Pod Insights Speaking of Psychology The psychology of wealth, empathy and entitlement, with Paul Piff, PhD About this episode Can money make you mean? Most of us like to think we’d stay grounded if we were to become wealthy, but psychologists’ research suggests that money, status and power shape people’s beliefs and behavior – sometimes in surprising ways. Paul Piff, PhD, of the University of California, Irvine, talks about money, fairness and empathy; the relationship between money and happiness; and the implications of rising income inequality.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:58 Kim Mills? Most of us like to think we'd stay grounded if we were suddenly to become very wealthy, that we'd still be our old selves, just with more money. But psychologist research suggests that this might not be true. In recent years, studies have found that gaining money and status can shift how people see themselves and how they behave toward others. While it was the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote that the rich are different from you and me, it is psychologists who have shown this to be true. Today, we're going to talk to a psychologist who studies wealth and the ways in which the rich are indeed different. How do money, status, and power shape people's behavior and beliefs? What are the psychological mechanisms at play?
1:40 Kim Mills? And at a time of rising income inequality, what happens to people's sense of empathy, fairness, and entitlement as the gap between rich and poor widens? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.
2:05 Kim Mills? My guest today is Dr. Paul Piff, an Associate Professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he leads the Morality, Emotion, and Social Hierarchy Lab. Dr. Piff studies how economic inequality and social class shape relationships between people and groups. He's published dozens of peer-reviewed research studies and has discussed his research widely with media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Marketplace, and the PBS NewsHour. Dr. Piff, thank you for joining me today.
2:36 Speaker 03 Thanks so much, Kim, for that lovely introduction, and it's a pleasure to be here today.
2:40 Kim Mills? I want to start with a question that you posed in your popular TED Talk called, "Does Money Make You Mean?" In it, you talk about an experiment you did with a rigged game of Monopoly. Can you tell our listeners about that research and what you found?
2:56 Speaker 03 The rigged game of Monopoly was really our attempt in the lab to emulate or model some of the features of being wealthy out in the real world. It's hard to do because money is such a complicated thing, and it means so many different things to so many different people, and it comes about in so many different ways in people's lives. But we wanted to come up with a situation in the lab that allowed us to, within the scanned situation of a laboratory environment, create between people the experience of being, relatively speaking, richer or poorer. That's a question that's dogged
3:36 Speaker 03 social scientists for decades because you can't just randomly assign people in the real world to being millionaires or to being impoverished and then following them over the course of their lives. But we thought, within a game of Monopoly, which everyone's familiar with, or many people are, you could create, within just 10 or 15 minutes, some of the experiences of being wealthy or less wealthy. And so what we did was we brought in pairs of strangers to the lab, and they didn't know each other. They didn't know what kind of situation they were walking in on. It's just a psychology study, after all. We told them they were going to get to play a game, and that to play the game, we were first going to flip a coin.
4:17 Speaker 03 And we flipped a coin to randomly decide who of those two players, who of those two participants in our study would get to be a rich versus poor player in the game. Now, my collaborators and I, leading up to those first sessions, had spent months playing Monopoly and trying to figure out like, what, what does this game need to look like? To basically get people to experience being somewhat richer or somewhat poorer. And so we had done some piloting and we figured out that the more desirable piece or the most desirable piece in Monopoly was the Rolls Royce. The least desirable piece in Monopoly was the shoe. So, the flip of the coin randomly assigned one person to be a rich player versus a poor player. The rich player got the Rolls Royce, the poor player got the shoe.
5:02 Speaker 03 The rich player got twice as much money to play the game with. They got $2,000 instead of half of that amount, $1,000. When they passed go, they'd collect $200. So they got, let's say, two times the salary of the poor player, who only collected $100 when they went around the board. And they got to roll two dice instead of one. So they got to move around the board a lot faster. And so, over the course of 15 minutes, we just surreptitiously observed and recorded what happened and what unfolded in this game. And we followed up this game with some surveys where we also measured some other things. But we did this with more than 100 different pairs of strangers.
5:48 Speaker 03 And what we found is that, you know, in broad strokes, over the course of the 15 minutes, what started out as a kind of, certainly an unfamiliar and kind of strange situation, quickly became a competitive game between two people. And they were just, you know, within a couple of minutes, people were playing Monopoly. And obviously, the person who was assigned to be the rich player had double the advantages in so many ways. And we noticed their patterns of behavior begin to shift. They became more dominant in their behavior. They, for instance, started moving around the board in a louder fashion,
6:30 Speaker 03 smacking the board with the piece, with their, with their game piece. They took up more space at the board, so they actually became more expansive in their posture.
