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Transcription of interview with Paul Piff on January 27, 2014.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Paul Piff is a social psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley.
He does this study about how rich people and poor people look at themselves a little bit
differently.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Piff on Arutz Sheva Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: You did a study how they actually look at themselves in the mirror.
What’s the difference?
Paul Piff: We have done a lot of different studies looking at how wealthier people behaved
differently from those who are less wealthy and one of the more recent studies, we’re
actually looking at patterns of personality.
How does wealth shaped how people kind of see themselves and define themselves in relation
to others and the variable that I focused on across the number of different studies
is this variable that social psychologists more generally call narcissism.
Narcissism is this broad kind of personality constructed that kind of refers to the extent
which you haven’t inflated sense of yourself in relation to others.
You think that you are more omnipotent, more invulnerable to mistakes, you need to be the
center of attention to want to dominate in social interactions and a big piece of narcissism
is how vain you are, how likely you are to prioritize your own physical appearance, how
you look, the clothes that you are wearing, whether you stand out from the pack in relation
to what you have on.
One of the studies that you just referenced that we ran, we actually look at whether people
would look at themselves in a mirror or ought to look at their reflections in a mirror by
actually discretely posing a person who is a confederative of our studies.
So a research assistant was hiding behind the corner kind of looking out unbeknownst
to the actual participant who was given the option to look at themselves and groom themselves
in the mirror when they were told that we would be taking a photo of their faces.
Unbeknownst to them, we actually recorded what they did whether they look at themselves
in the mirror and how long they spent.
What we found was this very specific fact such that the wealthier you were, the more
likely you were to want to go over to that mirror and look at your reflection and spent
some time looking at your reflection in it.
Douglas Goldstein: How radically different was it between the wealthy and the not one?
Paul Piff: It was statistically significant.
It wasn’t a huge effect.
Of course there were some wealthy people that didn’t and again we’re looking at students
here so these are students of wealthy parents.
We’re not actually measuring people’s direct levels of wealth, we’re measuring
college students in this study, some of whom come from a lot of money, others of whom comes
from very little.
In some cases, wealthy people didn’t look at their reflections in the mirror and there
were just a lot of poor people who didn’t look at their reflections at all but across
the board, we looked at I think around 350 different students, we found a significant
effect that say about a 20% more likelihood of looking at your reflection spending time
there.
I should say that’s just one study among a big package of studies where we look at
narcissism and entitlement in a whole bunch of different ways.
Narcissism is a difficult thing to look at behaviorally but this was our attempt to look
at one kind of behavioral manifestation if you will of vanity in a study.
Douglas Goldstein: You also did another study that looked at the differences between the
way rich people and poor people drive.
What did you find out there?
Paul Piff: The kind of car that you drive is a perfect indicator of your wealth.
In our studies, actually it’s a great indicator of wealth but you can imagine people who have
a lot of people who drive Bitter cars but nonetheless, we use that, the kind of car
that you drive, in a number of different studies that I should say have since been replicated
all over this country, but we use the kind of car that you drive to index how much money
you have and then we run a number of different studies to look at whether that predicted
how likely you were to drive according to the law.
Now in California, one of the largest states that if you’re driving down the road and
you’re approaching a crosswalk, if a pedestrian is waiting at that crosswalk to cross, it’s
the law that you have to stop for the person and allow them to cross and failing to do
so is a ticketable offense and I know a number of people who have actually gotten tickets
for doing just that thing, driving to the crosswalk without stopping.
We actually posed a person at a crosswalk in a really busy intersection of downtown
Berkeley, have them approached the crosswalk and wait to cross as the driver of the vehicle
came down the roadway.
We had researchers actually literally hiding behind bushes coding what kind of car it was,
is it a Mercedes, BMW or an old Toyota Corolla.
So coding what kind of car it is that’s coming down the road, a number of other things
like how much traffic is there, the time of day, the gender of the driver and then importantly
whether the driver actually stops, yields the right of way as is the law for that person
who is waiting to cross.
What we found pretty consistently is actually none of the low status cars or least expensive
cars broke the law.
We coded the number of them and they all stopped for the pedestrian.
Douglas Goldstein: How many cars have you looked at in the study?
Paul Piff: In this one study, we probably looked at around 200 in variations of it.
We looked at over 200, 300, 400, it’s since been replicated with thousands of different
cars in a number of different intersections so it has somewhat a surprisingly consistent
effect.
