Timothy 6:10: for the Love

¶ … Timothy 6:10: For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

The more moneyed the people, the less likely they are to be ethical according to a research study conducted by Paul Piff and colleagues in the San Francisco Bay area.

The economic concept discussed in the article is the observation that because rich people have more financial resources, they're less dependent on social bonds for survival and therefore more likely to be self-occupied and less likely to care about the concern of the other. The entire principle of economics, in fact, is the idea that the homo economicus is the one who works towards gaining his self-interest. He is a narrowly self-interested actor who works on gaining his own ends and on maximizing his utility as a consumer and his economic profit as a producer. The homo economicus is obverse to the concept of homo reciprocans, which states that human beings are primarily motivated by the desire to be cooperative and to improve their environment. It follows therefore, that the more 'economically-minded' the individual, the more selfish he should be.

This was demonstrated by Brown (2012)

The research study found that people driving more expensive cars were less likely to stop at 'stop' signs. "People of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in error rather than give it back" (Brown E (2012))

Piff and his colleagues also found that anyone who was initially ethical and then won the lottery tended to slip in ethical sensitivity. In earlier studies, Piff had discovered that wealthy people were less likely to act generously than relatively impoverished people. In this study, he and his colleagues now discovered that they also tended to push their self-interest ahead of others.

Researchers hid near a downtown Berkeley intersection and noted the makes, model years and conditions of bypassing cars. Then they recorded whether drivers waited their turn. It turned out that drivers of expensive cars were four times more likely to enter the intersection when they didn't have the right of way and even more times as likely to push past pedestrians who had the right of way.

A questionnaire given to college students that matched their socio-economic status against a list of eight ethical questions found similar results. Over and again, the researchers discovered that "those most willing to engage in unethical behavior were the ones with the highest social status."

Another experiment recruited people from Craigslist to play a "game of chance" that the researchers had rigged. Again, those with higher socio-economic status were more likely to be the ones who cheated.