I’m sure you know the stereotype of the rich asshole: wealthy guy, probably a business person, cares little for other people’s needs. The world revolves around him, his ideas and his needs. He’s an anti-social guy. And sometimes he even rides it all the way to the White House.
That’s the pop culture image, but let’s talk about the social science for a bit. Social psychologists study the phenomenon. So, are rich people anti-social? Does it mean working class people are pro-social? If so, why? What does social psychology say about these things?
Rich Devils and Poor Angels?
Proceedings of the Royal Society B published a study on this, and Science magazine covered the story surprisingly well. What did it show?
People with high levels of education and income – wealthy people, though not necessarily bourgeois – lack a cluster of traits the researchers call ‘wisdom.’ Wisdom includes: recognition of the limits to one’s own knowledge, sensitivity to flux and change, acknowledgment and acceptance of the perspectives of others, et al. What does it mean to lack these things? To put it simply, it means you’re a jerk. Wealthier, more highly educated people are more likely to ignore others, start conflicts, and engage in other kinds of anti-social behavior.
So, if rich people lack wisdom, who has it? Working class people do. Why? Because they need other people. Working class people rely on shared resources, skills, and personal connections to go about daily life. If you have money, you buy things. But if you can’t afford it, you borrow or trade for it. And when you don’t have the right degree and networking to get the job you want, you get a job through organic connections and friendships.
Against Class-Identitarianism
Much like with race, class isn’t biological, genetic, or an inherent feature of some person or group of people. Rich people weren’t born devils, and working class people weren’t born angels. That’s clear enough.
Class isn’t an identity, either. A world where identitarianism is on the rise obscures this point, at times leaving us with the impression that identity is everything. It isn’t. But interpreted wrongly, scientific results like these feed into this myth.
These things come from material conditions. Rich people weren’t born with properties of ‘richness’ or ‘jerkitude’ – nor were working class people born with properties of ‘working class-ness’. The suggestion is nonsense. Working class people develop wisdom because they need to do it to get by. Rich people fail to develop wisdom because they don’t need to. If anything wisdom might push many rich people further away from their goals.
That members of some groups are more likely to develop certain skills or knowledge because of material conditions is exactly what standpoint theorists were getting at in their early work.
A Postscript on Social Psychology
And now for a brief note of caution. I’ve cited one study here, and it comes from social psychology. Maybe you’ve heard of it, and maybe you haven’t. But the entire field of social psychology is in the middle of a replication crisis. That is to say most of the research has only been done once, or a small number of times. For us to fully accept the conclusion that rich people are anti-social, we need repeated studies.
