Does Money Make You Mean?

I've previously written about studies by social psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff that show that wealthy people are less helpful and more likely to engage in unethical behavior than people of average means. TED has released an entertaining 16-minute talk by Dr. Piff discussing and showing video of some of these studies.

Although I find the studies, in the aggregate, quite persuasive, I'm less impressed with Dr. Piff's suggestions for change. In fact, they illustrate some of the limitations of social psychology as a discipline.

• Dr. Piff recommends priming prosocial concepts—he calls them “nudges”—to encourage prosocial behavior. Such prompts are not very common in a capitalist society, and their effects are likely to be temporary, since they are certain to be drowned out by prompts that encourage selfish behavior, such as those contained in advertising.
• Like most psychologists, he advocates an individual solution to encouraging helpful behavior, when the real problem is structural. Changing rich people one rich person at a time is a slow process, especially when you're asking them to swim upstream against the influence of their culture.
• His suggested solutions are directed only at symptoms of the problem, such as failure to help people, and do not address what he identifies as the cause of the problem, social inequality, which, as he says, continues to increase.

You may also be interested in reading:

Class Acts

Me First