The honesty of a person's actions depends on social status

High social status and environmental merits encourage a person to behave dishonestly, deceive others and break the law.

Here, it would seem, is an important question: who is more honest, the rich or the poor? Or, in a more scientific formulation, how does moral character depend on income level and position in society?

Until recently, every resident of the USSR had to consider the rich bourgeoisie morally rotten, dishonest, etc. On the other hand, there is a centuries-old tradition of treating "mean people" as mean in every sense of the word; only the aristocracy possessed nobility of soul and thoughts. At the same time, of course, a rare person considers himself and his loved ones worse than others: the rich consider themselves the guardians of morality, the poor, on the contrary, accuse the rich of hypocrisy, and justice and honesty are traditionally attributed to the poor. Both points of view can be justified: the poor will do anything to get rich, and the rich (with his money!) can easily neglect the opinions of others.

Psychologists from the University of California at Berkeley (USA) decided to experimentally find out whether the honesty of actions depends on a person's social status. The researchers worked with several groups of volunteers, ranging from 100 to 200 people. First, everyone was asked to rate their own social status on a 10-point scale, taking into account such parameters as income level, education, job prestige, etc. Then came the actual "dishonor test." The subjects were asked to play a computer game resembling regular dice. The higher the result, the greater the reward. But if in regular dice we know that it is impossible to throw more than "12," then in the computer version only the experimenters knew about this limitation. And it turned out that "high society" is more inclined to cheat - the rich three times more often named a result greater than "12," although they could not have gotten it.

It would seem that this is entirely consistent with the sacred Soviet anti-bourgeois ideology. But the experiment was continued. The subjects were asked to compare themselves with other people on different rungs of the social ladder, from Donald Trump to a homeless person. The experiment was designed so that the volunteers, by comparing themselves with others, would rise or fall to the level at which the “model” was located. After that, the participants were asked to take candies that were standing right there, but were supposedly intended for children participating in an experiment conducted in a neighboring laboratory. So, if the poor person felt equal to the rich, he took more candies from the children than the ordinary poor person who knew his place.

In another version of the experiment, the participants had to say how one could benefit from greed. At the same time, some of them were shown an example of how greed could help achieve a career goal. In this case, even the poor began to suggest different ways to benefit from greed: for example, depriving employees of bonuses, overcharging customers, taking home public "cookies" from the office...

At the final stage of the study, the psychologists conducted a "field experiment": at a busy city intersection, they asked passersby to approach the "zebra", as if intending to cross the road, while the scientists themselves monitored the behavior of the cars. According to California law, a driver, if he sees a pedestrian preparing to cross the road, is obliged to stop and let him cross. It turned out, however, that only owners of cheap, non-prestigious brands were inclined to comply with the law. Status cars slowed down when they saw a pedestrian three times less often. At the same time, curiously, owners of environmentally friendly hybrid brands behaved in exactly the same way.

Researchers believe that caring for the environment in the form of a hybrid car gives its owner a kind of "moral license" for their merits: the right to act unethically, without paying attention to the interests of others. In general, the results of the study do not indicate that belonging to a particular social class makes us better: if a person sees an opportunity to earn extra money, to move up the social ladder (even if this is an illusion), he easily forgets that he is poor but honest. It is impossible to talk about the innate honesty and high moral character of "ordinary workers". It turns out to be a vicious circle: the higher a person rises, the more dishonest he becomes, and the more dishonest he behaves, the more chances he has to rise.

At the same time, psychologists emphasize the "classless" nature of their results (as indirectly indicated by the example of hybrid cars at the intersection). They draw attention to the fact that here we are not talking about class affiliation, but about social status based on the possession of power, and this kind of relationship can be found not only between entire groups of the population, but also in a single office and in a single family. The indulgence for adultery, for example, which fathers of families grant themselves, is also based on patriarchal ideas: a man is the head of the family, that is, the owner of a higher status, that is, he can do whatever he pleases...

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