised there is no mention of their definition. Nietzsche for one would say that this study's results are simply because modern ethical guidelines are based on those of the lower classes. So it's quite obvious that higher social classes are "unethical" simply because the poor's values are anti-upper class.
>I'm a little surprised there is no mention of their definition [for 'ethical'].
No you're not. ;)
If they define it, people can/will disagree with it. If they don't, they can't/won't.
Or, think of it this way: how many studies with similar outsets but which included a real attempt at a definition for 'ethical' do you think go viral enough to a) make it to HN, and b) get 46 upvotes in 60-119 minutes?
That's a problem qualitative social scientists often have with this kind of work. In their view, the right way to analyze something like this would require at least several months of classic ethnographic fieldwork: interview and observe people in a community, read its newspapers, try to understand how to it functions, what socioeconomic class categories people see themselves and others as a part of, what problems frequently come up around that, etc. Only after a phase of open-ended investigation to try to understand what's going on would you then try to abstract any general conclusions about how social class in Berkeley impacts something as broad as "ethics".
By contrast, the quantitative psych-influenced approach is to pick a proxy variable and measure it, either in the lab or in the field. Much less work, and many people will actually think that style of work is more scientific (it has numbers and p-values). It also makes for better definitive soundbites, because it states a bold conclusion that it doesn't qualify with the dozens of caveats you'd find in a year of real investigation. But it's also considerably more superficial and at risk of measuring based on problematic choices of categories and proxies.
Weird how you come to that conclusion. Cultural hegemony comes to mind, which is important in analysis of anthropological and sociological studies, claims the exact opposite of this: that the lower-classes emulate and internalize the mores of the ruling class.
Anecdotally, I come from a low income family and witnessed first hand the dissonant beliefs my parents held, that materialistically and socially benefited the rich at our expense, personally, and as a class.
It comes as a real surprise that it is that obvious to you. Are you from outside the United States? Perhaps that may be true in a society that has a shred of class consciousness, but certainly not here.
I don't necessarily agree with Nietzsche, I was just giving his opinion (for him). I definitely don't think that his diagnosis of 19th century immediate-post-Christian Europe is spot on to 21st Century materialistic America, but it's still relevant in a lot of higher level ways. I'm talking more about how utilitarianism is basically the default "ethical" choice today, and how this is a previously Christian "slave morality" ethical view. These are all Nietzsche-ian terms, not mine.
One place the criticisms here are bordering on unfair is in mentioning the study's assumptions without mentioning how they're based on previous work. For example, the use of fancy cars as a proxy for higher social status, or the use of a self-reported assessment of social status, are not arbitrary—the authors justify them with references to previous work that presumably established those techniques. Maybe that earlier work is bad; one would have to read it to know. But it's legitimate for experimenters to build on earlier work by pointing to it rather than inlining it.
Similarly, the experiments where subjects were asked to imagine things about their social status or about greed are based on a huge amount of earlier work on priming. That is by now an established experimental paradigm, and the authors clearly assume their audience knows about it [1]. That also is legitimate for a scientific paper. To criticize the paradigm, one should find flaws in the work that established it, not work that seeks to build on it.
So the comments along the lines of "how could this paper ever have passed peer review" seem to me not to hold up very well. You can extract details from most any experiment and make them seem absurd. It's true that the interpretation of these particular findings is greatly open to question, but that's no reason not to publish them when they're both interesting and statistically significant.
On the other hand, the paper clearly doesn't substantiate the enormous claim in its title. It's hard to imagine how any one paper could. Apparently peer-reviewed journals do linkbait too.
[1] Or rather, that's how I read the paper. I don't know enough to say whether this is true.
