Honesty of human actions depends on social status

A high position in society and environmental services encourage a person to behave dishonestly, deceive others and violate the law.

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

More recently, every citizen of the USSR had to consider a rich bourgeois morally rotten, dishonest, etc. On the other hand, there is a centuries-old tradition of treating "vile people" as mean in every sense of the word, nobility of the soul and thoughts possessed only by the aristocracy. In this case, of course, a rare person considers himself and his loved ones worse than others: the rich consider themselves to be the guardians of morality, the poor, on the contrary, accuse the rich of hypocrisy, and justice and honesty are inherently attributed to the poor. Both points of view can be found justification: the poor will go to everything to get rich, and the rich (with his money!) Can easily neglect the opinion 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 numbering from 100 to 200 people. At first, each was asked to assess their own social situation on a 10-point scale, taking into account such parameters as income level, education, prestige of work, etc. Then the "test of dishonor" itself followed. Subjects were asked to play a computer game, reminiscent of ordinary bones. The higher the result, the greater the reward. But if in ordinary bones we know that it is impossible to throw out more "12", then in the computer version only experimentalists knew about this limitation. And it turned out that "higher society" is more inclined to cheating - the rich three times more often called the result more "12", although they could not get it.

It would seem that this fully agrees with the sacred Soviet anti-bourgeois ideology. But the experiment was continued. The subjects were asked to compare themselves with other people at different stages of the social ladder, from Donald Trump to the homeless. At the same time, the experiment was constructed in such a way that the volunteers, through comparison of themselves with another, would rise or fall to the level at which the "sample" was located. After that, participants were asked to take candy, which stood right there, but were supposedly intended for children participating in the experiment conducted in a nearby laboratory. So, if the poor felt equal to the rich, he took more chocolates from children than the ordinary poor who knows his place.

In another version of the experiment, participants had to say how one could benefit from greed. At the same time, some of them demonstrated an example of how greed can help achieve a career goal. In this case, even the poor began to offer different ways of how to benefit from greed: for example, depriving hired employees of premiums, overstating the cost of services to customers, taking home from the office public "cookies" ...

At the last stage of the study, psychologists undertook a "field experiment": at a busy urban intersection, they asked passers-by to approach the zebra, as if intending to cross the road, while the scientists themselves were watching the behavior of the machines at that time. According to the law of the State of California, the driver, if he sees a pedestrian preparing to cross the road, is obliged to stop and skip it. It turned out, however, that only the owners of cheap, non-prestigious brands differ in their propensity to comply with the law. Status cars braked at the sight of a pedestrian three times less often. In this case, which is curious, exactly the same owners of environmentally friendly hybrid brands behaved.

Researchers believe that caring for ecology in the form of a hybrid car gives its owner a kind of "moral license" for merits: the right to act unethically, not paying attention to the interests of others. In general, according to the results of the study, one can not say that belonging to this or that social class makes us better: if a person sees an opportunity to earn a living, move up the social ladder (even if this is an illusion), he easily forgets that he is poor, but honest . It is not necessary to talk about the inherent honesty and high moral character of "ordinary workers". It turns out a vicious circle: the higher the person rises, the more dishonorable he becomes, and the more dishonorable he behaves, the more likely he will rise.

At the same time, psychologists emphasize the "extra-class" nature of their results (which is indirectly indicated by the example of hybrid cars at a crossroads). They pay attention to the fact that here we are not talking about class affiliation, but about the social status based on the possession of force, and this kind of relationship can be found not only between whole population groups, but also in a single office and in a single family. Indulgence for adultery, for example, which the fathers of families give themselves, is also based on patriarchal ideas: the man is the head of the family, that is, he has a higher status, that is, he can do whatever he pleases ...

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