I want you to, for a moment,
think about playing a game of Monopoly,
except in this game, that combination
of skill, talent, and luck
that helped earn you success in games, as in life,
has been rendered irrelevant,
because this game's been rigged,
and you've got the upper hand.
You've got more money,
more opportunities to move around the board,
and more access to resources.
And as you think about that experience,
I want you to ask yourself,
how might that experience of being
a privileged player in a rigged game
change the way that you think about yourself
and regard that other player?
So we ran a study on the UC-Berkeley campus
to look at exactly that question.
We brought in more than a hundred pairs
of strangers into the lab,
and with the flip of a coin
randomly assigned one of the two
to be a rich player in a rigged game.
They got two times as much money.
When they passed go,
they collected twice the salary,
and they got to roll both dice instead of one,
so they got to move around the board a lot more.
(Laughter)
And over the course of 15 minutes,
we watched through hidden cameras what happened.
And what I want to do today, for the first time,
is show you a little bit of what we saw.
You're going to have to pardon the sound quality,
in some cases, because again,
these were hidden cameras.
So we've provided subtitles.
Rich Player: How many 500s did you have?
Poor Player: Just one.
Rich Player: Are you serious. Poor Player: Yeah.
Rich Player: I have three. (Laughs)
I don't know why they gave me so much.
Paul Piff: Okay, so it was quickly apparent to players
that something was up.
One person clearly has a lot more money
than the other person, and yet,
as the game unfolded,
we saw very notable differences
and dramatic differences begin to emerge
between the two players.
The rich player
started to move around the board louder,
literally smacking the board with their piece
as he went around.
We were more likely to see signs of dominance
and non-verbal signs of display,
displays of power
and celebration among the rich players.
All right. We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side.
It's on the bottom right corner there.
That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior.
So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat.
Rich Player: Are those pretzels a trick?
Poor Player: I don't know.
PP: Okay, so no surprises, people are onto us.
They wonder what that bowl of pretzels
is doing there in the first place.
One even asks, like you just saw,
is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick?
And yet, despite that, the power of the situation
seems to inevitably dominate,
and those rich players start to eat more pretzels.
Rich Player: I love pretzels.
(Laughter)
PP: And as the game went on,
one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns
that we observed begin to emerge
was that the rich players actually
started to become ruder toward the other person,
less and less sensitive to the plight
of those poor, poor players,
and more and more demonstrative
of their material success,
more likely to showcase how well they're doing.
Rich Player: I have money for everything.
Poor Player: How much is that?
Rich Player: You owe me... 24 dollars.
You're going to lose all your money soon.
I'll buy it! I have so much money.
I have so much money, it takes me for ever.
Rich Player 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board.
Rich Player 3: You're going to run out of money soon.
I'm pretty much untouchable at this point.
PP: Okay, and here's what I think
was really, really interesting,
is that at the end of the 15 minutes,
we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game.
And when the rich players talked about
why they had inevitably won
in this rigged game of Monopoly
—(Laughter)—
they talked about what they'd done
to buy those different properties
and earn their success in the game,
and they became far less attuned
to all those different features of the situation,
including that flip of a coin
that had randomly gotten them into
that privileged position in the first place.
And that's a really, really incredible insight
into how the mind makes sense of advantage.
Now this game of Monopoly can be used
as a metaphor for understanding society
and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people
have a lot of wealth and a lot of status,
and a lot of people don't.
They have a lot less wealth and a lot less status
and a lot less access to valued resources.
And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing
is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies.
What we've been finding across dozens of studies
and thousands of participants across this country
is that as a person's levels of wealth increase,
their feelings of compassion and empathy go down,
and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness,
and their ideology of self-interest increases.
In surveys, we found that it's actually
wealthier individuals who are more likely
to moralize greed being good,
and that the pursuit of self-interest
is favorable and moral.
Now what I want to do today is talk about
some of the implications of this ideology self-interest,
talk about why we should care about those implications,
and end with what might be done.
Some of the first studies that we ran in this area
looked at helping behavior,
something social psychologists call
pro-social behavior.
And we were really interested in who's more likely
to offer help to another person,
someone who's rich or someone who's poor.
In one of the studies, we bring in rich and poor
members of the community into the lab
and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars.
We told the participants
that they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves,
or they could share a portion of it,
if they wanted to, with a stranger
who is totally anonymous.
They'll never meet that stranger and the stranger will never meet them.
And we just monitor how much people give.
Individuals who made 25, sometimes
under 15,000 dollars a year,
gave 44 percent more of their money
to this stranger
than did individuals making 150,
200,000 dollars a year.
We've had people play games
to see who's more or less likely to cheat
to increase their chances of winning a prize.
In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer
so that die rolls over a certain score
were impossible.
You couldn't get above 12 in this game,
and yet, the richer you were,
the more likely you were to cheat in this game
to earn credits toward a $50 cash prize,
sometimes by three to four times as much.
We ran another study where we looked at whether
people would be inclined to take candy
from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified
as being reserved for children
—(Laughter)—
participating, I'm not kidding,
I know it sounds like I'm making a joke,
we explicitly told participants
this jar of candy's for children participating
in a developmental lab nearby.