6:42 Speaker 03 They're more likely to fan their money out than to keep it confined to a little stack. So they're more likely to showcase how well they're doing. And over the course of the game, we noticed that just in their nonverbal behavior to the other person, they became way less sensitive to the plight of the poor players and way more likely to talk about and showcase how well they were doing. So what that tells us a little bit is that you can create this rigged experience of privilege through the flip of a coin and get someone to experience that privilege and actually start to manifest as if they deserve that privilege in certain ways within an experience.
7:27 Speaker 03 At the end of the game, when we asked people to describe why the game had ended in the way that they had, and I should say that all rich players inevitably and invariably won the game, of course, they had twice the advantage, obvious. So we asked the rich players, like, why did you win the game? And they were way more likely to talk about the things that they'd done, their skill at the game, their decisions, the properties they bought. They just talk about decisions they've made as opposed to talking about that flip of the coin that randomly and through no action of their own, got them to experience that privileged position in the first place.
8:08 Speaker 03 Now, just to tie this back, you asked me about Monopoly and I talked about wanting to model certain aspects of the real world. And people could quibble. I mean, maybe this is allegory masquerading as science or science masquerading as allegory. I mean, I think there's issues with the study, but I think one of the things that strikes me is that in the real world, you see very similar patterns unfold. Now, we've studied the psychology of wealth for now more than 20 years. People have studied the experience of other forms of privilege or other forms of status. And one of the uniform insights across all of that research is that The higher in status you are, and we find the higher in wealth you are, the more
8:53 Speaker 03 wealth you have, the more entitled and the more deserving of that privilege you feel. And you could say, well, of course, like if you've earned your money, then of course you deserve that money, right? Because it's come to you through your own hard effort. But we've studied this among lots and lots and lots of people, including people who inherited wealth and college students who have done nothing to earn their own wealth. And you actually find that among wealthy college students, high-class college students, levels of entitlement and deservingness that exceed that of their parents. So, college students who are wealthy have done very little to deserve that. They've been born into their privilege in many, or much like the Monopoly players were just sort of randomly flipped
9:38 Speaker 03 into their positions of privilege. And yet, they feel deserving and entitled to more than others in life. So I think that's an interesting, I think, and what the Monopoly experiment gives us is it's sort of an interesting insight into how the human mind makes sense of the privileges that a person experiences and attributes those privileges in part to one's own deservingness, one's own merit, as opposed to the luck and the features of the world that through no effort of our own, got us into that position of luck in the first place.
10:12 Kim Mills? I knew some of those people in college. I know what you're talking about.
10:16 Speaker 03 We all did, we all.
10:19 Kim Mills? Did you find gender differences? I'm just curious if, you know, women behave the same way as men, and did you pit women against men? And, you know, what were the dynamics there?
10:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, so that's a great question. I think I would have designed the study a little differently to have been able to figure out if there are really reliable gender effects. So we had men playing against women, women playing against women. So we had, we had all, all versions crossed. We didn't find major sex differences in this study, though I would say generally, across the studies that we've run.
10:54 Speaker 03 Upwards of maybe, let's say, forty to fifty studies at this point, looking at broad patterns in social orientation, social tendencies, prosociality, unethicality, narcissism, entitlement. Typically speaking, men, at least North American men, tend to score higher in these various, you might say, self-focused or self-regarding tendencies. So men are more competitive, generally speaking. We're not talking major effects, and of course, I'm talking about patterns across thousands of people, so there's obviously lots of exceptions to the rules. But generally speaking, the pattern is, men are typically more competitive,
11:35 Speaker 03 a little more entitled, feel a little more special, a little less oriented to the well-being of other people. And there's lots of meta-analyses that suggest similar differences, whether they're biological or socialized, but that women, in different ways, and sometimes in very small ways, but seem to be a little more empathetic, a little more compassionate, and a little more oriented to the well-being of others.
12:00 Kim Mills? You did another really interesting study regarding cars and how people acted depending on which type of car they were driving. Can you talk about that a little bit?
