Are wealthy people more likely to be liars?

Wealthy people are more likely to lie in order to reap financial gain, according to a provocative new study. — (Image credit: Steve Hix/Somos Images/Corbis)

The rich are more likely to lie, cheat, drive rudely, support unethical behavior at work, and, yes, even "steal candy from a baby," according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Social psychologist Paul Piff and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley discovered a striking lack of ethics among the wealthy, concluding that people are more likely to steal out of a sense of entitlement than necessity. Here's what you should know:

How did the researchers make their case?

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Researchers covertly observed cars at a four-way intersection in San Francisco, drawing conclusions about each driver's socioeconomic status based on the make and year of the car. People driving nicer, newer cars were twice as likely to illegally cut off other drivers and half as likely to stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk.
Study participants played an online dice game where they reported their own score, with $50 at stake. The game was fixed so the score was always 12, but wealthier players routinely claimed scores of 15 or higher.
In another test with "a certain tongue-in-cheek humor," says Brandon Keim at Wired, students were encouraged to imagine that they were either very rich or very poor, then given the chance to take candy from a jar destined for children in a neighboring lab. The "wealthy" participants took more candy.
In another study, participants were asked to play the role of a boss negotiating with a job seeker. The make-believe job applicant was willing to take less money in exchange for a two-year commitment. But the job had a six-month expiration date, and role-playing managers "could get a bonus for negotiating a low salary," Keim says. The result? Participants who were wealthy in real life were more likely to lie to a job applicant about the temporary nature of a position to get a higher bonus for themselves.

"In a crucial last experiment," says Ian Sample in Britain's The Guardian, researchers tried to teach poorer volunteers to believe that greed is good, then asked them how likely they were to perform a series of unethical acts. Less-affluent participants scored just as poorly as the wealthy respondents. So "upper- and lower-class individuals do not necessarily differ in terms of their capacity for unethical behavior," the researchers conclude, "but rather in terms of their default tendencies toward it."

Probably, says Piff. It may be as simple as "reminding upper-class people of the needs of others. That may not be their default, but having them do it is sufficient to increase their patterns of altruistic behavior." How about requiring college students to take ethics classes so they develop "the moral framework to operate in a capitalist society"? says University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. It's as important for them as for us, since "support for free-market capitalism will collapse if those who do well don't do good."