The rich are less generous when they think there’s high economic inequality

(credit: Flickr user Todd Sanders)

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me... They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are...”

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in 1925 in a short story called The Rich Boy. Today, some highly touted recent research seems to prove him right, indicating that those with higher incomes are less generous than those with lower incomes. But the new study shows that the upper echelons of society are not simply peopled by greedier, less moral individuals; the rich are merely tight fisted when they are surrounded by actual or even perceived income inequality. As different as they may be, they seem to be as susceptible to their surroundings as the rest of us.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and Stanford decided to revisit the reams of data from psychological experiments demonstrating that money is just as corrupting a force as power and that high earners are selfish. Instead, they suspected that being surrounded by vast economic inequality is what renders the economic elite less generous.

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