think about playing a game of Monopoly,

except in this game, that combination

of skill, talent and luck

that help earn you success in games, as in life,

has been rendered irrelevant,

because this game's been rigged,

and you've got the upper hand.

You've got more money,

more opportunities to move around the board,

and more access to resources.

And as you think about that experience,

I want you to ask yourself,

how might that experience of being

a privileged player in a rigged game

change the way that you think about yourself

and regard that other player?

So we ran a study on the U.C. Berkeley campus

to look at exactly that question.

We brought in more than 100 pairs

of strangers into the lab,

and with the flip of a coin

randomly assigned one of the two

to be a rich player in a rigged game.

They got two times as much money.

When they passed Go,

they collected twice the salary,

and they got to roll both dice instead of one,

so they got to move around the board a lot more.

(Laughter)

And over the course of 15 minutes,

we watched through hidden cameras what happened.

And what I want to do today, for the first time,

is show you a little bit of what we saw.

You're going to have to pardon the sound quality,

in some cases, because again, these were hidden cameras.

So we've provided subtitles.

Rich Player: How many 500s did you have?

Poor Player: Just one.

Rich Player: Are you serious. Poor Player: Yeah.

Rich Player: I have three. (Laughs)

I don't know why they gave me so much.

Paul Piff: Okay, so it was quickly apparent to players

that something was up.

One person clearly has a lot more money

than the other person, and yet,

as the game unfolded,

we saw very notable differences

and dramatic differences begin to emerge

between the two players.

The rich player

started to move around the board louder,

literally smacking the board with their piece

as he went around.

We were more likely to see signs of dominance

and nonverbal signs,

displays of power

and celebration among the rich players.

We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side.

It's on the bottom right corner there.

That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior.

So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat.

Rich Player: Are those pretzels a trick?

Poor Player: I don't know.

PP: Okay, so no surprises, people are onto us.

They wonder what that bowl of pretzels

is doing there in the first place.

One even asks, like you just saw,

is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick?

And yet, despite that, the power of the situation

seems to inevitably dominate,

and those rich players start to eat more pretzels.

Rich Player: I love pretzels.

(Laughter)

PP: And as the game went on,

one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns

that we observed begin to emerge

was that the rich players actually

started to become ruder toward the other person,

less and less sensitive to the plight

of those poor, poor players,

and more and more demonstrative

of their material success,

more likely to showcase how well they're doing.

Rich Player: I have money for everything.

Poor Player: How much is that?

Rich Player: You owe me 24 dollars.

You're going to lose all your money soon.

I'll buy it. I have so much money.

I have so much money, it takes me forever.

Rich Player 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board.

Rich Player 3: You're going to run out of money soon.

I'm pretty much untouchable at this point.

PP: Okay, and here's what I think

was really, really interesting,

is that at the end of the 15 minutes,

we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game.

And when the rich players talked about

why they had inevitably won

in this rigged game of Monopoly --

(Laughter) —

they talked about what they'd done

to buy those different properties

and earn their success in the game,

and they became far less attuned

to all those different features of the situation,

including that flip of a coin

that had randomly gotten them into

that privileged position in the first place.

And that's a really, really incredible insight

into how the mind makes sense of advantage.

Now this game of Monopoly can be used

as a metaphor for understanding society

and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people

have a lot of wealth and a lot of status,

and a lot of people don't.

They have a lot less wealth and a lot less status

and a lot less access to valued resources.

And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing

is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies.

What we've been finding across dozens of studies

and thousands of participants across this country

is that as a person's levels of wealth increase,

their feelings of compassion and empathy go down,

and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness,

and their ideology of self-interest increases.

In surveys, we found that it's actually

wealthier individuals who are more likely

to moralize greed being good,

and that the pursuit of self-interest

is favorable and moral.

Now what I want to do today is talk about

some of the implications of this ideology self-interest,

talk about why we should care about those implications,

and end with what might be done.

Some of the first studies that we ran in this area

looked at helping behavior,

something social psychologists call

pro-social behavior.

And we were really interested in who's more likely

to offer help to another person,

someone who's rich or someone who's poor.

In one of the studies, we bring in rich and poor

members of the community into the lab

and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars.

We told the participants

that they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves,

or they could share a portion of it,

if they wanted to, with a stranger

who is totally anonymous.

They'll never meet that stranger and the stranger will never meet them.

And we just monitor how much people give.

Individuals who made 25,000 sometimes

under 15,000 dollars a year,

gave 44 percent more of their money

to the stranger

than did individuals making 150,000

or 200,000 dollars a year.

We've had people play games

to see who's more or less likely to cheat

to increase their chances of winning a prize.

In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer

so that die rolls over a certain score

were impossible.

You couldn't get above 12 in this game,

and yet, the richer you were,

the more likely you were to cheat in this game

to earn credits toward a $50 cash prize,

sometimes by three to four times as much.

We ran another study where we looked at whether

people would be inclined to take candy

from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified

as being reserved for children --

(Laughter) —

participating -- I'm not kidding.

I know it sounds like I'm making a joke.

We explicitly told participants

this jar of candy's for children participating

in a developmental lab nearby.

They're in studies. This is for them.

And we just monitored how much candy participants took.

Participants who felt rich

took two times as much candy

as participants who felt poor.

We've even studied cars,

not just any cars,

but whether drivers of different kinds of cars

are more or less inclined to break the law.

In one of these studies, we looked at

whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian

that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk.

Now in California, as you all know,

because I'm sure we all do this,

it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross.

So here's an example of how we did it.

That's our confederate off to the left

posing as a pedestrian.

He approaches as the red truck successfully stops.

In typical California fashion, it's overtaken

by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over.

(Laughter)

Now here's an example of a more expensive car,

a Prius, driving through,

and a BMW doing the same.

So we did this for hundreds of vehicles

on several days,

just tracking who stops and who doesn't.

What we found was that as the expensiveness

of a car increased,

the driver's tendencies to break the law

increased as well.

None of the cars, none of the cars

in our least expensive car category

broke the law.

Close to 50 percent of the cars

in our most expensive vehicle category

broke the law.

We've run other studies finding that

wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations,

to endorse unethical behavior at work

like stealing cash from the cash register,

taking bribes, lying to customers.

Now I don't mean to suggest

that it's only wealthy people

who show these patterns of behavior.

Not at all. In fact, I think that we all,

in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives,

struggle with these competing motivations

of when, or if, to put our own interests

above the interests of other people.

And that's understandable because

the American dream is an idea

in which we all have an equal opportunity

to succeed and prosper,

as long as we apply ourselves and work hard,

and a piece of that means that sometimes,

you need to put your own interests

above the interests and well-being of other people around you.

But what we're finding is that,

the wealthier you are, the more likely you are

to pursue a vision of personal success,

of achievement and accomplishment,

to the detriment of others around you.

Here I've plotted for you the mean household income

received by each fifth and top five percent of the population

over the last 20 years.

In 1993, the differences between the different

quintiles of the population, in terms of income,

are fairly egregious.

It's not difficult to discern that there are differences.

But over the last 20 years, that significant difference

has become a grand canyon of sorts

between those at the top and everyone else.

In fact, the top 20 percent of our population

own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country.

We're at unprecedented levels

of economic inequality.

What that means is that wealth is not only becoming

increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals,