- How might the experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way that you think about yourself and regard the other player?
- As the game went on, the rich players started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players and more and more demonstrative of their material success.
- At the end of the 15 minute (experiment) we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why’d they’d inevitably won, in this rigged game of Monopoly, they talked about what they’d done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game.
- As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases
- Wealthy people are more likely to moralize greed being good and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral
- In one study, the poor participants (making less than $25k a year) gave 44% more of the money to a stranger than did the wealthy participants whose incomes exceeded $150k per year
- In another study, the wealthy people were more likely to cheat, sometimes by 3 or 4 times as much
- Participants who felt rich took twice as much candy that was supposed to be reserved for children
- As the expensiveness of a driver’s car increased, their tendency to break the law also increased
- Wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations and to endorse unethical behavior at work
- The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you
- The top 20% of the population own 90% of the total wealth in this country
- The “American Dream” is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us
Here's the talk.