We haven’t done this in other cultures and it would be really interesting for instance
having spent time in Israel and knowing what driving patterns are like in Israel to see
whether this kind of replicated there.
Nonetheless, in this one variation of this car study that we were in, there is this significant
effect such that more expensive the car that you drive was, the less likely you were to
abide by the law.
Close to 50% of drivers of those most expensive vehicles, BMWs and Mercedes, actually broke
the law whereas none of the cars in our least expensive car categories did.
Douglas Goldstein: I
found that some of the wealthier people who are giving away huge amount of their income
to charity and I’m talking about people who give 10-20% of their income every year
or more.
How does that concept of philanthropy jive with what you found in your studies?
Paul Piff: The studies that I referenced are two examples of a big program or research
that I’m involved with and other researchers are involved with where we not only look at
patterns of behavior in the real world like driving behavior but we’ve done close to
50 or 60 laboratory studies of how wealth, affluence, privilege and money shapes the
way that you behave, looking at generosity, charitable giving and compassion even on a
physiological level.
So whether people show physiological signs of compassion when they are exposed to other
suffering and we find these consistent differences between those that have and those that don’t.
Now that’s not to say when you find the statistically significant effect, of course
there are going to be notable exceptions.
In this country alone, we have lots of notable exceptions to the patterns that we document,
people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and lots of other wealthy philanthropists who
are notable exceptions to the patterns that we document.
A correlation does not mean that it’s unilaterally true or that we can predict the behavior of
specific individuals and just like your anecdotal experience suggests.
There are lots of reasons for why people do things and there are lots of wealthy people
that don’t necessarily conformed to the patterns that we document.
In the United States, there’s a pattern that’s been puzzling to a lot of people
for a long time who study charitable giving and that is that when you look at levels of
giving across all of the hundreds of millions of households in this country, for the last
50 years, there’s been this really interesting significant effect such that higher income
households give proportionately less of their incomes to charity than do lower income households.
So the more money you make, the less likely you are to give portions of that money to
charity and that here has been a highly significant effect for a lot of time.
One question would be why is it and I think our research helps shed light on what it is
that’s going on and with very notable acts of philanthropy, yes those are absolutely
the case.
We have something called the giving pledge where lots of wealthy philanthropists, hundreds
of them are giving half of their fortunes to charity but in this case has noticed somewhat
differently from the situations that we’re looking at in the lab were giving as often
anonymous.
We’re measuring whether or not you’re giving to a stranger in situations where you’ll
never meet that person and that other person never meets you.
In the cases that you might be talking about and certainly in the cases that I’ve observed,
a lot of the philanthropy of wealthy individuals operates in very public settings where giving
as very public to institutions that are also very public and even potentially put the donations
name up on some flyer or the donor’s name up on some gymnasium and these are public
acts of philanthropy that often yield not necessarily a material gain but certainly
a social and reputational gain to the person who engages in that.
I think it once again suggest that for anything that a person does, there’s a confluence
and different motivations and factors that shape why they do what they do, money is a
contributing factor but it’s not the only factor of course.
There’s a person’s values, where they come from, how they were raise, and the culture
they are in.
There are a lot of different things that shaped who a person is and what they do but money
when you isolate its effects, when you isolate wealth’s effect from the effects of other
things, it consistently in our studies has this really ironic socially costly effect
on your behavior.
It make you a little more self serving and a little less oriented to the needs of other
around you, a little more likely to prioritize yourself less attuned, less sensitive to the
needs of others around you.
Douglas Goldstein: How would you make the wealthy people more empathetic?
Paul Piff: I would say generally is that wealth in many ways is a psychological buffer.
It insolates you from others.
It allows you to [inaudible 0:13:29] yourself and you become less needing of your social
relationships and over time less prioritizing of those social relationships.
The way to reverse those effect, we’ve been finding in a number of different laboratory
studies is through simple nudges, remind people of the needs of others.
What we found is that when you bring wealthy people for instance into the lab and through
even brief videos, remind them of the needs of others in the social environment.
They become way more compassionate, way more empathetic, way more egalitarian and as a
result, way more likely to offer up their own help and their own resources for another
person suggesting that breaking through that psychological buffer of wealth through simple
reminders, simple contact, simple situational interventions goes a long way towards restoring
patterns of empathy.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people follow your work?
Paul Piff: The easiest way would be to just Google my name and go to my website.
All of our research and links to other people’s research is on my website www.paulpiff.wix.com/paulpiff.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
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