12:10 Speaker 03 I started out in this world as a person really interested in moral psychology, the psychology of prosociality. What are the factors that drive human kindness and cooperation and that get people to get outside themselves and want to do nice things for other people or behave in collective action with their groups? And so, when we started working on this research in social class, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit. And so, we'd done some studies finding, for example, that in interpersonal interactions, wealthier people are actually a little less generous, a little less compassionate. And we followed
12:51 Speaker 03 that up with a set of studies looking at individual differences as a result of social class in How willing people were to break certain normative rules of conduct, or what we would say engage in ethical violations. Little things like you pay for a coffee and a muffin at a coffee shop for $10 and you're given change as if you paid for 20. How likely would you be to keep that extra change? You know, and, and I think that these kinds of things are trade offs and conflicts that we navigate daily, you know, what if you're stuck in traffic? You're thinking about tonight, should I zip ahead of this other car? Or should I wait my turn in line? You know, they were always like thinking about the extent to which we should prioritize
13:36 Speaker 03 our own welfare versus the well being of others. And what's the right thing versus the thing that I want to do? And we're constantly juggling these things. And so we'd run a bunch of studies finding that generally speaking, surprising to us at the time, wealthier individuals were actually more likely to not only endorse unethicality, but to also engage in small little acts of cheating and normative violations to prioritize their own welfare above the welfare of other people. And I remember at the time thinking like, okay, if, you know, definitely if we publish these results, people are going to be really surprised. And one of the questions is going to be, I mean, because in many ways it's kind of counter stereotypical, right? Like, why would wealthy people see, you know, they've got more to begin with?
14:23 Speaker 03 So could we find ways to look at this in the real world? You know, how could we do this? And so my collaborators and I at the time, we're talking about all sorts of different ways to do this. And I was heading on my way to a meeting and I was waiting at a crosswalk. And I was kind of like thinking about these different study versions that we'd come up with. And I'm standing at the crosswalk and cars are just zipping by me. No one's stopping. And I remember thinking to myself, well, this is, this is interesting. I could do a study like this where we look at whether drivers abide by the law. And in California, just as an example, it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross. And so we, we, uh, we put together a team and we ran a series of studies
15:08 Speaker 03 that looked at whether drivers of different kinds of cars, which is what, which is our way of modeling wealth and status in the real world. What kind of car do you drive? Of course, it's the case that. People with without some means might drive fancy cars, but generally speaking, the correlation between the car that you drive and how much wealth you have is very, very high. We piloted that and we found that the correlation was was around point seven or point eight, which is double the correlation between how educated you are and how much money you make. So it's actually a very reliable indicator of your wealth. And so we looked at whether drivers of more or less expensive cars would be more or less inclined to do things that violate California vehicle code. So we ran one study at a four-way intersection
15:53 Speaker 03 and another study at a crosswalk where we, in that study, had a pedestrian walk up to the crosswalk. A car's coming down the road, the pedestrian would always look to the driver and nod, signaling their intent to cross. And then outside of view, we had coders hiding behind bushes, coding the expensiveness of a vehicle as it comes down the roadway, and whether or not the vehicle then stops for our pedestrian, who's signaled his or her or their intent to cross. We did this for hundreds of different vehicles, and what we found was this kind of clear, linear trend, even controlling for lots of other things.
16:32 Speaker 03 The more expensive your car was, the more likely you were to break the law, in this case, by driving right through the crosswalk and not stopping. And I remember at the time, like, being surprised by this. And also, when we published the results, I got lots of lots and lots of emails from drivers of different kinds of cars. For example, Prius drivers, saying like, "Yeah, okay, okay, okay." Because actually, Prius drivers at the time, they scored relatively high in our expensiveness category, because Prius cars were, at the time, some of the more expensive cars that you could drive. And they were also, Prius
17:14 Speaker 03 drivers somehow, I don't know that these would hold up nowadays, but then they were among our most likely to be breaking the law. They would drive right through the crosswalk. And I got a lot of emails from Prius drivers saying, "Well, we're too busy, we're too focused." Focused on, you know, the, the efficiency of our, of our mileage, right? And I know that like I, I got, I got emails explaining that braking for a pedestrian would implicate the climate because it would mean that your, your gas efficiency would go down, your gas or your, your mile, mileage per gallon would go down. And so they're making an executive decision to better the environment as opposed to stopping for someone else.
