Headline and Excerpt: Study: Poor Are More Charitable Than the Wealthy. Study author Paul Piff/ NPR Interview,  August 8, 2010

"So it's really compassionate feelings that exist among the lower class that's seen to provoke these higher levels of altruism and generosity toward other people."

The Study: Piff, PK et al (2010). "Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior."

Description: Across various lab experiments and online surveys, participant social status was associated with being more generous, as in giving away more points in a game or helping a fellow participant in a joint task. In one study, the greater generosity of lower-income participants was associated with  their higher levels of egalitarian values and social trust.  In another study, participants manipulated to feel compassion were more generous, regardless of social status. The authors conclude that the rich are less generous than the poor because they are less compassionate, less trusting, and less egalitarian.

Headline and Excerpt: Why Don't America's Rich Give More to Charity? Helaine Olen/The Atlantic; December 16, 2017

"The best-known study...found that the higher a subject’s self-described social rank, the more candy they took from a jar labeled as being for children."

The Study: Piff, PK, DM Stancato, et al. (2012). "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior."

Description: Participants were manipulated to perceive themselves as higher or lower social-class. They were then presented with a jar of individually wrapped candies and told the candy was intended for children participating in studies in a nearby laboratory but they could take some if they wanted. They were then left alone for 30 seconds. "Higher-class" participants took more candy.

Headline and Excerpt: Why the Rich Don't Give to Charity: The wealthiest Americans donate 1.3 percent of their income; the poorest, 3.2 percent. What's up with that? Ken Stern/The Atlantic April 2013 Issue. Quotation from Paul Piff, main author of the above studies:

"...the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. [They are] more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes."

A Few Points:

  1. While the results of the above research were "statistically significant", often they were barely so.
  2. Statistical significance just means the study results were unlikely to have happened by chance alone. It does not mean "significant" in the everyday use of the term, as in important or meaningful. The difference between two groups could be minor but still statistically significant (given a large enough sample size), e.g., Group A is 6.6 on a 0-10 scale and Group B is 6.8. Yeah, you could say Group A is less something-something than Group B, but that's not saying much.
  3. Some researchers* overstate the significance of their findings, especially to the press, such as making grand statements about the inner lives of the rich or poor. Access to their actual research data would help us judge for ourselves whether such generalizations are warranted by the evidence. 
  4. For instance, in the candy jar study, I would have liked to have seen the actual candy jar data. How much candy was in the jar? How many candies did higher-class and lower-class participants take, on average? How many of the higher-class participants took more candy than lower-class participants? Were there outliers (extreme candy-takers) that skewed the results? The researchers could have included (or provided a link to) a simple table conveying this information. That the researchers didn't is odd, because in the same 2012 paper, they did provide a table for another study about the purported driving habits of rich people (which, it turns out, was largely based on the bad behavior of 14 fancy car drivers, who may or may not have been rich - for more on that study, see The Science Behind The Headlines: Rich People Are Bad) .  
  5. These were mostly lab experiments that tell us little about the motivations, mindsets, and behavior of people in the real world. Field experiments - where people are studied in their natural habitat - are necessary to fill out the picture. For instance, in one such experiment envelopes were "misdelivered" to rich and poor neighborhoods. Some of the envelopes contained cash. Residents in the rich neighborhoods returned envelopes at a much higher rate than in the poor neighborhoods - no matter whether the envelopes contained money or not (Andreoni, Nikiforakis, and Stoop, 2017). 

Bottom line: beware of researchers on a moral crusade. They are likely to make unwarranted assumptions, overstate the significance of their findings, and ignore evidence that undermines their case.

Next: Well, what about the fact that the poor give more of their income to charity than the rich?

References:

Andreoni, J., N. Nikiforakis, and J. Stoop (2017). “Are the rich more selfish than the poor, or do they just have more money? A natural field experiment.” Technical Report, National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w23229

Piff, P. K., Kraus, M. W., Côté, S., Cheng, B. H., & Keltner, D. (2010). "Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(5), 771-784. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0020092

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.