To many the idea that you get to the top through nothing else but your greater comfort with bending the rules than everyone else.  New research from Berkeley lends some credence to this perspective.  The study found that the upper classes were considerably more likely to lie and cheat when dealing with other people, whether that was in negotiations, driving their car or in the workplace.

Strong stuff.  “The increased unethical tendencies of upper-class individuals are driven, in part, by their more favourable attitudes toward greed,” says Paul Piff, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“As these issues come to the fore, our research—and that by others—helps shed light on the role of inequality in shaping patterns of ethical conduct and selfish behavior, and points to certain ways in which these patterns might also be changed,” Piff continues.

The experiment

To test the class differences in our ethical behaviour, Piff and colleagues surveyed around 1,000 people of various classes to test their ethical behaviour in different circumstances.  They used the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Socioeconomic Status to place people in a particular class group before completing the survey to measure their attitude and completing various tasks to determine their actual behaviour.

One of these field studies involved driving behaviour, and interestingly it found that upper class drivers were 4 times more likely to cut up other vehicles, and 3 times more likely to do so to a pedestrian waiting to enter a zebra crossing.  They don't mention cyclists but it seems I should add posh cars to taxis and white vans.

Another study literally found the upper classes with their fingers stuck in the sweet jar.  Participants were placed in a lab where a jar of sweets was placed on the counter.  They were told the sweets were for visiting children, but were told they could take a couple if they wanted.  The upper class participants were found to snaffle twice as many sweets as the other participants.

Another task placed the participants in a negotiating environment where participants were given the role of an employer haggling the salary of a job candidate.  An interesting twist to the scenario was that whilst the interviewee thought they were going for a long-term job, the participants in the study were told that the job would be scrapped before long.  They were informed that they could share this with the candidate if they wanted though.  Can you guess what happened?  You got it, the upper class interviewers were much more likely to withold the information and decieve the candidate.

It doesn't get any better for the toffs.  Another task had participants playing a dice game.  Each player was given 5 rolls and were asked to report their scores.  The player with the highest score after five rolls would win a cash prize.  Unbeknown to the players, the game was rigged so that every player would get the same score.  It hardly seems worth reporting now but you guessed it, the upper class players were much more likely to cheat and inflate their scores to more than was actually possible.

Greed is good

So what causes this difference in ethical behaviour?  Apparently it's all down to ones attitude towards greed.  Gordon Gekko famously said that greed is good in the movie Wall Street, and the researchers suggest that sharing this attitude is the key predictor of unethical behaviour.  When participants were primed to think about the advantages of greed they were much more likely to think unethical behaviour was ok, regardless of their class.

“These findings have very clear implications for how increased wealth and status in society shapes patterns of ethical behaviour, and suggest that the different social values among the haves and the have-nots help drive these tendencies,” Piff says of the cumulative findings.

Tyler Cowen suggests an alternative however.  He suggests upper class people could be more aggressive when driving simply because they more places to go and more calls on their time and are therefore in a hurry more often.  Likewise he argues that cheating requires a degree of intelligence, therefore the smarter you are the more likely you are to bend the rules.

Suffice to say that his perspective is not how many outlets are reporting this research but it does suggest that more investigation is required to get to the bottom of this issue.