Over
the past few months we have been hearing the politicos ranting about how they
are concerned about the ‘middle class.’ A major problem is how does one define
the ‘middle class.’ Well, the ultimate arbiters of our social status will, of course, come from the ranks of the psychologists and management
school gurus.
It
is a widely held belief amongst the long tail of the 99% that I personally rub
shoulders with that ‘to get on’ one has to be flexible with regards to ethics.
How flexible depends on the individual, but now we can put to rest such
suspicions as Piff et al has carried
out a seminal study of the ethical behavior differential of upper and lower
class people (1,2,3). (Note: I am hanging on to the middle by my finger nails.
Feel free to join me.)
Piff
et al gave their participants a
series of 7 experimental problems to tease out their ethical behavior. Now it
is interesting that they didn’t stick with just one small group but brought in
people from a variety of sources such as Craig’s list and Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk.
With
seven individual experiments, the original paper is worthy of study, but I’ll
report on a couple of juicy data points here. How juicy, I guess depends on
your paycheck.
From
study number 5. This took 108 people from Amazon Turk to act as tough
negotiators for salary for a new job applicant. They knew that the applicant was
looking for long-ish term employment and wanted reassurance for long term
stability. They would accept a lower salary to achieve that assurance, but the
negotiators knew that the job would vanish in 6-months. What would you do? Well,
those described as UC went for the good of the corporation and promised
long-term jobs to get assent to the lower salary. Not so the LC
From
study number 1. Experimenters stood at four-way stops and pedestrian crossings
and recorded cars behaving badly (cutting-off pedestrians or pushing ahead of
their turn at 4-ways). Four times as many expensive cars cut off other drivers
at 4-ways and almost half of the expensive cars cut off pedestrians while none
of the oldest, cheapest cars did.
There
are lots of other fun factors in the paper for those of us who worry about such
things. The authors think that the rise in social status for all primates, not
just the 1%, but chimpanzees and baboons too, makes one more self-focused and
hence a little careless about other individuals in the social milieu. So the
big question remains as to how do we encourage empathy to tame our greed?
- http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.abstract?sid=05e8a63c-e497-4555-b50d-77a400dca40a
- http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSupplemental/pnas.201118373SI.pdf
- http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-27/wealthier-people-more-likely-than-poorer-to-lie-or-cheat-researchers-find.html
