Well, this is a shocker

[conuly]

Here's a study showing that wealthier people are more likely to cheat in every part of life.

Oh, wow, who could ever have seen this coming?

Gosh, it's not like we already knew they give a smaller percentage of their income to charity or anything!

All this selfish behavior can't be good for them psychologically or spiritually. When, when, when are we going to tax them more so they can learn to be better people? It's truly for their own good! (Especially the ones who profess to be Christian. Don't want to keep them out of heaven or anything like that!)

Comments

[dragonwolf]

Giving more to charity doesn't make them better people, though. Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) both signed the "Giving Pledge" (half of their wealth to charity), and both lied, cheated, and stole their way to where they are now.

[conuly]

Yes, but at least some of their vast fortunes is being spent on charity. I don't really care about them that much.

[mc776]

The more I read about those studies and the more I think about them, the less credence I give to the proposition that they are alleged in the MSM to support (which may be true despite this studies).

The car study was the best of them, but a) you've let the douchebags self-select from the fact that you're basically really testing for who's going to buy a fancy vanity car; b) unless there was a recorded video that could be rechecked I have trouble dismissing the possibility that the observers also counted the flashy cars more often just because they stood out; and c) even after the concerns of a) and b) are addressed the phenomenon can still be wholly explained by the fact that insurance premiums, personal injury claims and traffic tickets don't scale in proportion to socioeconomic status or excess wealth.

Another study of insurance premiums and car owners' socioeconomic status, controlling for value of the vehicle (preferably in a jurisdiction like BC where there's a centralized insurer), relying on the assumption that reckless driving leads to more accidents and more claims, may get us a bit closer to the truth.

The self-report study... is a self-report study. What is interesting is that people of higher socioeconomic status would more likely say that they'll cheat in these situations, and finding and verifying the reason for that would be a worthwhile endeavour of its own.

Perhaps I'm just primed to be in cross-examination mode here, but I note that the Craigslist experiment depends on self-reports of social status. My experience is that many people already of questionable loyalty to the truth misrepresent themselves as being richer all the time, so it's difficult to really control for that unless the experimenters also asked for a recent tax return or something.

When test subjects of any status were asked to imagine themselves at a high social rank, they helped themselves to more candies from a jar they were told was meant for children in another lab.

This priming effect is interesting and confirms my own experience with others and myself. I think, however, this should be taken as a warning to everyone rather than merely a confirmation of the "power corrupts" narrative which can take support from other things. Which I suppose was the implicit message in Acts as simple as watching a movie about childhood poverty seem to encourage people of all classes to help others in need, [Piff] said.

Perhaps it might be better to say that the studies support the proposition that pride is a sin.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

You know what I find odd? The assumption that all rich people are motivated by greed (which presumably got them rich in the first place). I mean, that's what the article states. Surely that's a bit too simplistic?

And some of the 'experiments'/thought games... I dunno. There's so much bias working into things there. For instance, if you ask "one of the 99%" to imagine they were of higher status and THEN ask them to take candy out of the glass, you have someone who believes that the rich are always greedy being greedy in order to roleplay being rich (after all, roleplaying works best when you follow the cliché...). What exactly does that prove about the actual behaviour of rich people? Is the person who took more candy motivated by actual (objective) observation, or rather by something they assume to be the case?
Or the car thing. Don't know how it is in the state, but in Germany, very often the nicest, poshest cars belong to retired people, i.e. the elderly, i.e. people who a) learned driving at a time when rules may have been different (yes, they should keep themselves updated, but hardly anyone really does that - even I wouldn't be able to swear that our traffic rules are still exactly the same as they were when I got my driving license, and I'm only 28!); b) tend to get a bit slower, physically and mentally, which may result in (for instance) not noticing someone else having the right of way (yes, they should hand in their license when they can no longer guarantee that they're safe drivers, but again, too few people do that) -- anyway, there are other factors than just "Rich = ME! ME! ME!" that may be at work here.

Of course, the taxation issue remains. (I assume. I can't pretend I know the first thing about the American tax system. I know that over here, the middle income groups are pretty heavily taxed while the really filthy rich get off (comparably) easy, though, so I assume there's some similarly unfair system at work for you.)
But I kind of hate that such a simplistic, generalising study presumably will be quoted as "proof that the rich are all greedy meanies". Bah.