The science of greed | Paul K. Piff | TEDxMarin - YouTube

Translator: Ivana Korom Reviewer: Camille Martínez

It's really an honor to be at such a distinguished gathering

and to have the opportunity to talk to you about some of my research.

I want you to, for a moment,

think about playing a game of Monopoly.

Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck

that helped earn you success in games, as in life,

has been rendered irrelevant,

because this game's been rigged,

and you've got the upper hand.

You've got more money,

more opportunities to move around the board,

and more access to resources.

And as you think about that experience,

I want you to ask yourself:

How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game

change the way you think about yourself

and regard that other player?

So, we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus

to look at exactly that question.

We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab,

and with the flip of a coin,

randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game.

They got two times as much money;

when they passed Go, they collected twice the salary;

and they got to roll both dice instead of one,

so they got to move around the board a lot more.

(Laughter)

And over the course of 15 minutes,

we watched through hidden cameras what happened.

What I want to do today, for the first time,

is show you a little bit of what we saw.

You'll to have to pardon the sound quality,

because again, these were hidden cameras.

So we've provided subtitles.

[Video] Rich Player: How many 500s did you have?

Poor Player: Just one.

RP: Are you serious? PP: Yeah.

RP: I have three. (Laughs) I don't know why they gave me so much.

Paul Piff: So it was quickly apparent to players that something was up.

One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person,

and yet, as the game unfolded,

we saw very notable differences, dramatic differences begin to emerge

between the two players.

The rich player started to move around the board louder,

literally smacking the board with the piece as he went around.

(Game piece smacks board)

We were more likely to see signs of dominance

and nonverbal signs, displays of power

and celebration among the rich players.

We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side.

It's on the bottom right corner.

That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior.

So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat.

[Video] RP: Are those pretzels a trick?

PP: I don't know.

Paul Piff: OK, so no surprises, people are on to us.

They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place.

One even asks, like you just saw,

"Is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick?"

And yet, despite that, the power of the situation

seems to inevitably dominate,

and those rich players start to eat more pretzels.

(Laughter)

[Video] RP: I love pretzels.

(Laughter)

Paul Piff: And as the game went on,

one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns

that we observed begin to emerge

was that the rich players actually started to become ruder

toward the other person --

less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players,

and more and more demonstrative of their material success,

more likely to showcase how well they're doing.

[Video] RP: I have money ...

(Laughs) I have money for everything.

PP: How much is that?

RP: You owe me 24 dollars.

You're going to lose all your money soon.

I'll buy it. I have so much money.

I have so much money, it takes me forever.

RP 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board.

RP 3: You're going to run out of money soon.

I'm pretty much untouchable at this point.

(Laughter)

Paul Piff: And here's what I think was really, really interesting:

it's that, at the end of the 15 minutes,

we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game.

And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won

in this rigged game of Monopoly ...

(Laughter)

They talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties

and earn their success in the game.

(Laughter)

And they became far less attuned

to all those different features of the situation --

including that flip of a coin --

that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position

in the first place.

And that's a really, really incredible insight

into how the mind makes sense of advantage.

Now, this game of Monopoly can be used

as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure,

wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status,

and a lot of people don't;

they have a lot less wealth and a lot less status

and a lot less access to valued resources.

And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing

is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies.

What we've been finding across dozens of studies

and thousands of participants across this country

is that as a person's levels of wealth increase,

their feelings of compassion and empathy go down,

and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness,

and their ideology of self-interest increase.

In surveys, we've found

that it's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize

greed being good,

and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral.

Now, what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications

of this ideology self-interest,

talk about why we should care about those implications,

and end with what might be done.

Some of the first studies that we ran in this area

looked at helping behavior,

something social psychologists call "pro-social behavior."

And we were really interested

in who's more likely to offer help to another person:

someone who's rich or someone who's poor.

In one of the studies,

we bring rich and poor members of the community into the lab,

and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars.

We told the participants they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves,

or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to,

with a stranger, who's totally anonymous.

They'll never meet that stranger; the stranger will never meet them.

And we just monitor how much people give.

Individuals who made 25,000, sometimes under 15,000 dollars a year,

gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger

than did individuals making 150,000, 200,000 dollars a year.

We've had people play games

to see who's more or less likely to cheat

to increase their chances of winning a prize.

In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer

so that die rolls over a certain score were impossible --

You couldn't get above 12 in this game, and yet ...

the richer you were, the more likely you were to cheat in this game

to earn credits toward a $50 cash prize --

sometimes by three to four times as much.

We ran another study

where we looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy

from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified

as being reserved for children --

(Laughter)

Participating -

I'm not kidding -- I know it sounds like I'm making a joke.