17:56 Speaker 03 Anyway, all of which is to say, I think there are lots of reasons why someone might stop or might not. I think generally speaking, what these studies showcase is that maybe in very small ways, your levels of privilege, your lifestyle as signaled and expressed through the class environment that you inhabit is reflected in these little ways in which you might, in these split second decisions, think about whether what you need to do is more important than what someone else needs in a given situation. And we find at least that in those kinds of little decisions, it's the case that the
18:41 Speaker 03 wealthier you are, the more likely you are in various ways to prioritize your own needs, your own goals, your own desires, your own interests above the interests of other people.
18:52 Kim Mills? What about people who were, they weren't born into wealth, but they earned vast wealth? I mean, does that affect people's behavior differently depending on how their money was acquired?
19:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a really important question, Kim, and it's one that we have some scientific answers to, but I think that work is only just beginning. I mean intuitively, I would say, of course it matters. How you gained your wealth, of course it matters for how you experience it. But I think the effects in some cases are kind of surprising. So we ran a study just a couple of years ago, looking at people born into wealth versus and comparing them to people who became wealthy over their lifetimes. And the specific question we were interested in here is who of those two groups? People born rich or people who have become rich, but who started out less well off?
19:43 Speaker 03 Are more sympathetic and empathetic to others, more likely to be willing to support various measures to help others in need. And when thinking about that question, you could, you could generate one idea, which would be that, yeah, someone who's been less well off, someone, let's say, someone who's been poor. Well, they've experienced what poverty is like. They've experienced what immediate need is like. They've experienced structural unfairness or injustice in their environment. They know what it's like to be poor. And so even though they're rich now, maybe because of that increased experience and increased exposure and increased empathy, they're more sympathetic to the plight of others, to the plight of the unfortunate ones.
20:28 Speaker 03 And so more willing to offer up help and to help others out. Actually, we found the opposite. So, so when comparing people who born into privilege versus people who became wealthy is people who were born into wealth that were actually more sympathetic and more empathetic because those that had earned their wealth had a certain story they could tell. And the story that they could tell was one of deservingness. And it was that I know that I, because I experienced upward mobility, I know it's possible to be upwardly mobile. So I feel deserving of that wealth that I now have. And so if you're not equally wealthy, or if you're, if you're in need, because I know
21:12 Speaker 03 that it's possible to have made it and pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps, it's your fault that you haven't been able to do that at least yet. And so that story gives, allows room for blaming others for their own misfortunes as opposed to giving rise to a willingness to help them. So I think that the, the effects are probably complicated. There's other work that looks at differences in entitlement and narcissism as a function of how you came about your wealth, finding intriguing differences there. I don't need to go into that, but generally speaking, I think it matters and the work is just now starting to get off the ground.
21:47 Kim Mills? Do you know, do findings like these hold across countries and cultures, especially countries that are more collectivist versus individualistic?
21:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think it's a really important question. I should have prefaced regarding our findings that they're primarily in what some might refer to as weird cultures, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. Anyway, most of them are done with North American or certainly Western participants. And I think there's a lot of reason to think that the effects of social class and of wealth and status might vary depending on your geographic location, but I think importantly, varies a function of your culture. And so there's work that's shown, for example, done by Wang and Myrnigan, Keith Myrnigan, a few years ago, that shows that across lots of different countries, the association
22:39 Speaker 03 between, say, wealth and the endorsement of unethicality seems to be culturally, if not universal, certainly culturally consistent. So they look at it, and I think upwards of 20 different countries and find similar effects. The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to say that it's okay to do small unethical acts in the favor of your own self-interest. Now, those effects, while they seem consistent, I think are likely to vary as a function of where you are, what the values are around the social safety net and around wealth. In the US, we have the, whether it's unfortunate or not, we have a culture that sort of prioritizes
23:23 Speaker 03 almost excessive pursuits of self-interest. Competitiveness and meritocracy is, you might say, almost a sacred value. And so if that's the case, then that's going to legitimize wealth and wealth inequalities in a way that more typically socially progressive or liberal countries might not, where there's a stronger, say, explicit value toward noblesse oblige and the responsibility of sharing what you have with others, for instance, via progressive taxation. Anyway, that's a long way of saying, I think it matters, and we don't really have a lot of data yet that sort of unpacks where and why.
23:59 Kim Mills? We're going to take a short break, and when we return, we'll ask Dr. Piff whether money can buy happiness.