They're in studies. This is for them.
And we just monitored how much candy participants took.
Participants who felt rich
took two times as much candy
as participants who felt poor.
We've even studied cars,
not just any cars,
but whether drivers of different kinds of cars
are more or less inclined to break the law.
In one of these studies, we looked at
whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian
that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk.
Now in California, as you all know,
because I'm sure we all do this,
it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross.
So here's an example of how we did it.
That's our confederate off to the left
posing as a pedestrian.
He approaches as the red truck successfully stops.
In typical California fashion, it's overtaken
by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over.
(Laughter)
Now here's an example of a more expensive car,
a Prius, driving through,
and a BMW doing the same.
So we did this for hundreds of vehicles
on several days,
just tracking who stops and who doesn't.
What we found was that as the expensiveness
of a car increased,
the driver's tendencies to break the law
increased as well.
None of the cars, none of the cars
in our least expensive car category
broke the law.
Close to 50 percent of the cars
in our most expensive vehicle category
broke the law.
We've run other studies finding that
wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations,
to endorse unethical behavior at work
like stealing cash from the cash register,
taking bribes, lying to customers.
Now I don't mean to suggest
that it's only wealthy people
who show these patterns of behavior.
Not at all. In fact, I think that 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.
And that's understandable because
the American dream is an idea
in which we all have an equal opportunity
to succeed and prosper,
as long as we apply ourselves and work hard,
and a piece of that means that sometimes,
you need to put your own interests
above the interests and well-being of other people around you.
But what we're finding is that,
the wealthier you are, the more likely you are
to pursue a vision of personal success,
of achievement and accomplishment,
to the detriment of others around you.
Here I've plotted for you the mean household income
received by each fifth and top five percent of the population
over the last 20 years.
In 1993, the differences between the different
quintiles of the population, in terms of income,
are fairly egregious.
It's not difficult to discern that there are differences.
But over the last 20 years, that significant difference
has become a grand canyon of sorts
between those at the top and everyone else.
In fact, the top 20 percent of our population
own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country.
We're at unprecedented levels
of economic inequality.
What that means is that wealth is not only becoming
increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals,
but the American dream is becoming
increasingly unattainable
for an increasing majority of us.
And if it's the case, as we've been finding,
that 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,
and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest,
well then there's no reason to think
that those patterns will change.
In fact, there's every reason to think
that they'll only get worse,
and that's what it would look like
if things just stayed the same,
at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years.
Now, inequality, economic inequality,
is something we should all be concerned about,
and not just because of those at the bottom
of the social hierarchy,
but because individuals and groups
with lots of economic inequality do worse,
not just the people at the bottom, everyone.
There's a lot of really compelling research
coming out from top labs all over the world
showcasing the range of things
that are undermined
as economic inequality gets worse.
Social mobility, things we really care about,
physical health, social trust,
all go down as inequality goes up.
Similarly, negative things
in social collectives and societies,
things like obesity, and violence,
imprisonment, and punishment,
are exacerbated as economic inequality increases.
Again, these our outcomes not just experienced
by a few, but that resound
across all strata of society.
Even people at the top experience these outcomes.
So what do we do?
This cascade of self-perpetuating,
pernicious, negative effects
could seem like something that's spun out of control,
and there's nothing we can do about it,
certainly nothing we as individuals could do.
But in fact, we've been finding
in our own laboratory research
that small, small psychological interventions,
small changes to people's values,
small nudges in certain directions,
can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy.
For instance, reminding people
of the benefits of cooperation,
or the advantages of community,
cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian
as poor people.
In one study, we had people watch a brief video,
just 46 seconds long, about childhood poverty
that served as a reminder of the needs of others
in the world around them,
and after watching that,
we looked at how willing people were
to offer up their own time to a stranger
presented to them in the lab who was in distress.
After watching this video, an hour later,
rich people became just as generous
of their own time to help out this other person,
a stranger, as someone who's poor,
suggesting that these differences are not
innate or categorical,
but are so malleable
to slight changes in people's values,
and little nudges of compassion
and bumps of empathy.
And beyond the walls of our lab, we're even
beginning to see signs of change in society.
Bill Gates, one of our nation's wealthiest individuals,
in his Harvard commencement speech,
talked about the problem facing society
of inequality as being the most daunting challenge,
and talked about what must be done to combat it,
saying, "Humanity's greatest advances
are not in its discoveries,
but in how those discoveries are applied
to reduce inequity."
And there's the Giving Pledge,
in which more than a hundred of our nation's
wealthiest individuals
are pledging half of their fortunes to charity.
And there's the emergence
of dozens of grassroots movements,
like We Are The One Percent,
the Resource Generation,
or Wealth For Common Good,
in which the most privileged
members of the population,
members of the one percent and elsewhere,
people who are wealthy,
are using their own economic resources,
adults and youth alike, that's what's most striking to me,
leveraging their own privilege,
their own economic resources,
to combat inequality
by advocating for social policies,
changes in social values,
and changes in people's behavior,
that work against their own economic interests
but that may ultimately restore the American dream.
Thank you.
(Applause)