Wealth and Privilege Make for Worse Behaviour – And We Can Prove It
What one rigged Monopoly game taught researchers about wealth, privilege and human behaviour
I have long held a theory that too much money makes you insane. I don’t just mean in the sense that you inevitably lose touch with the reality of the majority of other people on the planet (even though you do). No, I mean it literally makes you insane. As in, less able to gauge the reality of situations, less able to understand your own circumstances accurately, and more prone to paranoia, delusion and general assholery. Just a theory.
Turns out, we can prove it. Kind of. We can at least prove (theoretically) that it makes you delusional, artificially inflates your sense of self-worth and makes you kind of a dick.
How, you ask? Well, it all starts with Monopoly.
Stacking the Deck
Paul Piff is a professor of sociology at the University of California Irvine. He focuses primarily on the effects of wealth, poverty and unequal distribution of resources on social class, power and ethical behaviour. In 2012, he conducted a study still widely known as “The Monopoly Experiment” that was designed to simulate economic inequality for players – and the results were WILD.
Players were randomly assigned a status of “rich” or “poor”. Rich players started the game with more money, got double the amount when passing “Go” and were allowed to roll two dice at a time instead of one.
Poor players, meanwhile, started with less, got less passing “Go”, and were able to move less, limited to just one set of die. The players were, it should be noted, full aware of what status (“Rich” or “Poor”) they had been given. So, maybe you’re thinking – they know it’s arbitrary, why would it change their behaviour? Interesting question! Because it totally did.
Masters of the Board
With researchers watching via video cameras, the “Rich” and “Poor” players began the game. Researchers quickly picked up on a number of marked behavioural changes on the part of the “Rich” players. The Rich players started to take up more physical space, speak louder and more often and bang their pieces down with force as they made their way across the board.
In addition to this already-pretty-obnoxious behaviour, they also started to act… Well, like dicks. They quickly started to show less empathy towards their poor opponents, and became more belligerent, exhibiting less patience and often making disparaging remarks about their opponents and their opponent’s abilities to play the game. They also became greedier, and developed a heightened sense of entitlement, eagerly acquiring new properties and charging high rents and evicting tenants without remorse.
But that’s not the craziest part. That entitlement? It was because they thought they deserved it.
Breaking with Reality
Now keep in mind – these players KNEW that they had been assigned a status as either rich or poor. They understood the designation and the differences that came with each. But astonishingly, the rich players ability to accurately self-reflect quickly seemed to vanish. Instead of acknowledging that the additional seed money, additional die and additional “Pass Go” money made them more likely to win the game, because of course it did, they almost uniformly reported believing that they won the game simply because they were better players who made better decisions with their money.
They were also much more likely to pass moral judgements on their opponents, attributing their loss in the game to being less competent or less deserving – despite acknowledging that they both started the game with less money and were able to systematically accrue less throughout the game.
Basically? The money made them delusional assholes. And it’s super great when the world is run by those.
If you’d like to hear more about this experiment from Paul Piff himself, his TED Talk is super interesting, as is his whole body of work.
Bits & Bobs
I recently discovered an app called Kanopy, and folks, if you aren’t on this already, you need to jump on it. You connect it to your local library account and get access to SO MANY GREAT THINGS. From recently released films to amazing documentaries to The Great Courses, which are like my favourite things ever – and it’s all free! Download it now, thank me later. Aside from this:
Watching: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. I cannot recommend this doco enough. I really enjoyed the book by Thomas Piketty, but I’m not gonna lie - it was dry. I happen to love dry. But this documentary did a fantastic job of bringing the concepts to life and making them interesting and accessible. If you have ever wondered how the world wound up in its current economic situation – this is your answer.
Listening to: Unbecoming a Lady: The Forgotten Sluts and Shrews Who Shaped America by Therese Oneill. Frankly they had me at sluts and shrews.
Reading: So the great grand-nephew of Bram Stoker and horror writer J.D. Barker teamed up to write a kind-of Dracula prequel called Dracul and it’s actually pretty great. Excellently gothic, deliciously creepy. I’m enjoying it immensely.
A short one today, I know. Job interviews have sucked the soul out of my body. Hope you’re all doing wonderfully and thank you as ever for reading.
Until next time!