Does money make you mean? | Paul Piff

Summary

Social psychologist Paul Piff argues that feeling wealthy or powerful can make people less attentive to others and more focused on their own interests. He illustrates this with a rigged game of Monopoly, then describes research linking wealth and status to reduced generosity, empathy, and rule-following. He also emphasizes that these tendencies are not fixed: small reminders of other people’s needs can increase compassion and generosity.

The rigged Monopoly study

Piff and colleagues brought more than 100 pairs of strangers into a lab. A coin flip randomly selected one person in each pair to be the “rich” player. That player received twice as much money, collected twice as much when passing Go, and rolled two dice while the other player rolled one. Researchers observed the games using hidden cameras.

Although the players could see that the game was unequal, the advantaged players tended to:

• Move their pieces more forcefully and display more signs of dominance and celebration.
• Eat more pretzels from a bowl set nearby.
• Become ruder and less sensitive to the other player.
• Brag about their money and success.

Afterward, rich players often explained their wins by referring to their own decisions and skill, while overlooking how the coin flip and the game’s rules had given them an advantage. Piff presents this as an example of how people can overlook situational advantages when interpreting their success.

Wealth, self-interest, and behavior

Across dozens of studies involving thousands of participants, Piff’s team found associations between greater wealth and:

• Lower feelings of compassion and empathy.
• Stronger feelings of entitlement and deservingness.
• Greater emphasis on self-interest, including a greater tendency to view greed as acceptable or moral.

He gives several examples of the research:

• Sharing money: Participants from lower-income households gave an anonymous stranger, on average, 44% more of a $10 sum than participants from higher-income households.
• Cheating: In a game where high die rolls were impossible, wealthier participants were more likely to cheat to earn a cash prize.
• Taking candy: Participants who felt wealthy took twice as much candy from a jar explicitly reserved for children as participants who felt poor.
• Driving behavior: In a study of cars yielding to a pedestrian at a crosswalk, the likelihood of breaking the law rose with the cost of the car. Nearly half the cars in the most expensive category failed to stop; none in the least expensive category did.
• Other ethical behavior: The team also found that wealthier participants were more likely to lie in negotiations and endorse unethical workplace behavior, such as stealing, taking bribes, or lying to customers.

Piff cautions that these patterns do not apply only to wealthy people. People in general face conflicts between their own interests and the welfare of others; his argument is that greater wealth is associated with a stronger tendency to prioritize personal success at others’ expense.

Inequality and its consequences

Piff connects these findings to growing economic inequality in the United States. He says wealth has become increasingly concentrated, with the top 20% owning close to 90% of the country’s wealth, and argues that this concentration makes the American dream less attainable for many people.

He also points to research linking greater inequality with worse outcomes across society, including lower social mobility, physical health, and social trust, and higher obesity, violence, imprisonment, and punishment. These effects, he stresses, are not confined to people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.

What can help

Piff argues that the effects of wealth and status are not inevitable or permanent. Small interventions that shift people’s attention toward cooperation, community, and others’ needs can encourage more egalitarian behavior.

• Reminding people of the benefits of cooperation or community can make wealthier participants behave as egalitarianly as poorer participants.
• In one study, participants watched a 46-second video about childhood poverty. An hour later, wealthier participants were as willing as poorer participants to give time to help a distressed stranger.

He also cites public efforts to address inequality, including Bill Gates’s call to apply discoveries to reduce inequity, the Giving Pledge, and grassroots groups such as “We are the 1 percent,” Resource Generation, and Wealth for Common Good. These examples involve wealthy people using resources and influence to support policies and values that may run against their own financial interests.

Speakers and sources featured

• Paul Piff — the main speaker, presenting the research and its implications.
• Unidentified Monopoly-study participants — brief recorded exchanges between “Rich Player” and “Poor Player” participants are played during the talk.
• Pedestrian-study confederate — appears in the driving demonstration as a person waiting to cross; not identified by name.
• Bill Gates — quoted by Piff from a Harvard commencement speech; he is cited, not shown speaking in the subtitles.
• Other research and groups cited by Piff — unnamed research teams studying inequality, plus the Giving Pledge, “We are the 1 percent,” Resource Generation, and Wealth for Common Good.