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What You've Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
Why Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have a different perspective
www.rollingstone.com
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.
At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.
When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person.
“People find the car study infinitely relatable,” Piff says now of this research, the results of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s almost like science masquerading as allegory, or allegory masquerading as science.”
For all the attention it has received, the car study was admittedly small, but other research has backed up its findings — and augmented them. Wealth makes you less generous (lower-income individuals have been shown to give a greater proportion of their income than wealthier ones), less compassionate (people with more money and status report less distress when confronted with another person’s suffering), and more narcissistic. In a hilariously pointed study that was also included in the PNAS article, people primed to think of themselves as upper-class were more likely to take candy from a jar that they had been told was meant for kids in a nearby lab. In other words, they were more likely to literally steal candy from children.
When it came to determining the mechanism behind this antisocial shift, researchers hypothesize that socialization itself is key. Wealthy people tend to have more space, literally and figuratively. They spread themselves out into bigger homes, they send their children to less crowded schools, they interact less with the hoi polloi and even, research has shown, with members of their own social class. And they have less need to: Wealthy people are insulated from relying on the types of pro-social engagement that the rest of us need to survive and thrive in an interconnected world. For them, it does not take a village; it takes a staff.
Turns out, this disengagement can even be quantified. A 2020 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that wealthy people are less adept at reading other people’s facial expressions. Another, published in Psychological Science in 2016, used eye trackers to determine that higher-income individuals spend less time looking at others directly, which might explain why they are less able to remember people’s faces. Even their physiology changes: A study published in Emotion showed that poorer participants experienced a significantly larger deceleration in heart rate — a sign of compassion — when watching videos of kids receiving chemotherapy. In another study, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, poorer people who were shown images of suffering exhibited a stronger response in their vagus nerve, which is known to activate emotional sensations. According to Sukhvinder Obhi, a professor of social neuroscience and the director of the Social Brain, Body and Action Lab at McMaster University, having more money tends to suppress or curtail the mirror neuron system, the parts of the brain that light up when you execute an action and when you witness someone else execute that same action, allowing humans to cognitively put themselves in someone else’s shoes. “It’s giving you a neurophysiological measure of what we’ve called social attunement,” he says. “High status and high power just reduce that activity in the premotor cortex.”
