-
I want you to, for a moment,
-
think about playing a game of Monopoly,
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except in this game, that combination
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of skill, talent, and luck
-
that helped earn you success in games, as in life,
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has been rendered irrelevant,
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because this game's been rigged,
-
and you've got the upper hand.
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You've got more money,
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more opportunities to move around the board,
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and more access to resources.
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And as you think about that experience,
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I want you to ask yourself,
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how might that experience of being
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a privileged player in a rigged game
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change the way that you think about yourself
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and regard that other player?
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So we ran a study on the UC-Berkeley campus
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to look at exactly that question.
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We brought in more than a hundred pairs
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of strangers into the lab,
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and with the flip of a coin
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randomly assigned one of the two
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to be a rich player in a rigged game.
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They got two times as much money.
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When they passed go,
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they collected twice the salary,
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and they got to roll both dice instead of one,
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so they got to move around the board a lot more.
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(Laughter)
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And over the course of 15 minutes,
-
we watched through hidden
cameras what happened.
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And what I want to do today, for the first time,
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is show you a little bit of what we saw.
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You're going to have to pardon the sound quality,
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in some cases, because again,
-
these were hidden cameras.
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So we've provided subtitles.
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Rich Player: How many 500s did you have?
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Poor Player: Just one.
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Rich Player: Are you serious.
Poor Player: Yeah.
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Rich Player: I have three. (Laughs)
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I don't know why they gave me so much.
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Paul Piff: Okay, so it was quickly apparent to players
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that something was up.
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One person clearly has a lot more money
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than the other person, and yet,
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as the game unfolded,
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we saw very notable differences
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and dramatic differences begin to emerge
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between the two players.
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The rich player
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started to move around the board louder,
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literally smacking the board with their piece
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as he went around.
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We were more likely to see signs of dominance
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and non-verbal signs of display,
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displays of power
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and celebration among the rich players.
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All right. We had a bowl of pretzels
positioned off to the side.
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It's on the bottom right corner there.
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That allowed us to watch
participants' consummatory behavior.
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So we're just tracking how
many pretzels participants eat.
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Rich Player: Are those pretzels a trick?
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Poor Player: I don't know.
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PP: Okay, so no surprises, people are onto us.
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They wonder what that bowl of pretzels
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is doing there in the first place.
-
One even asks, like you just saw,
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is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick?
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And yet, despite that, the power of the situation
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seems to inevitably dominate,
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and those rich players start to eat more pretzels.
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Rich Player: I love pretzels.
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(Laughter)
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PP: And as the game went on,
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one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns
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that we observed begin to emerge
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was that the rich players actually
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started to become ruder toward the other person,
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less and less sensitive to the plight
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of those poor, poor players,
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and more and more demonstrative
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of their material success,
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more likely to showcase how well they're doing.
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Rich Player: I have money for everything.
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Poor Player: How much is that?
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Rich Player: You owe me... 24 dollars.
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You're going to lose all your money soon.
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I'll buy it! I have so much money.
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I have so much money, it takes me for ever.
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Rich Player 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board.
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Rich Player 3: You're going
to run out of money soon.
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I'm pretty much untouchable at this point.
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PP: Okay, and here's what I think
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was really, really interesting,
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is that at the end of the 15 minutes,
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we asked the players to talk about
their experience during the game.
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And when the rich players talked about
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why they had inevitably won
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in this rigged game of Monopoly
-
—(Laughter)—
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they talked about what they'd done
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to buy those different properties
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and earn their success in the game,
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and they became far less attuned
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to all those different features of the situation,
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including that flip of a coin
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that had randomly gotten them into
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that privileged position in the first place.
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And that's a really, really incredible insight
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into how the mind makes sense of advantage.
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Now this game of Monopoly can be used
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as a metaphor for understanding society
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and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people
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have a lot of wealth and a lot of status,
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and a lot of people don't.
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They have a lot less wealth and a lot less status
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and a lot less access to valued resources.
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And what my colleagues and I for
the last seven years have been doing
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is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies.
