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

[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.