We explicitly told participants:

"This candy is for children participating in a developmental lab nearby.

They're in studies. This is for them."

And we just monitored how much candy participants took.

Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy

as participants who felt poor.

We've even studied cars.

Not just any cars,

but whether drivers of different kinds of cars

are more or less inclined to break the law.

In one of these studies,

we looked at whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian

that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk.

Now in California, as you all know,

because I'm sure we all do this,

it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross.

So here's an example of how we did it.

That's our confederate off to the left, posing as a pedestrian.

He approaches as the red truck successfully stops.

In typical California fashion,

it's overtaken by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over.

(Laughter)

Now here's an example of a more expensive car,

a Prius, driving through, and a BMW doing the same.

So we did this for hundreds of vehicles

on several days,

just tracking who stops and who doesn't.

What we found was as the expensiveness of a car increased ...

(Laughter)

the drivers' tendencies to break the law increased as well.

None of the cars -- none of the cars --

in our least expensive car category

broke the law.

Close to 50 percent of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category

broke the law.

We've run other studies,

finding that wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations,

to endorse unethical behavior at work,

like stealing cash from the cash register,

taking bribes, lying to customers.

Now, I don't mean to suggest

that it's only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior.

Not at all -- in fact, I think that we all,

in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives,

struggle with these competing motivations

of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people.

And that's understandable,

because the American dream is an idea

in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper,

as long as we apply ourselves and work hard.

And a piece of that means that sometimes,

you need to put your own interests

above the interests and well-being of other people around you.

But what we're finding is that the wealthier you are,

the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success,

of achievement and accomplishment,

to the detriment of others around you.

Here I've plotted for you the mean household income

received by each fifth and top five percent of the population

over the last 20 years.

In 1993,

the differences between the different quintiles of the population,

in terms of income,

are fairly egregious.

It's not difficult to discern that there are differences.

But over the last 20 years, that significant difference

has become a Grand Canyon of sorts

between those at the top and everyone else.

In fact, the top 20 percent of our population

own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country.

We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality.

What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated

in the hands of a select group of individuals,

but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable

for an increasing majority of us.

And if it's the case, as we've been finding,

that the wealthier you are,

the more entitled you feel to that wealth,

and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests

above the interests of other people,

and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest,

well, then, there's no reason to think that those patterns will change.

In fact, there's every reason to think that they'll only get worse,

and that's what it would look like if things just stayed the same,

at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years.

Now inequality -- economic inequality --

is something we should all be concerned about,

and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy,

but because individuals and groups

with lots of economic inequality do worse ...

not just the people at the bottom, everyone.

There's a lot of really compelling research

coming out from top labs all over the world,

showcasing the range of things that are undermined

as economic inequality gets worse.

Social mobility, things we really care about,

physical health, social trust,

all go down as inequality goes up.

Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies,

things like obesity, and violence,

imprisonment, and punishment,

are exacerbated as economic inequality increases.

Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few,

but that resound across all strata of society.

Even people at the top experience these outcomes.

So what do we do?

This cascade of self-perpetuating,

pernicious, negative effects

could seem like something that's spun out of control,

and there's nothing we can do about it,

certainly nothing we as individuals could do.

But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research

that small psychological interventions,

small changes to people's values,

small nudges in certain directions,

can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy.

For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation

or the advantages of community,

cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian

as poor people.

In one study, we had people watch a brief video, just 46 seconds long,

about childhood poverty

that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around them.

And after watching that,

we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time

to a stranger presented to them in the lab, who was in distress.

After watching this video, an hour later,

rich people became just as generous of their own time

to help out this other person, a stranger,

as someone who's poor,

suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical,

but are so malleable to slight changes in people's values,

and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy.

And beyond the walls of our lab,

we're even beginning to see signs of change in society.

Bill Gates, one of our nation's wealthiest individuals,

in his Harvard commencement speech,

talked about the problem of inequality facing society

as being the most daunting challenge,

and talked about what must be done to combat it,

saying, "Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries --

but in how those discoveries are applied

to reduce inequity."

And there's the Giving Pledge,

in which more than 100 of our nation's wealthiest individuals

are pledging half of their fortunes to charity.

And there's the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements,

like "We are the 1 percent,"

"Resource Generation,"

or "Wealth for Common Good,"

in which the most privileged members of the population,

members of the one percent and elsewhere,

people who are wealthy,

are using their own economic resources,

adults and youth alike -- that's what's most striking to me --

leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources,

to combat inequality

by advocating for social policies,

changes in social values

and changes in people's behavior

that work against their own economic interests,

but that may ultimately restore the American dream.

Thank you.

(Applause)