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What we've been finding across dozens of studies
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and thousands of participants across this country
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is that as a person's levels of wealth increase,
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their feelings of compassion and empathy go down,
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and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness,
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and their ideology of self-interest increases.
-
In surveys, we found that it's actually
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wealthier individuals who are more likely
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to moralize greed being good,
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and that the pursuit of self-interest
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is favorable and moral.
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Now what I want to do today is talk about
-
some of the implications
of this ideology self-interest,
-
talk about why we should
care about those implications,
-
and end with what might be done.
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Some of the first studies that we ran in this area
-
looked at helping behavior,
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something social psychologists call
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pro-social behavior.
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And we were really interested in who's more likely
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to offer help to another person,
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someone who's rich or someone who's poor.
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In one of the studies, we bring in rich and poor
-
members of the community into the lab
-
and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars.
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We told the participants
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that they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves,
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or they could share a portion of it,
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if they wanted to, with a stranger
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who is totally anonymous.
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They'll never meet that stranger and
the stranger will never meet them.
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And we just monitor how much people give.
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Individuals who made 25, sometimes
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under 15,000 dollars a year,
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gave 44 percent more of their money
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to this stranger
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than did individuals making 150,
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200,000 dollars a year.
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We've had people play games
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to see who's more or less likely to cheat
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to increase their chances of winning a prize.
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In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer
-
so that die rolls over a certain score
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were impossible.
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You couldn't get above 12 in this game,
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and yet, the richer you were,
-
the more likely you were to cheat in this game
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to earn credits toward a $50 cash prize,
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sometimes by three to four times as much.
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We ran another study where we looked at whether
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people would be inclined to take candy
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from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified
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as being reserved for children
-
—(Laughter)—
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participating, I'm not kidding,
-
I know it sounds like I'm making a joke,
-
we explicitly told participants
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this jar of candy's for children participating
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in a developmental lab nearby.
-
They're in studies. This is for them.
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And we just monitored how
much candy participants took.
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Participants who felt rich
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took two times as much candy
-
as participants who felt poor.
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We've even studied cars,
-
not just any cars,
-
but whether drivers of different kinds of cars
-
are more or less inclined to break the law.
-
In one of these studies, we looked at
-
whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian
-
that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk.
-
Now in California, as you all know,
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because I'm sure we all do this,
-
it's the law to stop for a pedestrian
who's waiting to cross.
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So here's an example of how we did it.
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That's our confederate off to the left
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posing as a pedestrian.
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He approaches as the red truck successfully stops.
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In typical California fashion, it's overtaken
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by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over.
-
(Laughter)
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Now here's an example of a more expensive car,
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a Prius, driving through,
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and a BMW doing the same.
-
So we did this for hundreds of vehicles
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on several days,
-
just tracking who stops and who doesn't.
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What we found was that as the expensiveness
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of a car increased,
-
the driver's tendencies to break the law
-
increased as well.
-
None of the cars, none of the cars
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in our least expensive car category
-
broke the law.
-
Close to 50 percent of the cars
-
in our most expensive vehicle category
-
broke the law.
-
We've run other studies finding that
-
wealthier individuals are more
likely to lie in negotiations,
-
to endorse unethical behavior at work
-
like stealing cash from the cash register,
-
taking bribes, lying to customers.
-
Now I don't mean to suggest
-
that it's only wealthy people
-
who show these patterns of behavior.
-
Not at all. In fact, I think that we all,
-
in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives,
-
struggle with these competing motivations
-
of when, or if, to put our own interests
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above the interests of other people.
-
And that's understandable because
-
the American dream is an idea
-
in which we all have an equal opportunity
-
to succeed and prosper,
-
as long as we apply ourselves and work hard,
-
and a piece of that means that sometimes,
-
you need to put your own interests
-
above the interests and well-being
of other people around you.
-
But what we're finding is that,
-
the wealthier you are, the more likely you are
-
to pursue a vision of personal success,
-
of achievement and accomplishment,
-
to the detriment of others around you.
-
Here I've plotted for you the mean household income
-
received by each fifth and top
five percent of the population
-
over the last 20 years.
-
In 1993, the differences between the different
-
quintiles of the population, in terms of income,
-
are fairly egregious.
