A study summarizes that wealthier people are more liable to cheat

[Stan Hunter]

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_06-21/

 

I'm curious about this, and would love to hear thoughts and opinions on the matter. 

 

It's *one* study, but it got quite a bit of media coverage. I'm especially interested in opinions from other researchers, and I am interested if there is research that reveals counter-evidence. 

 

EDIT:

Original study found here: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full

This guy is on some kind of "crusade" : https://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/ppiff

[bitcoin]

I'm not able to find the study.. Only an article with no data...

[thebeardslastcall]

Who do you imagine paid for such a study and what do you suppose their motivations for doing so might be? If more money makes you more likely to cheat then what does that say about researchers and politicians and others who don't earn their money on the free market? The whole statist system corrupts everything. The more money you earn the more gets stolen and the more skewed one becomes against playing by kind rules because they're constantly being raped. If a female's physical quality and fertility is her sexual market value and a man's is in providing money and he's constantly having people steal his money this is equivalent in many ways to stealing sexual market value and rape and in such a culture why wouldn't you be more inclined to cheating to try to 'rebalance' the scales by gaining some additional sexual market value on the side wherever you can get it. Also it's basically like saying hot women are more likely to cheat than ugly women in many ways. This doesn't address the actual morality of the people necessarily so much as how often they're tempted and propositioned sexually due to their higher sexual value. It's also well known by now that once you're beyond a certain level of subsistence more money isn't what makes you more happy, especially if you have to give up more of your time to gain that more money. Once you're making enough you want more spare time to engage in other more profitable activities as simply piling on more money you can't enjoy while sucking up more and more of your time to earn that money at an ever decreasing rate of productivity due to the state's theft and it's easy to see why such a path leads many to unhappiness.

[Wuzzums]

Seeing how universities have become a cesspool of idiocy, I refuse to acknowledge any work they do until they get their act together.

[Stan Hunter]

If more money makes you more likely to cheat then what does that say about researchers and politicians and others who don't earn their money on the free market? 

Excellent point, I wonder about the professor who did the study. 

 

@JakeZeal the study can be found here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full

[fezjones]

owning a fancy car =/=, it could mean less net worth because cars are depreciating assets.

 

a wealthy person may eat less candy in their everyday lives.  this is an assumption that many leftist like to make, the mantra, "it costs more to eat healthy".  so using their own logic, and the nature of type A folks, i think wealthy people consume less candy in general.

so when presented with candy as a gift, they may enjoy it more because to them its more of a treat and something they rarely treat to themselves.  as a result, they will not give up their candy as much as someone less well off.

 

on the monopoly game. of course you will feel like you deserve to win when the deck is stacked in your favor.  thats human nature.  when i play poker at the casino and someone goes broke when they are a 70% favorite, its not surprising when people dont take it lightly. and many people who appear to take it lightly, are probably reeling inside. its not irrational for someone who feels they deserve to win (for example, when a game is rigged in their favor), to come back to the table. its called long run expected value. as long as you have a positive expected value in a game, you will correctly feel that you deserve to win in the long run.

[fezjones]

owning a fancy car =/=, it could mean less net worth because cars are depreciating assets.

 

a wealthy person may eat less candy in their everyday lives.  this is an assumption that many leftist like to make, the mantra, "it costs more to eat healthy".  so using their own logic, and the nature of type A folks, i think wealthy people consume less candy in general.

so when presented with candy as a gift, they may enjoy it more because to them its more of a treat and something they rarely treat to themselves.  as a result, they will not give up their candy as much as someone less well off.

 

on the monopoly game. of course you will feel like you deserve to win when the deck is stacked in your favor.  thats human nature.  when i play poker at the casino and someone goes broke when they are a 70% favorite, its not surprising when people dont take it lightly. and many people who appear to take it lightly, are probably reeling inside. its not irrational for someone who feels they deserve to win (for example, when a game is rigged in their favor), to come back to the table. its called long run expected value. as long as you have a positive expected value in a game, you will correctly feel that you deserve to win in the long run.

 

and on the monopoly game. Where are the results of the control group? wouldnt the control group be, to put a poor person in the upper hand position in the monopoly game and see how his attitude compares to other demographics of players?  

i know his point was that people born into lucky situations feel entitled bla bla bla.  but what about putting people born into unlucky circumstances, into a position of luck, and see how they pan out. 

i think people who come from better families and more economic opportunity are more likely to make good decisions, and handle being wealthy, better than someone who is simply handed a lot of money after all their formative years have gone. look at lotto winners. 

[thebeardslastcall]

A smart person knows there is a cost to eating candy. Candy may be freely given, but even the wealthiest may not afford the cost of consuming the candy. Less intelligent, often poor, people think free to get is free to use and take and consume everything they're given with no thought to the costs. The welfare state feeds bad habits while pretending to be a friendly gift. Cheating is not without risks, but in a corrupt environment those risks tend to be reduced since integrity is already lost and desperation may be high. The study may mean to damn monetarily wealthy people while forgetting that it could also damn those wealthy with power and suggest they're more likely to be corrupt. So a corrupt group delivers a foul claim against their dummy target while pretending it doesn't also implicate themselves and feeds into class warfare as if the politicians and researchers on government money aren't also 'upper class' of a sort, though with integrity and morality they are lower class.

[Stan Hunter]

Putting more thought into this... there's some inconsistencies. 

 

First of all, yes, it would implicate the wealthy on the left as well as the right.

Secondly, there is the fact that religious conservatives "are the most giving" when it comes to charities and non-profits (NGO's for you Europeans).