37 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 47.1 ms ] threadAs a topical comment, the research on this subject is still pretty uncertain, though with some interesting studies. A somewhat-contrary finding is that one proxy measure of altruism, probability of a dropped letter being returned, was found to be lower in poorer neighborhoods of the UK: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
The authors of that study have a brief discussion of possible differences in the scenarios:
Our overall findings replicate and expand on previous studies using similar methodology [9], [10] but are in contrast with the findings of Piff et al [11] who find that wealthy individuals in Berkeley, U.S.A. are more likely to not give way to other cars or pedestrians, and are more likely to behave selfishly or unethically in economic games. One possible explanation for these contradictory results is that Piff et al [11] findings are likely due to individual level differences, whilst our findings may stem mainly from contextual neighbourhood effects. Therefore our results may not be in conflict, if good socio-economic conditions in an area lead to increased trust and long-term thinking, even though, within any one neighbourhood, wealthier individuals are less altruistic than poorer people. If this is the case, we would predict that the lost letters in our experiment were more likely to be returned by the poorer individuals in the area, and that the wealthy residents of Berkeley would behave even less altruistic when in a poorer neighbourhoods. These latter hypotheses have yet to be tested. Alternatively, these contradictory results may be highlighting domain specific differences of altruistic behaviour between rich and poor people; for example anti-social behaviours involving competition (such as aggressive driving or cheating in an economic game) may be more common amongst the wealthy, whereas in a non-competitive task (such as returning a lost letter) wealthy individuals behave more altruistically than poor individuals.
In this study, we have shown that individuals living in poor neighbourhoods are less altruistic than individuals living in wealthier neighbourhoods. However, we have not been able to identify the specific neighbourhood characteristic behind this, due to income being strongly correlated with other factors, such as crime. Further research should focus on attempting to disentangle these two factors, possibly by comparing equally deprived neighbourhoods with different levels of crime.
Superiority complex -> unethical behavior economically -> economic superiority -> increased sense of superiority -> unethical behavior in general -> ad infinitum
It's actually a pretty comprehensive study, though this article doesn't cover everything discovered, it is still very much worth reading.
(disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist, but I've read a lot of papers on social stratification as I used to work on social mobility stuff)
Studies 3 & 4 were conducted entirely with undergraduate participants taking a laboratory class for course credit.
Studies 5 & 7 were done entirely online. It's not clear how participants were recruited.
Study 6 was done by recruiting volunteers through Craigslist with a "chance to win" a $50 gift card.
There's a lot more here to make me skeptical of any conclusions from this "science".
EDIT: Here are the first three tested "unethical behaviors" from study 4[1]:
1. Use office supplies, Xerox machine, and stamps for personal purposes.
2. Make personal long-distance phone calls at work.
3. Waste company time surfing on the internet, playing computer games, and socializing.
They get a little worse, but it's easy to see why some "upper class" respondents might measure as "more unethical" in this survey: Employers who predominantly hire high skill workers for high salary positions generally don't care about these behaviors and employees act and respond accordingly. Does Google consider it unethical if you photocopy a few "Lost Dog" posters?
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSu...
EDIT2: Oh god. And as the link danielweber supplies below points out, study 4 wasn't even run with real participants from different classes, instead, "We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior."
That a paper like this can be published (and funded by the NSF!) seems like an awful reflection of the state of the social sciences.
Let me guess... they found that BMWs are exclusively driven by assholes? Any cyclist could have told them that!
Or maybe a professor could divide his undergrads randomly into two groups and send them one at a time for a 10pm stroll through either a high-class neighborhood or a housing project, keeping careful statistics of how many in each group have their money taken from them by violent means. Could differences in willingness to violently rob others be construed as saying something about differences in ethics or greed?
Of course the second study would never pass the research ethics board, but that's okay because, as it turns out, the police keep mountains of such statistics from the natural laboratory social scientists are supposed to be studying. Data on per capita "theft from vehicle" by neighborhood, per capita robbery, and so on, are easily available and could be incorporated into the study, except that...they wouldn't support the desired conclusion, making the study less helpful for promoting other agendas.
As the old saying goes, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. The elite and ultra-rich commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries, and start wars with hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties.
They get laws written in their favor, buy off politicians and judges, hide their gains in off-shore tax havens, and hire armies of high-paid lawyers to protect them -- with the effect that few of them suffer any consequences (rarely anything like the SWAT-style raids and hard jail time routinely inflicted upon the poor for far smaller offenses).
Replace the first word, "the", with "some", and I'm with you. It's undeniably true. And "some" elite and ultra-rich do more good in the world than entire towns full of poor people. This is an observation about leverage, not about differences in average ethics by class.
