Irony About Our Wealth Purity Codes

In my last entry I wrote about the purity codes of biblical times and how they still seem to be in operation when it comes to our view of the wealthy and the poor.  "Being wealthy does not automatically make a person 'pure' but it gives the person the assumption of purity.  A rich person is assumed to be clean, well mannered, smart and moral until proven otherwise. A poor person, on the other hand, lives with the assumption of 'impurity.'  He is assumed to be unintelligent, less capable, unclean and less moral until proven otherwise."  (Thus we have politicians recommending drug testing for welfare recipients.)

A follow up to this comes from a story in today's Bloomberg.  Researchers have found, in contrast the the assumption of purity, that the rich are more likely to cheat, lie and steal.  According to Paul Piff:

“A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” he said in a telephone interview. “So why are they more inclined to cheat? For a person with lower socioeconomic status, that $50 would get you more, and the risks are small.”

Poorer participants may be less likely to cheat because they must rely more on their community to get by, and thus are more likely adhere to community standards, Piff said. By comparison, “upper-class individuals are more self-focused, they privilege themselves over others, and they engage in self- interested patterns of behavior,” he said. 

The God of Wall Street

Interesting opinion piece by Mike Lux at the Huffington post today.  Lux asks "What Kind of God Do Wall Street Bankers Believe In?"

There was a pretty amazing moment Tuesday during the JPMorgan Chase shareholders meeting. A woman from the group Illinois People's Action, Dawn Dannenbring, who as a shareholder had the right to speak at the meeting, said to CEO Jamie Dimon: "As a person of faith, my God believes you shouldn't take advantage of people when they are down. Do you believe in the same God I believe in?" Dimon was apparently a little taken aback, answering, "That's a hard one to answer."

Well, I'm sure on one level it was. He wouldn't have known what religion the woman was, or what she truly thought about God. He probably has never been asked his theological views in his job as JPMorgan Chase CEO before. But even though I have no knowledge whatsoever of Jamie Dimon's faith or theology, I feel extremely confident in saying I know the answer: it would be "no."

You can read the rest at Huffington Post.

Do As I Say...

New research published in the journal Psychological Science (I read about it in Science Daily) suggests something you may already have suspected. (Don't most psychological studies do that?)

The rich and powerful are more judgmental when it comes to the ethical choices of the less powerful than they are for themselves.

"According to our research, power and influence can cause a severe disconnect between public judgment and private behavior, and as a result, the powerful are stricter in their judgment of others while being more lenient toward their own actions," said Adam Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School.

Through a series of five experiments, the researchers examined the impact of power on moral hypocrisy...In all cases, those assigned to high-power roles showed significant moral hypocrisy by more strictly judging others for speeding, dodging taxes and keeping a stolen bike, while finding it more acceptable to engage in these behaviors themselves...

In contrast, a fifth experiment demonstrated that people who don't feel personally entitled to their power are actually harder on themselves than they are on others, which is a phenomenon the researchers dubbed "hypercrisy." The tendency to be harder on the self than on others also characterized the powerless in multiple studies.

"Ultimately, patterns of hypocrisy and hypercrisy perpetuate social inequality. The powerful impose rules and restraints on others while disregarding these restraints for themselves, whereas the powerless collaborate in reproducing social inequality because they don't feel the same entitlement," Galinsky concluded.

Photo credit: Steve Rhode
http://www.flickr.com/photos/steverhode/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0