SSIR Articles
The more you have, the less you give. According to a 2002 Independent Sector survey, households earning more than $100,000 a year contributed only 2.7 percent of their income to charity, while those earning less than $25,000 gave a more generous 4.2 percent. New research shows that's no accident. "The more money a person makes or has, the less generous, helpful, compassionate, and charitable he is toward other people," says Paul Piff, a doctoral candidate in social and personality psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Piff started out by noticing that rich people are generally ruder. When he videotaped them in the lab as they got to know a stranger, people who had identified themselves as having more "would check their cell phones ... or doodle without establishing eye contact. Whereas the individuals who identified themselves as having less, were more engaged: They would establish eye contact, they'd laugh more, they'd nod," Piff says. There seemed to be basic differences in the level of social engagement and concern for others. So Piff and colleagues designed a series of experiments. Given $10 worth of points and asked how much of it they wanted to share, rich people were less generous… Sent with Reeder
