Our proposed reason for this draws on new research showing that the financial stresses that the poor suffer affect their cognitive abilities, how they set priorities and how chaotic their lives become.
The reason we found this significant is that research shows that when people are under financial stress, their cognitive abilities are affected and they set priorities differently. When we do so, as one might expect, we find big differences in needs and stresses between rich and poor. But what is more important is that, when we statistically remove the influence of these factors, we no longer find differences in the relative altruism of the rich versus the poor. These findings show the perils of inferring deeper motives from casual behavior.
While our raw data show clear differences between the rich and poor in terms of pro-social behavior, digging a little deeper erases them. Our conclusion is that incentives are the biggest determinants of pro-social behavior and that neither the rich nor the poor are inherently kinder or more selfish — in the end all of us are susceptible to behaving this way.
In a famous conversation about the character of the upper class, Mary Colum, a famous critic, tells Ernest Hemingway that the only difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have more money. This is not to absolve those who evade taxes or break the law. What it suggests is that the rich are no different than the rest: If we were to put the poor in their place, they would likely behave similarly.
Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Social scientists have long known that the rich are not exactly model citizens. One video showed somebody explaining how to build a patio.
The other showed children who were suffering from cancer. After watching the videos, participants indicated how much compassion they felt while watching either video. The results of the study showed that participants on the lower end of the spectrum, with less income and education, were more likely to report feeling compassion while watching the video of the cancer patients.
In addition, their heart rates slowed down while watching the cancer video—a response that is associated with paying greater attention to the feelings and motivations of others.
These findings build upon previous research showing how upper class individuals are worse at recognizing the emotions of others and less likely to pay attention to people they are interacting with e. But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness.
Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings.
This leads us towards being more self-focused. Another reason has to do with our attitudes towards greed. Given the growing income inequality in the United States, the relationship between wealth and compassion has important implications. Those who hold most of the power in this country, political and otherwise, tend to come from privileged backgrounds. If social class influences how much we care about others, then the most powerful among us may be the least likely to make decisions that help the needy and the poor.
They may also be the most likely to engage in unethical behavior. As a crisis response, in the newly formed Bank of England was permitted to print a note issue for its depositors, even though those deposits had already been lent to the King for the war in Ireland—it was as though the value of the same deposit was in two places at once. Bank notes circulated in place of coins, and with further note issues, achieved by merchants borrowing notes instead of coins, the shortage of cash could be overcome.
As a result, the most pious, diligent, and thrifty individuals were able to pay on time in cash, acquiring credit and reputation by their acts of payment. The best way to serve the common good, averting any dangers of debt contagion, was to acquire cash and pay in cash, acting as if one was a self-interested individual. The financial revolution in England changed the meaning of wealth from reputation, which is a common good, to possession, which is an individual good. Instead of the butcher, brewer, and baker offering goods on credit for the sake of their reputation as a socially conscious individuals, they had to be persuaded by money.
Of course, such a fundamental social transformation simply displaces trust from the character of individuals known personally or by reputation to money. Instead, its stability is managed by central banks who create reserves by means of complex exchanges of government debts with commercial banks.
The state, with its power of future taxation, together with the central bank, with its power to coordinate clearing operations through the use of reserves, and commercial banks, supported by the power of market exchange, all combine to provide a basis for money—but they do so in a manner comparable to the seventeenth-century merchants.
Reputation is all. The pursuit of individual self-interest, measured in terms of the value of money, is made possible by a highly centralized group of institutions.
Individual and common interests remain intertwined, for if money loses its value or stability, then so does individual wealth. So are people naturally selfish? Probably, but they are also naturally caring and naturally social. Nowadays, people are willing to serve the needs of others because they trust in the value of money. Yet the organization and grounding of such trust is entirely artificial and, as has been demonstrated in recent years, highly fallible. While the use of money to interact with strangers exaggerates our self-interested concerns, trust in money is a collective and participatory good: we trust money, to a significant extent, because we trust that others will also trust it.
Moreover, we can only access the value of money when we spend or invest it, that is, when we transfer it to someone else. Of course, few think of where the money will go when it leaves them. But it is the route that money takes—whether it falls into the hands of those who most need it, or whether it accumulates on the balance sheets of financial institutions—that determines whether our pursuit of self-interest actually assists others or confines them to financial exclusion. His research interests include philosophy of religion, philosophy of political economy especially credit and faith , and the philosophy of Simone Weil.
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