“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald says, “They are different from you and me. … They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
A study with a rigged game of Monopoly set out to test that theory. Here’s a summation by Pat Copeland:
“Psychologist Paul Piff and colleagues at UC Berkeley developed an experiment to demonstrate how privilege works. In a modified version of Monopoly, participants were randomly assigned roles as ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ players through a coin toss. The rich players received more starting money, could roll two dice instead of one, and earned more each time they passed ‘Go.’ These advantages quickly produced noticeable disparities and behavior.
“Researchers observed a consistent shift in how the rich players conducted themselves. They became more assertive, louder, more boastful, and even physically took up more space, eating more snacks, and slamming game pieces with greater confidence. More troubling, they began to belittle the poorer players and failed to acknowledge that their advantage was arbitrary. Despite the initial coin flip, none of the rich players cited it as the cause when asked why they won. Instead, they rationalized their dominance with merit-based explanations.
“This research illustrates an important insight: when people experience material advantage, they tend to adopt behaviors that justify their position. They become less empathetic and more entitled, suggesting that inequality doesn’t just affect outcomes, it distorts perception and self-worth.”
(Copeland goes on to apply it to management practices here, but I’d rather not dilute the main point of the study itself.)
The “American Dream” is in essence a pursuit of wealth, and far too many who don’t yet have it will defend, nonetheless, those who do—suffering in effect a financial Stockholm Syndrome.
The very rich are different from normal people. Through luck of the draw, they are a distorted version of the human race. Fitzgerald’s point isn’t to blame them, but instead to pity them:
“They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”
If only their long shadows didn’t so blight the earth, stunting or killing so many of their fellow creatures, I might be moved to pity them, too.
It defies logic. True. Much of human behavior, does, doesn’t it?
The fact remains. Piff and his team did the Monopoly experiment over and over again. Each time with different people. And the results were consistent. People with the advantage of course knew they had an advantage. But they felt that their win was earned mainly by the ways they employed that advantage.
As a game designer, I’m aware of the odds. Which is why my Layoffs & Lotteries game begins: “Roll to determine first player. On a roll of 12, roll again and add to your number. If you roll a 12 for 7,920 times in a row, you were born into an independently wealthy family. You win! To hell with this game! Go snort some cocaine and sleep with a Kardashian. Otherwise take turns clockwise.”
People don’t grasp the odds of wealth. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, for instance. One million seconds = 11.54 days. One billion seconds = 31.7 years!
It isn’t that much of a stretch for the winner of a rigged Monopoly game to attribute their success more to their own hard work and talent than to their advantage.
Lester,
I apologize for using the wrong name. But the study results defy logic. The problem with real life rich people is that they’re playing a rigged game without realizing it’s rigged. Their starting wealth and nepotism give them outrageous advantages they downplay or erroneously chalk up to merit.
I know it’s true, I used to argue with people about this kind of thing.
But in the particular case of the monopoly experiment, it doesn’t work. What idiot is going to see that they start with more resources and collect more resources going around the board versus their opponent, and then attribute their own victory to merit? Someone that failed third grade math, maybe?
Maybe the experiment would work if you concealed the advantages one player has from the other. That’s the blind privilege I mentioned. But the summary says “even slammed game pieces together with great confidence”. They had to know. It’s without logic.
Thanks for the comment, Mike. Just to be clear, Paul Piff did the study. I chose Copeland’s summation because it is so concise and clear.
As to Piff’s research, as far as I can tell from checking various different online sources, his study has not been discredited. Peer review did point out an error in one number, but with that correction the study’s conclusions remained the same, and the publisher did not retract it.
While I agree a thousand-fold with your ideas and conclusions, I believe Copeland’s research has been discredited.