For a moment, think about playing a game of monopoly.
Except this game's been rigged
and you've got the upper hand.
You've got more money,
more opportunities to move around the board,
and more access to resources.
How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game
change the way that you think about yourself
and regard that other player?
We ran a study to look at exactly that question .
We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab
and with the flip of a coin
randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game.
One of the really interesting and dramatic patterns
that we observed begin to emerge
was that the rich players actually started to become ruder to the other person,
less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor poor players,
and more and more demonstrative of their material success,
more likely to showcase how well they're doing
and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation
including that flip of a coin
that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place.
What we've been finding is that as a person's levels of wealth increase,
their feelings of compassion and empathy go down,
and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness
and their ideology of self-interest increases.
It's actually wealthier individuals
who are more likely to moralize greed being good.
and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral.
We've run other studies finding that wealthier individuals
are more likely to lie in negotiations,
to endorse unethical behavior at work,
like taking bribes and lying to customers.
I don't mean to suggest that it's only wealthy people
who show these patterns of behavior.
I think that we all in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives
struggle with these competing motivations of when or if
to put our own interests above the interests of other people,
but what we're finding is that the wealthier you are,
the more likely you are to pursue a vision
of personal success of achievement and accomplishment
to the detriment of others around you.
We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality.
Economic inequality is something we should all be concerned about.
There's a lot of really compelling research
showcasing the range of things that are undermined
as economic inequality gets worse.
Social mobility,
physical health,
social trust all go down as inequality goes up.
Similarly, things like violence
imprisonment, punishment are exacerbated as economic inequality increases.
And if it's the case
as we've been finding that the wealthier you are,
the more entitled you feel to that wealth
and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests
above the interest of other people,
well then there's no reason to think that those patterns will change.
This cascade of self-perpetuating, negative effects
could seem like something that has spun out of control
and there's nothing we can do about it.
But we've been finding that small psychological interventions,
small changes to people's values
can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy.
In one study, we had people watch a brief video about childhood poverty
that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around them.
We looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time
to a stranger who was in distress.
After watching this video,
rich people became just as generous of their own time
to help out the stranger as someone who's poor
suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical
but are so malleable to slight changes in people's values
and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy.
Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries
but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.