When you are used to having money, you're more likely to think that material things can be replaced. A bag of candy is a much smaller deal when you make 100k a year as opposed to 20k, so you don't think as much of it.

Just one thought.

Because morality is a poor man's companion.

If you look trough a lenses where everything is a business decision (whether ingrained or just habit acquired after doing it for 8 hours per day as a job) it will wrap your worldview that way.

The savvy business decision is to take as much as possible.

That reminded me of something I read a few month ago - maybe even here on HN - gamers don't have as scary nightmares. We are so used to killing weird stuff in weird worlds that when something nightmarish happens we take control in our dream and fight back. http://kotaku.com/5547398/video-gamers-have-power-over-their...

It is the same with the businessmen - after learning to ignore morality in the office - you cannot turn it on for the small stuff.

Because their sympathy isn't the same anymore. All of the people thought: if I were running this, how much would I be OK with people taking? So the people with less money took less because they assumed the people running the show were like them. And the rich people took more, for the exact same reason.

My view would be that the children are not being deprived of candy. If you assume (as I naturally would) that the supply of candy is infinite from the perspective of the children in the other study, then you're simply being offered candy and should take as much as you want to eat now. (Taking the bowl home to use for Halloween give-always is out of bounds, but anywhere in the 0-5 pieces doesn't seem to be remotely a moral question to me.)

I think extrapolating that the rich are literally taking candy from babies is a stretch too far to me.

There could be many explanations not involving "evilness" of the rich that they (Berkeley folks) did not control.

E.g. if you perceive candy as free then you take as much as you want, but if you are aware of its price you will limit yourself.

Or that people who use their brain more also like sweets more.

Or that the person conducting the experiment was aware about wealth of each test subject (i.e. it was not a double blind test) and affected the outcome accordingly.

Etc. etc.

Maybe the rich are more comfortable with taking more. Or the notion of 'I deserve more'. Maybe that's why they got rich ? Maybe pushing the boundaries is what it's all about - whether that means not stopping for pedestrians - or taking more candy ?

Well they're just hacking the system, seeing just how much they can get away with, seeing just how far they can push the rules before someone explicitly tells them to stop.