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What do Monopoly and that guy who doesn’t know how to say “thank you” to waiters have in common?
Human disposition.
On October 2013, Paul Piff, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, discussed mankind’s instinctual reactions to positions of privilege at a TED Talk. Through a series of studies, Piff was able to establish a correlation between wealth and human empathy. He determined that those who have more capital often feel more entitled. His studies on the negative societal impacts of privilege may be slightly dated, but his findings are all the more relevant now, as the wage gap continues to rocket to a dangerously high level.
In the filmed discussion, Piff begins outlining his main study on human nature with a rigged Monopoly game. One-hundred random participants are paired off and then asked to flip a coin. The winner of the coin toss is granted twice as much starting money. When passing “Go”, the coin toss winners are granted twice as much salary. Most notably, the winners are permitted to roll both dice instead of just one, so each turn results in two times as many moves as their disadvantaged opponent.
Obviously, the player who lost the original roll never stood a chance of winning the Monopoly game.
But fascinatingly, as the players were unknowingly being recorded, the behavior of those advantaged grew worse and worse. At the beginning of the game, both players acknowledged the comedy of their blatantly biased situations. Yet as the game went on and the gap between the pairs widened, so did the advantaged player’s treatment of his poor counterpart.
Piff notes how the rich players exhibited more confidence and entitlement in their physical actions. The board piece movements of the winning players had more weight and were more dramatic. Additionally, their voices tended to grow louder as the game went on. Perhaps the most humorous — and significant — instance of their changed behavior came with the bowl of pretzels placed on the center of the table. The wealthy players, Piff observes, were much more inclined to eat from the bowl of pretzels, as if their success in one aspect of the scenario had led to their entitlement to do so.
To explain their victories, many of the advantaged players were quick to describe the strategy and skill that went into their domination of the game, rather than acknowledging the massive disparity of their opponent. This can nearly wrap up the entire study in a bow. Granted with the upper hand, man is seemingly more predisposed to mistreat those lesser off, rather than to empathize with them. It also indicates that those born with privilege may be more likely to ascribe later success to their own efforts, rather than their inherent advantage.
Though Piff’s TED Talk goes on to reference a number of additional studies that suggest a similar trend, the rigged Monopoly game is the most authentic for one reason: it was the only one of Piff’s studies that had both players start off as near equals. Both were equally likely to become advantaged or disadvantaged and both laughed at the transparently unfair terms of the game. Yet the moment it became apparent to the advantaged player that they were not just winning the game, but dominating their opponent, the sharing of emotions ceased.
This is a particularly dangerous inference about the human psyche when applied to society as a whole. As a student, it’s apparent to me that there is a dearth of appreciation for opportunities that some of my peers seem to have. With no student debt to fear and ceaseless spending money, there’s a demographic of students at any university who take their social lives far more seriously than academics. This handful of entitled millennials will represent part of a generational workforce soon and will likely be the same constituents complaining of fierce competition in a globalized workforce.
Additionally, the growing wealth gap likely justifies the entitled attitude of the supremely wealthy. Whereas being a millionaire used to merely represent a life of satisfaction, it now typically guarantees a legacy of trust funds, corporate dominance and, often, continued family growth. On the other hand, being wealthy today doesn’t just mean a three-story house and a condo in Costa Rica; rather, the richest 1 percent of the earth’s population owns $110 trillion in combined assets, or 65 times the wealth of the bottom half of the population. That puts an unfathomable amount of economic power in the hands of a very small number of individuals. The concept of trickle-down economics has failed, as minimum wage no longer represents what it takes to support one’s own family. Large corporations exploit and benefit from cheap labor both domestically and abroad, while also simultaneously controlling powerful lobbies that keep corporate taxes low and limit the ability of governments to redistribute profits.
The only way to successfully combat the human tendency to associate privilege with apathy is to create a society where the overall human condition is promoted as greater than achieving personal success. With nearly 7 billion people on the planet, it’s impossible that we all enjoy the same rich and a luxurious lifestyle. As such, we should work to shorten the gap between poor and rich. We should ensure that those who deserve celebration for their achievements have the lifestyle they’re entitled to, but at the same time, make sure these people do not use poor populations as stepping stones along the way.
Contact Assistant Opinion Section Editor Sam Schanfarber at samuel.schanfarber@colorado.edu.