-
It's not difficult to discern that there are differences.
-
But over the last 20 years, that significant difference
-
has become a grand canyon of sorts
-
between those at the top and everyone else.
-
In fact, the top 20 percent of our population
-
own close to 90 percent of the
total wealth in this country.
-
We're at unprecedented levels
-
of economic inequality.
-
What that means is that wealth is not only becoming
-
increasingly concentrated in the hands
of a select group of individuals,
-
but the American dream is becoming
-
increasingly unattainable
-
for an increasing majority of us.
-
And if it's the case, as we've been finding,
-
that the wealthier you are,
-
the more entitled you feel to that wealth,
-
and the more likely you are
to prioritize your own interests
-
above the interests of other people,
-
and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest,
-
well then there's no reason to think
-
that those patterns will change.
-
In fact, there's every reason to think
-
that they'll only get worse,
-
and that's what it would look like
-
if things just stayed the same,
-
at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years.
-
Now, inequality, economic inequality,
-
is something we should all be concerned about,
-
and not just because of those at the bottom
-
of the social hierarchy,
-
but because individuals and groups
-
with lots of economic inequality do worse,
-
not just the people at the bottom, everyone.
-
There's a lot of really compelling research
-
coming out from top labs all over the world
-
showcasing the range of things
-
that are undermined
-
as economic inequality gets worse.
-
Social mobility, things we really care about,
-
physical health, social trust,
-
all go down as inequality goes up.
-
Similarly, negative things
-
in social collectives and societies,
-
things like obesity, and violence,
-
imprisonment, and punishment,
-
are exacerbated as economic inequality increases.
-
Again, these our outcomes not just experienced
-
by a few, but that resound
-
across all strata of society.
-
Even people at the top experience these outcomes.
-
So what do we do?
-
This cascade of self-perpetuating,
-
pernicious, negative effects
-
could seem like something that's spun out of control,
-
and there's nothing we can do about it,
-
certainly nothing we as individuals could do.
-
But in fact, we've been finding
-
in our own laboratory research
-
that small, small psychological interventions,
-
small changes to people's values,
-
small nudges in certain directions,
-
can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy.
-
For instance, reminding people
-
of the benefits of cooperation,
-
or the advantages of community,
-
cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian
-
as poor people.
-
In one study, we had people watch a brief video,
-
just 46 seconds long, about childhood poverty
-
that served as a reminder of the needs of others
-
in the world around them,
-
and after watching that,
-
we looked at how willing people were
-
to offer up their own time to a stranger
-
presented to them in the lab who was in distress.
-
After watching this video, an hour later,
-
rich people became just as generous
-
of their own time to help out this other person,
-
a stranger, as someone who's poor,
-
suggesting that these differences are not
-
innate or categorical,
-
but are so malleable
-
to slight changes in people's values,
-
and little nudges of compassion
-
and bumps of empathy.
-
And beyond the walls of our lab, we're even
-
beginning to see signs of change in society.
-
Bill Gates, one of our nation's wealthiest individuals,
-
in his Harvard commencement speech,
-
talked about the problem facing society
-
of inequality as being the most daunting challenge,
-
and talked about what must be done to combat it,
-
saying, "Humanity's greatest advances
-
are not in its discoveries,
-
but in how those discoveries are applied
-
to reduce inequity."
-
And there's the Giving Pledge,
-
in which more than a hundred of our nation's
-
wealthiest individuals
-
are pledging half of their fortunes to charity.
-
And there's the emergence
-
of dozens of grassroots movements,
-
like We Are The One Percent,
-
the Resource Generation,
-
or Wealth For Common Good,
-
in which the most privileged
-
members of the population,
-
members of the one percent and elsewhere,
-
people who are wealthy,
-
are using their own economic resources,
-
adults and youth alike, that's
what's most striking to me,
-
leveraging their own privilege,
-
their own economic resources,
-
to combat inequality
-
by advocating for social policies,
-
changes in social values,
-
and changes in people's behavior,
-
that work against their own economic interests
-
but that may ultimately restore the American dream.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 1/26/2017.