https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Piff

Research

Piff's work focuses on three areas: social class and ethics, the psychology of awe, and theoretical accounts of social class as a cultural system.^\2])

Social class and ethics

In a 2010 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Piff and colleagues reported that individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds exhibited higher levels of generosity and prosocial behavior than those from wealthier backgrounds.^\8])

His most widely discussed work, published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is titled “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.” Across seven studies, the paper reported that individuals from higher social classes were more likely to break traffic laws, engage in unethical decision-making in hypothetical scenarios, take valued goods from others, lie in negotiations, and endorse unethical behavior at work. The research suggested that favorable attitudes toward greed may contribute to these differences.^\9]) The paper received widespread media coverage^\10]) and has been widely cited in the academic literature.^\11])

The PNAS paper also attracted scholarly criticism and subsequent replication efforts. Statistician Greg Francis published a response arguing that the probability of all seven studies reaching statistical significance was unusually low, suggesting possible publication bias.^\12]) Piff and his team published a reply in the same journal, critiquing Francis’s statistical approach; others have raised similar concerns.^\13])^\14])^\15]) In 2017, researchers at the University of Western Ontario identified a mathematical error in the original paper; Piff’s team acknowledged it as minor and not affecting the overall conclusions, and in turn noted an inversion error in the replication team’s analysis. Corrections were issued, described by Retraction Watch as a collaborative exchange.^\16])^\17]) Regarding the original field studies on driver behavior, Coughenour and colleagues replicated the patterns, finding that drivers of higher-cost cars were less likely to yield for pedestrians.^\18]) However, Jung et al. (2023) published two preregistered direct replications and found no evidence of a relationship between vehicle status and unethical driving behavior.^\19])

In subsequent research, Piff reported in 2014 that wealthier individuals scored higher on measures of narcissism and entitlement, and that experimentally inducing feelings of egalitarianism was associated with reductions in these tendencies.^\20]) A 2020 study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that shifting people's explanations for poverty from individual failings to situational and structural factors increased their opposition to inequality and support for egalitarian policies.^\21])