Does being wealthy make you unethical? New research suggests it does

Headline is completely false. Ars Technica made the mistake, and the submitter copied it. Editors, please fix.

The cited research shows that wealth is a predictor of unethical behavior. There were no exeperiments investigating the direction of causality, or whether becoming wealthy correlates to increased unethicality.

Also, the article closes with a complete non-sequitur about Bill Gates, one the most famously greedy individuals of the 20th Century, whose philanthropy (which has what to do with ethics, anyway)? only appeared after he accumulated more money than God.

Aside from the idiotic title (maybe some people are simply jerks, but rich jerks are less scared of consequences of their jerkiness, so they do more of it), this article describes mostly the studies/experiments that have nothing to do with real ethics.

Cutting of pedestrians? Cheating at an exam for $4 (I doubt that the cash prizes were more than $5)? Lying at a role-playing job interview? Hardly behavior that deserves to be qualified as unethical.

Would you call a surgeon who does a pro-bono medical procedure on some poor child, but cuts of pedestrians, unethical?

Does being not greedy, not taking candy, make a serial killer ethical?

I was once part of an experiment on risk aversion. We could choose to take the sure bet, and get $3, or a risky bet, and get either $0 or $6 (with 50% chance for each), and the bet would be repeated twice. I chose to take the risky bet. I mean, it's just $3, who cares, lets risk for fun! However, if it were $30,000, I would sure as hell take the sure bet. Lesson of the story: contrived psychological experiments don't tell you a lot about real life.

... or does having no respect for authority and social constraints make you wealthy?

It's got a dark side, but there's also a side that's quite defensible. A lot of the social constraints that are placed upon us by society are idiotic: dumb rules made by and for dumb people. A lot of it is also predatory. A lot of the rules and recommendations in our society are designed to put you into debt and servitude. Examples: you must have a college degree (and $50k in debt), you must buy a home, you need a credit card when you're 18 to establish credit, etc.

In my experience: do what you're told and you get screwed.

So maybe people with less respect for rules, customs, fads, etc. are more likely to get ahead?

A word about BMWs:

Many people think BMW drivers are jerks because they are rich. The reality is that BMW drivers are jerks because of the precision and power the vehicle communicates to the driver -- which lets you be more confident about making decisive and sudden movements in it.

Maybe the status has some effect as well, but a lot less than the fact that the BMW just drives better than a Honda Accord and over time you can become very aggressive because of it.

Ask any long time BMW (or precise sports car) driver and they'll likely confirm this.

maybe its the other around - being unethical makes you wealthy

I think Tyler Cowen has the best critique of this study:

We need to be cautious in our interpretation of these results. Of the seven tests, two of them showed that people driving more expensive cars are more in a hurry and more likely to cut off others or not yield. That’s not praiseworthy, but hardly a major moral condemnation. Several of the tests involved people being asked to imagine they were high class, not actual “high class” people themselves. To that extent we are testing the lower class view of the upper classes, noting that I would not use those terms as given. One of the tests showed that social class did not matter once we adjust for a person’s attitude toward greed. A positive attitude toward greed is positively correlated with social class, but it was also easy enough to “prime” the lower class individuals to feel the same way, suggesting that extreme context dependence will hold here.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how...

TFA doesn't say anything about education and background here. I'm curious about whether these results are reproducible for people who earned their wealth through mostly honest businesses, through inheritance, through various dealings in third-world countries, for people who majored in philosophy, for lawyers, for MBAs, for bankers, for hackers, for immigrants, etc.

I think the study merely predicts that BMW drivers are more likely to be arsehats.

Make of car is not a good indicator of genuine wealth in America. If you're looking for a heuristic, then a two year old second hand domestically manufactured vehicle would be a better indicator. See Thomas Stanley and William Danko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door

Tyler Cowen has an interesting comment on this [0]. Generally, it's good policy to interpret these studies cautiously.

[0] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how...

So they have academic research to prove nice guys finish last? If at least it was a Mythbuster research on the topic we would have some explosions.

This was reported on WTOP radio this morning as, "Wealthier people more likely to take candy from children."

Correlation versus causation, guys. We're better than this.