The Money-Empathy Gap
New research suggests that more money makes people act less human. Or at least less humane.
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T-Shirt isn’t just winning; he’s crushing Glasses. Initially, he reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. “Hey,” his expression seemed to say, “this is weird and unfair, but whatever.” Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate. He’s a skinny kid, but he balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece (in the experiment, the wealthy player gets the Rolls-Royce) as he makes the circuit—smack, smack, smack—ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang! Four minutes in, he picks up Glasses’s piece, the little elf shoe, and moves it for him. As the game nears its finish, T-Shirt moves his Rolls faster. The taunting is over now: He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet Glasses’s gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash.
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It is easy to see Piff’s research as ideologically motivated. The point is to “shed light on some of the consequences of social class,” he says. But whatever his goal, the “results are apolitical,” he says, and the data point in a clear direction. “Would I be less excited if we found that higher-status people were more generous?” he asks. “I’d probably be less excited, but that’s not what we found.”
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http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/
I've witnessed a similar change of attitude when I took my masters for elementary education. Game was called powderkeg. It was specifically designed to let one team win by slanting the odds of them collecting cards or game pieces easily from other players who didn't have a chance to stop them. After the first round, the teacher asked if anyone wanted to change the rules of the game. All of the "winners" were fine with the status quo and the "losers" were adamant about changing the odds, not necessarily in their favor, but to make the game "more fair".