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25:05 Kim Mills? There's been psychological research into the amount of money it takes to reach happiness. And there was one study, at least one study, maybe several, that found that there was, at $70,000, people's happiness kind of plateaus. And after that, you don't get hugely happier after making more money. I'm just wondering, does having more money make people happier?
25:29 Speaker 03 That's a question that moral philosophers and poets and artists and people have thought about, not just about money, but about resources for as long as we've had them. So these are longstanding questions. And they're questions that we have some answers to, but I think the work is ongoing. There's new work that suggests that maybe, in fact, the plateau isn't at $70,000, but it's much later. And as your money goes up, happiness does, but the incremental value of each sort of rise in income starts to diminish. So it's almost logarithmic. So to an extent, money research tells us it buys you some version of happiness, not as much as people think it does.
26:13 Speaker 03 And that effect seems to diminish as money goes up. But I think what's more important is that what we're also simultaneously learning, and I'm just going to mention two different things here, is To the extent that money buys you happiness, what's almost more important is how you spend the money. And we know that work, there's a lot of work that tells us that spending money on others, for instance, versus spending it on yourself buys you a lot more happiness, a lot more bang for your buck, and has a much larger effect on well-being. When it comes to how to spend resources, using your money to buy yourself time, for example, has a much bigger effect on happiness than does using your money to,
26:56 Speaker 03 say, buy yourself material things, buying yourself experiences over material goods as a better predictor of happiness. What we find, actually, is that happiness, when you break it down, happiness is like a very complicated psychological phenomenon, right? You can think of it as a simple word, are you happy or not? But in fact, when you study it, you know, what does it even mean to people? If you ask someone, are you happy right now? Some people might say, well, it depends on what you mean. I feel content. I wouldn't necessarily say I'm happy. So happiness is a very multifaceted construct, and psychologists have been grappling with what kind of multifaceted construct it is. One of the things that we've been finding, and I think that this has, you know, been true over the last, say, 20 years, as people have been thinking
27:41 Speaker 03 about the role of emotions in happiness, is that happiness is actually kind of a, you might say, Gestalt state derived from our experiences of not just one emotion, but lots of different kinds of positives, and maybe even negative emotions. And so when we break happiness down, as we did in one study, into its composite emotions, and look at people's tendencies to experience different kinds of positive emotions, all of which contribute to this overall state of happiness, we actually find this really interesting pattern where the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to experience certain kinds of positive emotions, like pride, but the less likely you are to experience
28:23 Speaker 03 other kinds of positive emotions, like love, like compassion, like awe, that are equally, or you might even say, in some cases, more powerfully connected to happiness. So I think wealth and happiness are connected, but the ways in which wealth connects to happiness is pretty complicated. And actually, it seems like wealth might buy you certain kinds of happiness, but not all of them. It's not an unmitigated, unequivocal good. You know, I've not found this in my life because I'm not necessarily wealthy, but people have reached out with their stories of wealth as, you know, our lab and the work that we publish has gotten some traction. And they, they tell me stories of like, kind of retrospectively looking back at their lives
29:06 Speaker 03 and feeling like, you know, they had spent a lot of time as their money aggregated, as they gained more wealth, as they gained more status. They got more involved in their career, more focused on their numbers, more focused on working weekends and hours. And they lost sight of the things that in retrospect they wish they hadn't, like their friends, their social relationships, their family. They wish they'd spent their time differently. And so I think wealth and money kind of shape your value system into a particular set or constellation of things that get you to focus and prioritize on some things in life, but perhaps lose sight of some others, like your social relationships, your inherent connection to other people around you
29:51 Speaker 03 and the ways in which you can derive value from those connections. And losing sight of those things are, I think, major, major determinants of your wellbeing and have a negative impact on it.
30:03 Kim Mills? Let's talk for a minute about politics, just in a general sense. I'm wondering how wealth affects people's political attitudes. You know, there's a long history in this country of the well-off favoring the Republican Party and being more conservative in their values, while the Democratic Party seems to be in touch with more average adults. Do the rich tend to be Republican and conservative? Or is that just a stereotype?
30:28 Speaker 03 I think it's largely a stereotype. You've got, you've got wealth on both sides and lots of wealth on both sides. Generally speaking, the work that looks at wealth and your political attitudes finds that, at least economically speaking, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be, let's say, economically conservative. And what I mean by that is if you're wealthy, you're less likely to support something like progressive taxation. You're less likely to support redistribution in other ways. You're less likely to support a social safety net that offers, let's say, universal healthcare or universal basic income.
