Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2014, when Piff was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley; he later moved to UC Irvine.
A series of studies carried out by a postdoctoral researcher in the psychology department at the University of California has concluded that people with more money are more likely to be ruder, as well as to break the rules and be less empathetic towards the rest of the population.
The level of empathy drops and the level of rudeness rises as the zeros on the right of their fortune increase. The differences in attitude between people with greater material wealth (even if they haven’t earned it) and people who lack wealth are considerable. As wealth levels rise, feelings of compassion fall.
An interesting part of the study involved getting a group of people to play Monopoly and similar games. As the game went on, the players who were accumulating more (fictitious) wealth started to become more arrogant and obnoxious towards the others, while the ones who were losing began to show “head down” syndrome.
The winners boasted about the brilliant strategies they had come up with to win, while the losers put their poor result down to bad luck. Very similar to real life, except that in Monopoly the result depends heavily on the luck of the dice.
In another experiment, it was found that those with the least fictitious money were kinder when it came to lending to other players, while those with the most money couldn’t even bring themselves to say good morning.
See also: Ways to increase emotional intelligence in the company
It is also true that no rich person ever made their fortune by giving money away to people.
Beyond this study, how much truth is there in the rudeness of those who have the most?
Personally, I don’t think the people who have the most are really ruder or less polite. It is true that they can become more distrustful of the people around them.
As their fortune grows, I don’t think it is entirely accurate that they have less and less empathy or compassion for those who have less. I would venture to say that these people, especially if they created their own wealth through work and effort, may come to think that others haven’t achieved what they have because they didn’t put in the effort or didn’t know how to focus properly to get there.
Most of the rich people I’ve met are not lacking in compassion for others; rather, they start to get tired of the fact that everyone who approaches them wants favours instead of advice. Perhaps this is the point at which a person with a lot of money can become somewhat ruder with people, simply because they doubt the intentions of those who approach them.
That said, it is a natural instinct to gain confidence and inflate our ego about our abilities, attitudes and skills (often leading to arrogance) as we get positive results from the actions we take.
See also: Once you have a lot of money, how do people stay motivated to keep working instead of retiring?
Of course, I’m not a psychologist, and I can only speak about the people with money, with a lot of money and with no money that I’ve met throughout my life. And honestly, I’ve met every kind of person: very humble rich people and very arrogant, haughty poor people. Could we really say that people with a lot of money lack compassion for the rest of society?
Further reading
- 8 habits of millionaires
- Are millionaires smarter than everyone else?
- The secret of millionaires, told by millionaires
Featured image: Lucius Kwok, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
