Money Changes Who You Are

Does it matter that our politicians are so much richer than average Americans? Maybe so. Britt Peterson:

a number of new studies suggest that, in certain key ways, people with that much money are not like the rest of us at all. As a mounting body of research is showing, wealth can actually change how we think and behave—and not for the better. Rich people have a harder time connecting with others, showing less empathy to the extent of dehumanizing those who are different from them. They are less charitable and generous. They are less likely to help someone in trouble. And they are more likely to defend an unfair status quo. If you think you’d behave differently in their place, meanwhile, you’re probably wrong: These aren’t just inherited traits, but developed ones. Money, in other words, changes who you are.

There are two ways to gauge the difference between how wealthy and nonwealthy people think: You can make people temporarily feel rich (or prompt them to think about money) and see if that creates changes, or you can sample rich and nonrich people and see if they think differently to begin with. Both kinds of studies yield results that point in the same somewhat disturbing direction. . . .

Further studies have shown that prompting people to think about money—a technique known as “priming”—makes them less likeable and friendly, and more likely to agree with statements that support an unjust, social-Darwinist status quo (for example, “Some groups of people are simply inferior to others”). In a particularly disturbing part of one study, the team primed people with money, then gauged their empathy by eliciting reactions to a theoretical scenario involving a belligerent homeless person. The researchers offered the subjects a chance to agree with statements that dehumanized others (“Some people deserve to be treated like animals”). The money-primed group was more likely to agree.

One of the most consistent findings of these studies is that the more money people make, the more likely they are to believe that the existing economic arrangements are just:

In 2009, Michael Kraus, Paul Piff, and Dacher Keltner, all then of Berkeley, published research that divided up sample groups by family income as well as self-reported socioeconomic status. People of higher socioeconomic status were more likely to explain success or failure as a result of individual merit or fault; lower-class people, on the other hand, felt less control in their own lives and were more likely to blame events on circumstance. In other words, higher-status people were more likely to feel that they’d earned their high place in society, and that poorer people hadn’t.