Washington: A new study has revealed that rich people’s unethical behaviour is driven by the fact that they see nothing wrong with greed. Psychologist Dacher Keltner said that there are exceptions but still some people who belong to the really well-to-do community have lost a little of their moral character.
In one study, psychologist Paul K. Piff and Keltner and several of their students positioned themselves at four-way-stop intersections in the San Francisco Bay area to find out which cars broke state law to yield to the first vehicle to reach the stop sign.
The study found that drivers of the expensive cars were quadruple times likelier to cut off another vehicle and not care about the right-of-way than drivers of cheaper cars. The most flagrant offenders were drivers of the Mercedes.
Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted six other studies involving nearly a thousand participants from college students to senior citizens which indicated that the rich are different from the rest of the people.
The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.