And if so, why?

In this modern era where the struggle between the rich and the average has solidified into talk of the struggle of the ninety nine percent versus the one percent, it has become increasingly clear that those ivory tower billionaires whose wealth and power makes them de facto rulers of the world have behaved in ways which are not merely selfish and short-sighted, but actively hostile to the ethical standards of free world. They seek every opportunity to subvert democracy, curtail freedom that is not their own, demand bigger and bigger slices of the pie to slake their everlasting greed, and in fact, use their ill gotten power to try to take the world back to the age of the robber barons, if not even further.

In such a political milieu, those of us unburdened with billions might be tempted to reflexively answer “Hell yes!” when asked if the rich are evil. It’s an easy thing to say, it feels good, and it’s the sort of thing that very few people outside of Fox News and the GOP will disagree with.

But if that was all there was to it, it might well simply be dismissed as a popular prejudice from a troubled age. However, as it turns out, this view actually has some science on its side.

Here is the gist of the article :

As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers find that the wealthy are more likely to cheat, lie and act indifferently to those in need than those financially less well-off.

“Elevated wealth status seems to make you want even more, and that increased want leads you to bend the rules or break the rules to serve your self-interest,” says Paul Piff, a UC Berkeley graduate student, who is the lead author of the joint study with the University of Toronto.

Some of this is thing that everybody already knows from experience, like findings that confirm that the rich are more likely to cut you off in traffic or be rude to servers.

But what strikes me most is that this clear tendency towards acting in their own self-interest above absolutely anything is shown even when they are reporting on themselves and what they would do in hypothetical ethical situations.

So not only do they lack basic morality, they lack even the self-interested self-awareness to pretend to have it. They are evil, and they do not see a problem with that.

But why? What is it about a high level of wealth that does this to people?

Here are a few potential factors to consider :

Selection Bias. One possible factor is selection bias. Perhaps the real story is that it takes a ruthless and amoral person to become rich in the first place. This would certainly explain the callous attitudes of the nouveau riche and the self-made man (or woman).

The infantalizing effect of privilege. The more wealth or power a person has, the greater their ability to have everything be exactly how they want it to be, and the less incentive they have to socially cooperate. In effect, this causes them to revert to a pre-moral emotional state, as if they were once more self-centered spoiled children. And indeed, you will find that, like such children, they are often angry, petulant, demanding, unreasonable, selfish, unwilling to share, and extraordinarily short-tempered and impatient.

The isolating effect of wealth. The extreme power differential between an average citizen and a wealthy person creates a strong isolating effect. An average person cannot help but see the wealthy person as an opportunity more than a person, and the wealthy person in turn cannot afford to trust that average people are acting out of pure motives and can be trusted. This creates a terrible barrier between the wealthy and the average, and leads many of the wealthy to conclude that they have no choice but to only associate with those of their level of status and income, regardless of any egalitarian impulses. This forms the basis for a group identity and the rich acting as a class.

The instinctual primate response to status. Our modern pluralistic, capitalistic democracies do a good job of masking our species’ basic hierarchical nature. But every human being has a set of instincts which are entirely about power, status, social dominance, and maintaining a strict hierarchy. One of those instincts has to do with status. We naturally feel that with status comes dominance and privilege. It is basic to our natures to feel that being higher up the status tree means we are special and deserve both to have the best of everything and to rule over those below us. This instinct runs deep into our primate natures, and yet, because of the flattening of the formal hierarchy that occurs in modern society, most of us do not achieve a very large increase of status in our lives, and hence, we never experience these instincts very strongly. Hence, the way wealth and status changes people seems alien to us, and it is easy to imagine we would behave differently in their shoes. And perhaps we would. But we should not simply assume it will be so.

Obviously, these are just a few of the potential factor that go into a complex and multifaceted sociological phenomenon like this tendency of wealth and status to be antithetical to moral behaviour.

And it should be carefully noted that what I am speaking of in this article is a broad trend, not a narrow prejudice. Nothing in this article should be construed as a blanket moral condemnation of all wealthy people. As individuals, they are no doubt as various and diverse as any other human beings. We speak only of a broad sociological trend.

That said, this trend is supported by scientific evidence, and as it bodes very poorly for the future of freedom and democracy, it behooves us to study this trend very carefully, and see what can be done to counter it before it is too late.