This month for our Econ Extra Credit project, we’re revisiting the 1983 comedy “Trading Places.” The holiday classic stars Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd as characters on opposite ends of the social hierarchy, with Murphy playing a beggar living on the streets and Aykroyd playing a wealthy commodities broker. Their lives are switched as part of an elaborate social experiment by two uber-rich brothers that run the brokerage firm.
Overall, the film raises some interesting questions about how people behave when they have more money (although it’s important to also mention it makes some inappropriate choices while doing so). There is, in fact, a whole body of research on this. One particular type of experiment, which researchers have run different iterations of over the years, involves a pedestrian waiting at a crosswalk. Will drivers stop and obey the traffic law to let them cross? And can we learn anything from the outcome?
Paul Piff is a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: You and I here have talked before about your famous rigged Monopoly game study that you have tested far and wide: game of Monopoly, contestants know the game is completely rigged in favor of one of them after a coin flip. But the winners think it’s not the coin flip, but their own awesomeness, that leads to success in the game. But lesser known is this other thing that you’ve done. It was your analysis of cars endangering pedestrians. How did you set that up?
Paul Piff: We just were interested in whether drivers of different kinds of cars, drivers from different kinds of wealth backgrounds, would behave differently in terms of abiding by California vehicle code: Are they more or less likely to break the law? One of the versions of those studies, we actually posed a pedestrian at a crosswalk and secretly monitored whether drivers would stop for that pedestrian, which is, in California, the law. What we found is that as the expensiveness of the car that you drove increased, the less likely you were to stop for the pedestrian, so the more likely you were to break the law. None of the cars in our least expensive car category broke the law, whereas close to 50% of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category broke the law.
Brancaccio: What conclusions do you reach from seeing that data?
Piff: I think it’s hard to draw clear conclusions from any single study. But, at this point, we’ve got dozens of different studies looking at different facets of behavior that tell us that the more wealth you have, the less attentive to other people you become. And so what I think we’re measuring in that car study may simply just be that if you come from greater means, if you have more wealth, you’re just a little more focused on your own goals and interests, your own needs, what you yourself want to do. And you’re a little less attentive to other people around you, other things in the social environment, and, in this case, someone else that might need to cross the street when you’ve got to drive right through the crosswalk to get where you need to go.
Brancaccio: I mean, but this is an important point that you’re making, which is that this one study grabbed our attention, but it fits into a matrix of other data suggesting a similar conclusion.
Piff: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s important that, like, science is a multifaceted, ongoing process. You can’t ever say that if a person has wealth that they’re going to unilaterally or categorically behave in self-interested ways. But we’ve been finding — and this is in averages across tens of thousands of people studied all across this country, in fact, all across the world, in upwards of 40 different studies at this point — that the wealthier you are, the less attuned to others you become, and the more attentive, the more likely you are to focus, both cognitively and in your own values, on the things that you want.
So we’ve actually run studies where we look at the kinds of moral principles that people of different levels of wealth endorse. And we find that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to see the pursuit of greed — and I mean literally greed. In these questionnaires, we’re using that word, which is kind of the unilateral pursuit of self-interest to the disadvantages of others. You’re willing to — more willing — to do things that harm others, to get the things that you want. The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to endorse principles of greed.
And I think the really interesting thing to me is that, it’d be one thing to make these kinds of general ascriptions, that wealthy people are just like that. And, after all, you have to be a person who has those kinds of values to become wealthy in the first place, right? You could make that argument that it’s self-interested people that become wealthy and accrue wealth in the first place. But we’ve run experiments in the lab, where we actually — like the “Trading Places” experiment — we actually bring rich and poor people into the lab and manipulate them into feeling like they’re somewhat wealthier or somewhat less well off than someone else. And even that very temporary, fleeting experience of relative advantage or relative disadvantage makes people actually shift in their social values and shift in the kinds of behaviors they exhibit toward other people. Making even poor people feel temporarily richer, temporarily more advantaged than someone else, actually shifts them into more greedy patterns of behavior.
Brancaccio: And I assume this is not just about frowning on people who have a lot of wealth. This points to the challenge of dealing with increasing inequality in society as a matter of public policy. Because a lot of people in society don’t get it if they have succeeded in society.
Piff: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really valid point. We, as a species, evolved in environments of resource scarcity. And one of the things, and perhaps the thing, that helped us survive, even thrive as a species, is our ultra sociality, our incredible tendencies to cooperate, to befriend others, to build social relationships that allow us to achieve common goals. What’s quirky is that now you’ve got lots of people at the very top — not a greater amount than at the bottom — but you’ve got a handful of people who have concentrated wealth and are actually experiencing a level of resource privilege that the human mind has never been adapted to experience. And so with that, strangely enough, comes increased feelings of entitlement, increased feelings of deservingness, increased feelings of the protection, you want to protect the wealth that you have, which is going to exacerbate inequality, which we know has all sorts of potential downstream negative consequences.
Brancaccio: I know we’re talking in the aggregate here, but I just feel the need to give equal time to wealthy people who have been extraordinarily generous with their bounty. This year, we lost a person named Chuck Feeney who got super rich through duty-free shops, and he gave away just about all of it before he died. This is Mr. Feeney of the Atlantic Philanthropies, that benefactor. I mean, there is certainly people who bucked the trend that you’ve documented.
Piff: Absolutely. I mean, I’ve got to, again, say that these are often correlations that we’re looking at across thousands and thousands of people. So we’re looking at general patterns. These aren’t categorical differences at all. And they’re averages, so there’s going to be all sorts of people who are exceptions to the general trend that we’re documenting.
But, again, we find that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their general tendencies to behave in self-interested ways do as well. That’s not to say that people from lesser means aren’t self interested, not at all. Self-interest is something we all struggle with and navigate that conflict between what I want and what’s good for others. We do that on a daily basis. And sometimes it makes sense to prioritize your own needs over the needs of others. Of course, that’s adaptive and it’s functional. You have to, to an extent. What I’m saying is that, as your levels of wealth increase, the extent to which you do those self-interested things increase as well.
Brancaccio: Just before we go, back to your crosswalk study: I’ve shown your work to audiences. And some people point out — after they get over their dismay about the human behavior that they see — some people point out that when you’re richer, paying the ticket for rolling through the crosswalk will be easier, because you’re richer. And, conversely, the penalty is effectively higher for lower-income people. So that may be going on there, too.
Piff: I think that’s that’s an important point. I mean, we don’t know what’s going on in the drivers’ heads, we don’t have access to what’s going on in those black boxes. And I would imagine that the cost of a ticket probably has something to do with it. But isn’t it then funny that the more means you have, the more above the law you can feel? So even if you feel like the ticket is something that you could pay and not experience all that much damage as a result of, you’ve still got wealthier people driving through a crosswalk, because, in a sense, they’re feeling like the law doesn’t apply to them, or at least that they can get out of breaking the law relatively easier. Which I think is an interesting social tendency that we ought to be concerned about. Because that’s going to apply to a whole broad array of other behaviors that could be more pernicious in form.
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