Paul Piff on Does Money Make You Mean – Transcript

In this entertaining but sobering TEDxMarin talk, social psychologist Paul Piff shares his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy. But while the problem of inequality is a complex and daunting challenge, there’s good news too. 

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Paul Piff_ Does money make you mean_

Paul Piff – Social psychologist

I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly, except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that help earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game has been rigged, and you’ve got the upper hand. You’ve got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources.

And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself, how might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way that you think about yourself and regard that other player?

So we ran a study on the U.C. Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game. They got two times as much money. When they passed Go, they collected twice the salary, and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot more.

And over the course of 15 minutes, we watched through hidden cameras what happened. And what I want to do today, for the first time, is show you a little bit of what we saw. You’re going to have to pardon the sound quality, in some cases, because again, these were hidden cameras. So we’ve provided subtitles.

[Video clips: Rich Player: How many 500s did you have?

Poor Player: Just one.

Rich Player: Are you serious.

Poor Player: Yeah.

Rich Player: I have three. I don’t know why they gave me so much.]

 

Okay, so it was quickly apparent to players that something was up. One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences and dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players. The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around. We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players.

We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side. It’s on the bottom right corner there. That allowed us to watch participants’ consummatory behavior. So we’re just tracking how many pretzels participants eat.

[Video clip: Rich Player: Are those pretzels a trick?

Poor Player: I don’t know.]

 

Okay, so no surprises, people are onto us. They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place. One even asks, like you just saw, is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick? And yet, despite that, the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate, and those rich players start to eat more pretzels.

[Video: Rich Player: I love pretzels.]

 

And as the game went on, one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they’re doing.