Who is more ethical: rich people or poor people? The shocking truth is that it's not the super rich. Score one for poor people.
A study by a team of professors at the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley says rich people are more likely to lie in negotiations and engage in unethical behaviour at work. This is the kind of information I should be taking into salary negotiations. I am worried that if it works too well, it may appear that I would be arguing for a reduction in pay, just as an extra precaution to ensure I am not tempted to test any ethically-questionable waters. It's true, journalists have ethics too, and according to the study, ours would be as noble as anybody's.
The day after reading about the study finding unethical rich people, I see another story about a billionaire Canadian accused of running an illegal gambling website. With that, I conclude the findings in this one study must be true.
The findings do beg the question: is the only way to get rich by making an unethical pledge with the devil?
Maybe the correlation is that poor people need to pool resources and work together in order to survive, whereas the wealthy don't need to rely on anybody else. Growing up in these different atmospheres will naturally instill different values and teach people at a young age different ways to self-preserve.
In the study, individuals played a game of dice with a pot of $50. Those of high economic status were more likely to cheat, as much as three times more likely, and declare rolling a higher number. It didn't matter if $50 was a lot of money to them.
It reminds me of The Simpsons episode in which the billionaire Mr. Burns was promised eternal happiness for $1.
"I'd be happier with the dollar," he said. Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, with his famous, "greed is good" line, appears to be an accurate representation of the economic elite.
I guess pop culture has been warning us of the questionable behaviour of wealthy people for quite some time. Maybe the study was unnecessary, and the scientists could have just watched movies and cartoons to get their answers.
The wealthy in the study were also more likely to not say anything if a cashier gave them too much change after purchasing a coffee.
So it's true, poor people are poor by choice; it's just not the choice everyone thought (to be lazy). The choice instead is whether or not to sacrifice their ethical standards. It seems that in a fit of stubbornness, poor people would rather remain that way than to push another person in the mud to get ahead.
A promising side note to this global recession may be that the world as a whole has become a little more ethical in the last five years.
