© Aurora Photos/Alamy'Wealth cultivates attitudes that are against redistribution and for privilege.'
Call it the asshole effect. That is the term coined by US psychologist Paul Piff after he did some stunning new research into the effects of wealth and inequality on people's attitudes.
As we ponder Joe Hockey's budget and his division of the world into "leaners" and "lifters", as we learn from Oxfam that the richest 1% of Australians now own the same wealth as the bottom 60%, we would do well to consider the implications of Piff's studies. He found that as people grow wealthier, they are more likely to feel entitled, to become meaner and be more likely to exploit others, even to cheat.
Piff conducted a series of revealing experiments. One was remarkably simple. Researchers positioned themselves at crossroads. They watched out for aggressive, selfish behaviour among drivers, and recorded the make and model of the car. Piff found drivers of expensive, high-status vehicles behave worse than those sputtering along in battered Toyota Corollas.
They were four times more likely to cut off drivers with lower status vehicles. As a pedestrian looking carefully left and right before using a crossing, you should pay attention to the kind of car bearing down on you. Drivers of high-status vehicles were three times as likely to fail to yield at pedestrian crossings. In contrast, all the drivers of the least expensive type of car gave way to pedestrians.