31:13 Speaker 03 And you're more likely to endorse
31:17 Speaker 03 Attitudes and values, politicians and, you know, political policies that you might say protect the wealthy against taxation and that help conserve privilege. These aren't massive effects. There are lots of different things that drive political attitudes. But it basically, I think a lot of this seems to stem from, well, if you have resources, then you're going to feel motivated to protect them. You're going to want to maintain them. You feel deserving of them. And so those kinds of attitudes tend to be more, at least typically, associated with conservative economic policies. There's even work that suggests that, you know, because you could, you can make lots of different
32:02 Speaker 03 kinds of arguments for why that relationship might exist in the first place. There's all sorts of chicken and egg stuff that you could talk about. There's work that finds, this is with Hozie Brown Iannucci, who's at the University of Virginia. She manipulates levels of wealth within even games and finds that if you experience privilege and status within a game, you become, economically speaking, more conservative by being less willing to support redistribution within the game. I think it's just a general tendency among elites to want to do things that conserve their power and privilege. I don't think that's only true of elites. I think that's true of anyone who's in a position of power, of high status or of privilege, that they will feel motivated to defend the status quo because after all, they're benefactors of it.
32:46 Speaker 03 There are, of course, exceptions to that, but I think generally speaking, the better off you are, the more motivated you are to keep the world as it is because you're benefiting from it.
32:58 Kim Mills? I mentioned in the introduction, the rise in income inequality being a huge issue in our nation, probably in the world right now. How do you see these psychological effects that you've been studying playing out on a more global societal scale in terms of how we think about and deal with inequality and poverty?
33:18 Speaker 03 First of all, I'm certainly one voice among many, many, many that have talked about the very pernicious problematic effects that inequality can have on societies. And I think it's not a stretch to say that many of the issues that we face as a nation, as a species, as a planet, you could say derive in part from the extreme levels of inequality that we're being experienced. You can even attribute something like the severe polarization that we're experiencing in the US right now as resulting, at least in part, from the vast economic inequality that our population's experiencing. So I think inequality is problematic for lots of reasons, in part because it makes
34:00 Speaker 03 it so difficult, because it's so polarizing, to come together as cohesive units to collectively confront issues we're facing. So I think that our work lends a little bit of insight into the idea that inequality is problematic and given that we're finding that the more wealth you have, the more motivated you are to conserve that wealth, to not want to share it with others, and to even be willing to do things that break the rules to get more wealth. There's no reason to think that inequality on an individual level would necessarily change, that people would all of a sudden say, like, "Look, I've got enough, let me now start sharing it with others."
34:45 Speaker 03 There doesn't seem to be that mental switch. The more wealth you have, the more willing you are to do things, to aggregate it, to conserve it, to conserve that privilege for yourself. And so you can expect, based on that, that inequality just gives rise to more inequality, which in turn gives rise to more inequality. You get something like runaway inequality that just kind of exacerbates differences between those that have and those that don't over time. Lots of people have talked about trickle-down benefits of wealth. That's part of the foundational insights of even capitalism in our country, that if you let capitalism kind of run wild, then the market always corrects itself in part by having those at the top sort of use...
35:27 Speaker 03 Use their resources to benefit everyone, building jobs, jobs, building, building out different systems toward efficiency that help not just them, but everyone within the population. You kind of carry people along with you. We've seen politically, socially, that does not seem to be the case. Maybe trickle down economics is a real thing, but trickle down compassion doesn't seem to be.
35:49 Kim Mills? Now, there is a move afoot among some of these billionaires or oligarchs in this country to give their money away, to pledge to give their money away. And is that coming out of a sense of guilt and pressure from others? I mean, or are people suddenly becoming more empathetic?
36:08 Speaker 03 It's hard to say because I know, for instance, like the initiatives like the Giving Pledge, which are really interesting. And actually, we're doing a bunch of studies on them. I don't know what's individually motivating each of the members of the Giving Pledge. And these are billionaires who have pledged upwards of 50% of their fortunes to different charitable causes. I think it's a wonderful endeavor. I don't know what's specifically motivating them. There are lots of different motivations, including some tax benefits. Certainly, they're doing it in public ways, right? So the moment you're giving away charity in a way that's being actively recognized by people, there's a lot of interesting benefits that you get as a result, including billionaires get to
36:50 Speaker 03 hold on to billions. And just by virtue of having given some of those billions away, they are now treated as moral and good people, you know, even though they have exorbitant levels of wealth. I'm not saying that the Giving Pledge is a problem, but I think that the motivations for people to become members of those kinds of initiatives can be multifaceted and not necessarily pro-social. There's a lot of work that suggests that actually the charity of the wealthy is often oriented toward causes that actually conserve and exacerbate inequality as opposed to mitigate it. So wealthy people are more likely to give to alma maters, they're more likely to give to different kinds of initiatives, even, you know, the cultural institutions that, you know, play into elites that help.