It's reasonable to assume that the same housing project residents who are so willing to violently assault a passerby and take his wallet or swarm around a traffic accident, stealing what they can from the injured victims, would be willing to "commit theft and fraud on a scale that would bankrupt entire countries" if only they had the means to do so. That they don't do so is probably not a sign of higher ethical standards.
"Are politicians corrupt and steal public money?"
and
"If you were elected yourself, would you be corrupt and steal public money?"
The first had 90% of "YES" (no surprise here).
The second had a 60% of "YES"
This mean if you put a random person in office, 60% of chance they WILL steal. And 40% of chance they might fall into the group of real honest people, or people that steal but won't admit about it.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june13/makingsen...
Here's a pretty critical analysis. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how... "Several of the tests involved people being asked to imagine they were high class, not actual “high class” people themselves."
People from higher social classes have a cushion that protects them from the consequences of their ethical lapses. A mistake that would consign a person of lower-class origins to a life of perpetual poverty or prison is frequently just an inconvenience to a higher-class person.
Because their consequences are less severe, of course the upper classes feel more free to ignore ethical guidelines. The real disaster happens when the lower classes decide to emulate them and get crushed.
* Jewelry heir kills two men with his out of control Porsche, pays off the families, gets house arrest. This is after running over a cop a few years earlier. [0]
* Red Bull heir kills a police officer and drags the body with his Ferrari, pays off the family with a mere $97K. [1]
* Aspiring "interior designer" kills two men while driving recklessly in her mom's Porsche. One is killed instantly, she drags the other around a parking lot. [2]
0: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-le...
1: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355224/Aspiring-int...
2: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/red-bull-heir-pays-9...
God's world is perfectly just. Do not covet.
God says... land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for the sons of the prophets.
4:39 And one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full, and came and shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew them not.
4:40 So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof.
4:41 But he said, Then bring meal. And he cast it into the pot; and he said, Pour out for the people, that they may eat. And there was no harm in the pot.
4:42 And there came a man from Baalshalisha, and brought the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley, and full ears of corn in the husk thereof. And he said, Give unto the people, that they may eat.
4:43 And his servitor said, What, should I set this before an hundred men? He said again, Give the people, that they may eat: for thus saith the LORD, They shall eat, and shall leave thereof.
4:44 So he set it before them, and they did eat, and left thereof, according to the word of the LORD.
----
In the movie titanic, the rich lived in straight jackets. Slavery
No you're not. ;)
If they define it, people can/will disagree with it. If they don't, they can't/won't.
Or, think of it this way: how many studies with similar outsets but which included a real attempt at a definition for 'ethical' do you think go viral enough to a) make it to HN, and b) get 46 upvotes in 60-119 minutes?
By contrast, the quantitative psych-influenced approach is to pick a proxy variable and measure it, either in the lab or in the field. Much less work, and many people will actually think that style of work is more scientific (it has numbers and p-values). It also makes for better definitive soundbites, because it states a bold conclusion that it doesn't qualify with the dozens of caveats you'd find in a year of real investigation. But it's also considerably more superficial and at risk of measuring based on problematic choices of categories and proxies.
Thanks for the perspective.
Anecdotally, I come from a low income family and witnessed first hand the dissonant beliefs my parents held, that materialistically and socially benefited the rich at our expense, personally, and as a class.
It comes as a real surprise that it is that obvious to you. Are you from outside the United States? Perhaps that may be true in a society that has a shred of class consciousness, but certainly not here.
More reading for the curious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
Similarly, the experiments where subjects were asked to imagine things about their social status or about greed are based on a huge amount of earlier work on priming. That is by now an established experimental paradigm, and the authors clearly assume their audience knows about it [1]. That also is legitimate for a scientific paper. To criticize the paradigm, one should find flaws in the work that established it, not work that seeks to build on it.
So the comments along the lines of "how could this paper ever have passed peer review" seem to me not to hold up very well. You can extract details from most any experiment and make them seem absurd. It's true that the interpretation of these particular findings is greatly open to question, but that's no reason not to publish them when they're both interesting and statistically significant.
On the other hand, the paper clearly doesn't substantiate the enormous claim in its title. It's hard to imagine how any one paper could. Apparently peer-reviewed journals do linkbait too.
[1] Or rather, that's how I read the paper. I don't know enough to say whether this is true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVlh4e8yP3o