Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior (2012) [pdf]

Let me guess... they found that BMWs are exclusively driven by assholes? Any cyclist could have told them that!

Or maybe a professor could divide his undergrads randomly into two groups and send them one at a time for a 10pm stroll through either a high-class neighborhood or a housing project, keeping careful statistics of how many in each group have their money taken from them by violent means. Could differences in willingness to violently rob others be construed as saying something about differences in ethics or greed?

Of course the second study would never pass the research ethics board, but that's okay because, as it turns out, the police keep mountains of such statistics from the natural laboratory social scientists are supposed to be studying. Data on per capita "theft from vehicle" by neighborhood, per capita robbery, and so on, are easily available and could be incorporated into the study, except that...they wouldn't support the desired conclusion, making the study less helpful for promoting other agendas.

It's actually a pretty comprehensive study, though this article doesn't cover everything discovered, it is still very much worth reading.

Superiority complex -> unethical behavior economically -> economic superiority -> increased sense of superiority -> unethical behavior in general -> ad infinitum

As a topical comment, the research on this subject is still pretty uncertain, though with some interesting studies. A somewhat-contrary finding is that one proxy measure of altruism, probability of a dropped letter being returned, was found to be lower in poorer neighborhoods of the UK: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

The authors of that study have a brief discussion of possible differences in the scenarios:

Our overall findings replicate and expand on previous studies using similar methodology [9], [10] but are in contrast with the findings of Piff et al [11] who find that wealthy individuals in Berkeley, U.S.A. are more likely to not give way to other cars or pedestrians, and are more likely to behave selfishly or unethically in economic games. One possible explanation for these contradictory results is that Piff et al [11] findings are likely due to individual level differences, whilst our findings may stem mainly from contextual neighbourhood effects. Therefore our results may not be in conflict, if good socio-economic conditions in an area lead to increased trust and long-term thinking, even though, within any one neighbourhood, wealthier individuals are less altruistic than poorer people. If this is the case, we would predict that the lost letters in our experiment were more likely to be returned by the poorer individuals in the area, and that the wealthy residents of Berkeley would behave even less altruistic when in a poorer neighbourhoods. These latter hypotheses have yet to be tested. Alternatively, these contradictory results may be highlighting domain specific differences of altruistic behaviour between rich and poor people; for example anti-social behaviours involving competition (such as aggressive driving or cheating in an economic game) may be more common amongst the wealthy, whereas in a non-competitive task (such as returning a lost letter) wealthy individuals behave more altruistically than poor individuals.

In this study, we have shown that individuals living in poor neighbourhoods are less altruistic than individuals living in wealthier neighbourhoods. However, we have not been able to identify the specific neighbourhood characteristic behind this, due to income being strongly correlated with other factors, such as crime. Further research should focus on attempting to disentangle these two factors, possibly by comparing equally deprived neighbourhoods with different levels of crime.

No you're not. ;)

If they define it, people can/will disagree with it. If they don't, they can't/won't.

Or, think of it this way: how many studies with similar outsets but which included a real attempt at a definition for 'ethical' do you think go viral enough to a) make it to HN, and b) get 46 upvotes in 60-119 minutes?

Anecdotally, I come from a low income family and witnessed first hand the dissonant beliefs my parents held, that materialistically and socially benefited the rich at our expense, personally, and as a class.

It comes as a real surprise that it is that obvious to you. Are you from outside the United States? Perhaps that may be true in a society that has a shred of class consciousness, but certainly not here.