Does becoming rich make you a jerk? Or do jerks just have the right personality type for getting rich?
Either way, research shows that wealthy people are more likely to behave in unethical, self-serving ways.
"Flash Boys" author Michael Lewis detailed as much in a recent article in the New Republic.
He cites a few telling examples from the research:
• Rich people are more likely to shoplift than the poor.
• Brain scans find that wealthy people have less activity in brain areas associated with empathy.
Some of the most vivid research comes from University of California psychologist Dacher Keltner. The experiments his lab ran are pretty astounding.
The most telling example might be this one:
[R]esearchers invited a cross section of the population into their lab and marched them through a series of tasks. Upon leaving the laboratory testing room the subjects passed a big jar of candy. The richer the person, the more likely he was to reach in and take candy from the jar — and ignore the big sign on the jar that said the candy was for the children who passed through the department.
So if we take being a "good person" as "caring for other people," then the rich, for some reason or another, seem more likely to lack those humanitarian qualities.
"As you move up the class ladder,"Keltner tells Lewis,"you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others."
What's troubling is that organizations are commonly — and unintentionally — structured for narcissists to flourish.
Psychologists have discovered that the reason narcissists rise to leadership positions is because they're masters of managing people's impressions of them. Confident and charismatic, narcissists know how to prod people with a mixture of credit and blame.
So in a nauseating way, having a "me-first" personality tends to breed the skills needed for economic ascension.
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