The Headline: Are rich people more likely to lie, cheat, steal? Cal research suggests so by William Wan, The Washington Post, August 13, 2018
An Excerpt:
"Six years ago, [Dacher] Keltner and a then-graduate student in his lab, Paul Piff, published influential innovative experiments that confirmed many of our worst assumptions about the rich and the corrupting power of wealth.
In one experiment, the researchers stationed themselves at a busy intersection with four-way stop signs and tracked the model of every car whose driver cut off others instead of waiting their turn. People driving expensive cars - like a brand-new Mercedes - were four times more likely to ignore right-of-way laws than those in cheap cars like an old beat-up Honda.
'It told us that there's something about wealth and privilege that makes you feel like you're above the law, that allows you to treat others like they don't exist,' Keltner said."
Ok. Let's look at the data from that study:
High status vehicles included BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Prius, with extra status points going to newer and shinier cars. Per the above table, 14 vehicles of the "highest status" cut off pedestrians or other vehicles, out of a total of over 300 vehicles observed. I'm not sure one can draw any conclusions about the group in question ("rich people") by the inconsiderate behavior of 14 drivers.
Then there's the assumption that the type of car one drives reflects some enduring personality trait (or "character flaw" for the judgmental among us), e.g., people who drive luxury cars are greedy, self-absorbed, immoral, etc. But a good number of luxury car owners ditch their vehicles within a few years:
"about 40 percent of the households that own a luxury car in a given year no longer own luxury vehicles four years later." - (Who Drives Luxury Cars (Only for a While)? by Christopher Kurz and Geng Li/Fed Notes; Federal Reserve; June 1, 2015)
Thus, owning a luxury car is a phase of life for many, e.g. before marriage and kids. In other words, it's not a good indicator of long-lasting personality traits.
Plus, most rich people in the US don't even drive luxury cars: according to a study done by researchers at Experian Automotive , 61% of wealthy people actually drive Hondas, Toyotas and Fords. Ditto the results of a 2017 study: not a single a luxury sedan or sports car was among the top choices of high-income Americans (Honda Civics made the list, though).
Then there's the complication that half the luxury cars in the US are bought by individuals with incomes of less than $100,000 a year (per the research firm Kantar Media TGI). In the San Francisco Bay Area, where the car study was done, that would count as middle-class. So why did the Cal researchers assume rich people were behind the wheel of those fancy cars?
The authors of the paper in question - "Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior" - didn't bother to seriously research the demographics of luxury car owners; they simply asserted, "vehicles are reliable indicators of a person’s social rank and wealth", with one measly reference, a book that bemoans consumerism. A book with a moralistic axe to grind is not a suitable reference for an empirical claim in a scientific paper.
There's also a good reason why people driving the "lowest status" vehicles were the most likely to yield to other vehicles and pedestrians: the deterrence value of traffic fines. A few years ago, the fine in California for “failure to yield right-of-way on sidewalk to pedestrian” was $238. Chump change for the doctor or lawyer* but enough to get behind in rent for the poorest among us. This is not mere speculation on my part: a Danish study showed that higher income people did indeed drive faster than other folk, but that finding was explained by decreased “real cost” of speed-related fines for rich drivers.
As many travelers have observed, drivers in other countries tend to be much less considerate than American drivers. Solid research backs up that perception, especially as it pertains to lower- and middle-income countries. But the generous spin is that the drivers in these less affluent countries aren't inconsiderate, selfish, or immoral - they are simply being pragmatic, as in " the patterns of behaviours observed in low and middle income countries can be described as "pragmatic driving": compliance only when there is a high chance of being detected and fined..." (King 2015). Different group, different narrative.
Sure, some rich people at some point in their lives in certain contexts act like privileged jerks who "treat others like they don't exist", but the Cal car study provides zero evidence to that effect.
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* Doctors and lawyers do have more car accidents than anyone else in the US, per How Occupations Relate to Car Accidents. Note, though, that pedestrian injuries are most common in low-income neighborhoods (Cottrill and Thakuriah, 2010).
References:
Cottrill, C. D. and P. Thakuriah (2010). "Evaluating pedestrian crashes in areas with high low-income or minority populations." Accident Analysis & Prevention 42(6): 1718-1728.
Grimm M, Treibich C. Socio-economic determinants of road traffic accident fatalities in low and middle income countries.: Erasmus University Rotterdam; 2010 [updated Jan 2014). http://hdl.handle.net/1765/19841
King, Mark (2015) Traffic behaviour and compliance with the law in low and middle income countries: are we observing "pragmatic driving"? In Proceedings of the 2015 Australasian Road Safety Conference, Gold Coast, Qld. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/90094/
Piff, P. K., D. M. Stancato, et al. (2012). "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(11): 4086-4091. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short