Wealth, poverty and compassion The rich are different from you
and me They are more selfish LIFE at the bottom is nasty,
brutish and short. For this reason, heartless folk might assume
that people in the lower social classes will be more self-
interested and less inclined to consider the welfare of others
than upper-class individuals, who can afford a certain noblesse
oblige. A recent study, however, challenges this idea.
Experiments by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of
California, Berkeley, reported this week in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, suggest precisely the
opposite. It is the poor, not the rich, who are inclined to
charity. In their first experiment, Dr Piff and his team
recruited 115 people. To start with, these volunteers were asked
to engage in a series of bogus activities, in order to create a
misleading impression of the purpose of the research.
Eventually, each was told he had been paired with an anonymous
partner seated in a different room. Participants were g