money...happiness...empathy...greed?

“Money may not buy happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.” – Francoise Sagan

Money has always been a tough topic for me. I grew up in a family that didn’t have much of it and for years Mr. Clark and I struggled to make ends meet. There was a time, a frighteningly long time, during the recession when Mr. Clark was out of work. Nothing like having the wolves claw through the door to make you appreciate the thing that kept them simply howling outside and that thing was money…

 

Thankfully, those times are gone and for the first time in my life, I am able to live comfortably, without money worries. It’s a strange and wonderful blessing and it has me knocking on wood, trying hard to be ever humble and being careful to be generous. When I saw an NPR offering this morning titled “Does Money Make You Mean?” you can imagine how quickly I clicked on it.    

 

This TED talk (www.ted.com/talks) by a social psychologist named Paul Piff describes “how wealth changes behavior and how almost anyone's behavior can change when they're made to feel rich.” Piff does his research at the University of California - Berkeley and he also travels in circles of researchers who are interested in the same topic.

 

In one study, he rigged games of Monopoly to create privileged players, in another Piff tracked how drivers in expensive cars behave behind the wheel. In other experiments, he tested whether people who felt poor or rich were the most likely to take candy labeled as being specifically for children; he also tested who is more likely to be generous or help others.        

 

What Piff found was “increased wealth and status in society lead to increased self-focus and, in turn, decreased compassion, altruism, and ethical behavior." He adds that he is not suggesting only wealthy people show these patterns of behavior. “We all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when, or if, to put our own interests above the interests of other people.”

 

Some of the studies used real income, others simply made people feel rich or poor, based on their role in the study. Here’s how the work unfolded:   

 

In the rigged Monopoly game, a coin flip determined if a player was “rich” or “poor.” The “rich” players received more starting money, twice the dice rolls around the board and twice the funds when they passed Go. They also got to use the Rolls Royce game piece. The “poor” players were given the shoe game piece and no advantages. All the players quickly realized the game was rigged. At the end of the game, the winning players (all from the advantaged group) were asked why they won. The consensus was, in Piff’s words, “because I’m so awesome.” They talked about experience, skills and knowledge; some mentioned lucky rolls of the dice. None seemed to remember that a coin toss was what had turned them into “a privileged player in a rigged game.”  

 

In the driving study, Piff’s team observed “hundreds of drivers over several days.” What they saw was that drivers of expensive cars are 50 percent more likely to break the law than those with inexpensive cars. In fact, those in the least expensive cars did not break the law at all.   

 

The experiment involving who was more likely to take kids’ candy revealed that subjects who were made to feel rich (with the same types of entitlements as the subjects in the Monopoly game) took twice as much candy from a kid-ear- marked bowl as participants who felt poor.

 

The generosity study involved rich participants and poor participants being given the opportunity to share $10 with a stranger in need. The poor participants were consistently more generous than the rich. 

 

Piff states that in “dozens of studies with thousands of subjects” researchers find that “as a person’s wealth increases, their feeling of compassion and empathy go down, while their feelings of entitlement increase…The wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people.”  

 

Is Piff condemning wealth or the wealthy? Yes and no. He concludes the talk by making it clear that the research also indicates with “small nudges in certain directions…levels of egalitarianism and empathy can be restored.” The example he gives is of a study that involved subjects watching a 46 second video about childhood poverty. They were then given the opportunity to help a stranger in distress who was presented to them in the lab. The results indicated that rich people are just as generous as poor people, which had not been the case before watching the video.

 

“This suggests that these differences are not innate or categorical, but are malleable to little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy,” Piff says.  

 

I’m not sure what the lesson in all this is for me…I do know all of those months of Mr.Clark’s unemployment gave me a deep and sincere appreciation for, “There but for the grace of God, go I…”

 

I believe there is no inherent harm in wealth, nor nobility in poverty; and, those in the middle class certainly understand the struggle. And, whether moving the Rolls Royce or the shoe around the Monopoly board of life, beware of that feeling of entitlement and never, ever take all the credit for where you end up in the game. 

 

Be mindful, be careful; remain thankful and self-aware…While much of my family’s current financial security is the result of hard work, luck has also been a factor and, as in all things, so has the hand of the Lord.