Does the story really not link to even one "Study"? If the studies exists, are they pier reviewed?
What happened to the Washington post? Didn't they report news at one point?
* Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716
* Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full
* The Psychological Consequences of Money: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154
* Social status modulates neural activity in the mentalizing network: https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatel... (from NeuroImage)
* Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
* Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior: http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf (from J. Pers. Soc. Psych.)
* Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU... (from Emotion)
I omitted the study in the Chronicle of Philanthropy from this list because I couldn't find the actual data.
I'm not sure if it counts as a slur. To a rich person, isn't 'poor' the real slur? Surely meanness is sort of orthoganal to what being rich is about, or even helpful?
Also, I'm not sure this alone is harmful to society. If we acknowledge the very rich are evil jerks by nature, all that really means is 'maybe we shouldn't listen to them on moral topics' and 'maybe their opinions on how to run society are not trustworthy, because they're evil jerks by nature and will disproportionately favor themselves even when taking a larger view would be advantageous'.
Just don't let them write the tax code, and they can be evil all they like, perhaps to their neighbors or social inferiors :)