
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior (2012) [pdf] - gruseom
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full.pdf
======
twoodfin
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?

[1]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/02/22/1118373109.DCSupplemental/pnas.201118373SI.pdf)

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.

~~~
SiVal
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.

~~~
gnosis
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).

~~~
SiVal
_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.

~~~
speeder
Here in Brazil a street pool asked two questions:

"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.

------
ig1
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)

------
gyardley
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.

~~~
smtddr
You are completely right and that's all there really is to it. That's why
things like this happen: [http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-
elite-childre...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-
children)

~~~
incision
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]

0: [http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-
le...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-levin-hit-
and-run-2-20110603_1_house-arrest-work-with-florida-authorities-craig-elford)

1: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355224/Aspiring-
int...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355224/Aspiring-interior-
designer-22-charged-manslaughter-DUI-struck-killed-pedestrians-mothers-
Porsche.html)

2: [http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/red-bull-heir-
pays-9...](http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/red-bull-heir-
pays-97000-to-family-of-man-he-is-alleged-to-have-killed-with-a-1m-ferrari/)

------
WestCoastJustin
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].

[1] [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-
june13/makingsen...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-
june13/makingsense_06-21.html)

------
danielweber
This came out a year or two ago and got a bunch of discussion on economics and
science blogs.

Here's a pretty critical analysis.
[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how-
good-are-the-upper-classes.html) "Several of the tests involved people being
asked to imagine they were high class, not actual “high class” people
themselves."

~~~
gruseom
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.

------
gnosis
I also seem to recall reading that poor people tend to donate more money (as a
percentage of their wealth) and do so more frequently than rich people.

~~~
emhart
[http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-
Divide/...](http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-
Divide/133775/)

It's actually a pretty comprehensive study, though this article doesn't cover
everything discovered, it is still very much worth reading.

------
digitalsushi
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.

~~~
zwegner
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

------
gruseom
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.

------
mjn
PDF from the source (also open access):
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full.pdf)

~~~
mjn
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...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043294)

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._

------
keiferski
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.

~~~
mdt
>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?

~~~
mjn
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.

~~~
mdt
Hmm. I'll have to do something about that.

Thanks for the perspective.

------
known
90% of corrupt money in India is with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste)
people.
[http://images.outlookindia.com/Uploads/outlookindia/2013/201...](http://images.outlookindia.com/Uploads/outlookindia/2013/20130211/page_32_20130211.jpg)

------
tikums
Accompanying PBS NewsHour report: Exploring the Psychology of Wealth

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVlh4e8yP3o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVlh4e8yP3o)

------
known
Sounds like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)