37:37 Speaker 03 Conserve the power of upper class individuals as opposed to trying to mitigate it. So I think it's a complicated answer. One of the questions I've gotten really interested in is the stories of wealth that people tell, particularly in the US. And so, for instance, something like the Giving Pledge gets a lot of traction in the news, right? Because people love hearing stories about how, you know, stereotypically speaking, wealthy are sometimes depicted as Scrooges. But here we've got all this evidence, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, but so many other people, of people being so philanthropic. And so newspapers tell these stories. We tell these stories. We share them almost as like heroic tales. And so we've launched a set of studies that look at the role of these stories that we tell,
38:23 Speaker 03 of wealthy heroes in getting people to feel like, everyday people to feel like, inequality might not actually be a problem. Because if it's the case that people who are wealthy are moral and good and pro-social and charitable and give their money away, well, then inequality is not as problematic because the wealth that's being concentrated on the top just ends up getting circulated around and benefiting everyone else. And we find that that's the case. The more people have been exposed to these stories, the more people tell them, the more okay with inequality people feel, which would suggest that there's actually possibly this kind of problematic, potentially problematic side to these stories of wealthy philanthropy.
39:06 Speaker 03 I don't think they're representative of our country's wealthy necessarily, and I think they bias the mind in some really interesting ways.
39:13 Kim Mills? I often like to close with the question of what you're working on next, but what are the big questions that you still want to answer?
39:20 Speaker 03 One that we're really interested in is how do your own narratives, your own experiences with wealth, how you earned it versus inherited it, play into the tendencies that we've really been interested in, towards social connection, towards social attention, towards social attunement? So really looking at differences in inheritance versus earning, in how wealth seeps into the mind. And you pointed at this other really interesting piece, this emotional experience of guilt. And so we've been in the lab now for the last six or seven years, been looking at the role of guilt, particularly in a climate of growing inequality. The role of guilt and how people experience their wealth, and how that guilt, those feelings of undeservingness.
40:05 Speaker 03 Play into not only how someone feels about their wealth, but also what they're willing to do with it. So, so we've gotten interested in this idea of wealth guilt and where it comes from and what are the ways that people go, what are the lengths that people go to assuage those feelings of guilt, to mitigate them and to even try to alleviate them, not only within themselves, but to also sort of demonstrate that they themselves are deserving or not as wealthy as they might appear to be. But what, basically, what are the different ways that people kind of confront those feelings of guilt and navigate it in various social interactions? So those are two projects. And then more broadly, I've gotten really interested in different kinds of psychological, you might say, motivators that in some ways
40:47 Speaker 03 attenuate the wealth class differences we've been finding. So if it's the case that wealthier individuals, that elites are generally speaking biased toward conserving their privilege, toward conserving their power and are less attuned to the well-being of others and their social groups, then what are some factors that might attenuate those differences that get them to feel a heightened sense of responsibility toward the greater good, to feel more compassion for their fellow citizens, their fellow group members? And so we've gotten interested in the role of compassion and more recently in how experiences of awe, and I don't just mean experiences that you might have in the Grand Canyon or looking up at the night
41:32 Speaker 03 sky, but experiences of awe sort of are characterized by feeling like you're a small part of something much bigger, how that kind of constellation of human experience can remind various people, not just wealthy people, but various people in various locations who belong to various groups, that they're not just these disconnected entities and disconnected individuals, but are rather interconnected bits of a much larger whole that are all sort of needing to work together toward unified goals. So how do experiences of awe sort of bring people together and allow us as a species to be better equipped to confront some of our most pressing challenges?
42:13 Kim Mills? Well, this is really interesting stuff that you're working on. I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been a pleasure talking to Dr. Pish.
42:19 Speaker 03 Thanks so much, Kim. It's been a lot of fun. And I mean that.
42:23 Kim Mills? Thank you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected] . Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
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