How did I not hear of this experiment sooner? This is one in a series of rather startling studies conducted at the University of California at Berkeley that finds that wealthier people tend to behave more unethically than people of more modest means. Even when wealth is accumulated by means outside of their control, the wealthy considered themselves to be entitled to their advantages, more so than anyone else would be.
From PBS:
Paul Solman (PBS) : But the simple Darwinian story is if I have more resources than you, I can have more kids than you; my kids will pass on my DNA, which is the resource-hoarding DNA.
Dacher Keltner (Psychologist, UCB): That was sort of an older view of how we evolved as the particular social species we are, but what we’re learning through a lot of new advances in evolutionary biology is that we really had to cooperate to make it as a species.
We had to cooperate in terms of food gathering, defending against predators and so on. And human cultures evolved particular tendencies to reward the generous — to ensure that there weren’t people hoarding resources and that the resources were more equally distributed.
