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Published on: November 19, 2015
Social status and unethical behavior: Two replications of the field studies in Piff et al. (2012)
Minah H Jung1, Paul Smeets2, Jan Stoop3
1Department of Marketing, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University.
Abstract:
Prominent social psychologists and major media outlets have put forward the notion that people of high socioeconomic status (SES) are more selfish and behave more unethically than people of low SES. In contrast, other research in economics and sociology has hypothesized and found a positive relationship between SES and prosocial and ethical behavior. We review the empirical evidence for these contradictory findings and conduct two direct, well-powered, and preregistered replications of the field studies by Piff and colleagues (2012) to test the relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior. Unlike the original findings, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior in the two field replication studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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