Thirdly, as mentioned above, people who are born into poverty who achieve higher socio-economic status?

Fourthly, read up on people who win the lottery (who are almost always poor), and how their stories play out. It's pretty much a guarantee that it will end in tragedy.

Fifth, as mentioned above, what about the control group? Oh wait, there's no mention of it. Because there isn't one? 

 

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the candy test. You have someone wait in a waiting area. In this country, waiting rooms often having candy bowls. And you mention in passing that the candy bowl is to be sent to a children's hospital? 

[Thomasio]

I can't find the link anymore, but I remember seeing a video on YT, where some guys have invested quite a bit of money on research, setting up experiments, trying to find out on what the willigness to cheat depends and what factors can influence it.

If I remember correct, there were no difference whatsoever by social status or wealth, in poor countries as well as in rich countries, among students as well as among random guests in a bar.

 

They did things like handing out an envelope with $10 in it to everyone.

Then they gave them 5 questions written on a piece of paper and told them to write the answers to the questions right under the questions.

Then they told them to put the paper into a shredder they had put in the room, so nobody would know whether or not they had the correct answers.

Then they gave them the correct answers and told them, everybody shall take from the envelope $2 for every answer they got correct and return the rest of the money.

 

The shredder was prepared and didn't destroy the paper, just looked like, so they could afterwards not tell who cheated, but they could tell how many correct answers were given and how much money they got back.

They did this experiment in several countries all over the world and made statistics about the results.

From that they found out that in ANY group of people, entirely independent of social status, religion, race, or whatever other difference, the amount of cheating was always near identical, around 7-8%, meaning they got 7-8% less money back than there were wrong answers.

 

Then they tried to find out what could influence the percentage of cheating and they got some astonishing results.

 

If people had to sign the paper underneath the questions and before they put it into the shredder, that made no difference on the cheating, but if people had to write their name on top of the paper, before answering the questions, cheating dropped significantly.

 

Then they placed a blonde girl in the first row of the room, who would jump up 20 seconds after the questions were handed out, claiming she had answered all questions correct and asking what she shall do now.

She was told to put the paper in the shredder, take her $10 and may leave, which she did.

After people saw her leaving and obviously getting away with definite cheating, the cheating in the rest of the group jumped to nearly 100%, again among ALL groups of people in ALL countries, British no different from Italians and South Africans no different from Americans.

 

Then they repeated the same experiment, with the blonde girl wearing a shirt with the logo of a football team that was a sworn enemy of the local team.

In this case cheating among the rest of the group dropped actually below 7%.

 

They concluded, the willingness to cheat depends on everyones inner moral status.

Seeing someone else cheating and getting away with it makes you more likely to cheat yourself, but seeing an enemy of yours cheating makes you more likely not to cheat, because you want to show your moral superiority.

 

Either way, it's all entirely independent of wealth.

[Snafui]

On the one hand I agree that these studies are flawed as mentioned by others above--and I can also safely say I don't know a lot of people from the upper classes that have time to partake in studies like this! But subjectively, and clearly anecdotally, having been raised in a household that has assets into eight digits, this rings true. (I, nor my siblings, had access to these assets--not even for college--before I get asked.) Perhaps these studies cherry picked people from households like mine:

 

My parents, and their friends, often used the law as a guideline for how much they could get away with. So long as it could be tied up in court to waste the other person's money they knew they could do what they wanted in breaking any contract. If you had real power, the contract would be broken intentionally so that it would force a renegotiation for greater gains. These never went to court because, "remember that favor I did for you (or more likely your kids)? Well, now I need you to make this disappear." And it would. Or at times a mysterious, completely out of the blue offer would be presented where they receive rather high end price tagged items for doing quite minimal work--a lottery for the rich and powerful as it were.

 

My father, and again those like him, had sex with other women and the wives didn't care so long as the money, homes, jewelry, cars, and fur coats kept coming. The line of thinking from these women was, "oh, dear, you might get him for a night or two, but I'm keeping him and his money." It was common knowledge that the worst response to "the other woman" was to be bitter about cheating and get a divorce. They understood that some young, athletic "bimbo" could come along and entice their men into bed--just roll your eyes and say, "that new Mercedes convertible is beautiful, red please!" And these men would go and buy it. This would be one of the reasons that not every rich guy trades in for the trophy wife.

 

It was a truly sick environment.

[Thomasio]

Not having the opportunity for a "big" cheat, doesn't make a poor guy less liable to cheat.

[thebeardslastcall]

Cheating by whose rules is the critical question. Different people are playing different games and thus by different rules. Some people like to define all rich people as cheaters as that's how they comfort themselves that they lost. People have a habit of defining cheating versus non-cheating in a way that favors themselves.

[Stan Hunter]

After people saw her leaving and obviously getting away with definite cheating, the cheating in the rest of the group jumped to nearly 100%, again among ALL groups of people in ALL countries, British no different from Italians and South Africans no different from Americans.

 

I read a book on cheating, and a similar observation was made. People are more likely to cheat when they see someone get away with it. I gotta find that study!

 

Some people like to define all rich people as cheaters as that's how they comfort themselves that they lost. People have a habit of defining cheating versus non-cheating in a way that favors themselves.

 

This. I live in a very "left-wing" part of the country, and this is the assumption, without question. It doesn't matter that the people making these statements live in the top 5% of socio-economic status in the world, they think anyone wealthier than them is cheating and that they can afford to sustain the whole country at a U.S. New England middle-class standard of living.