One might imagine that the poor feel more entitled to wealth because of their plight, but a new study suggests just the opposite—that it is actually the rich who feel that way.
And it’s not just a matter of money, according to University of California at Berkeley psychology professor Paul Piff, who says people’s egos also swell as they get wealthier.
“The more you have, the more deserving of good things in life you feel, and also the more narcissistic you are, the more likely you are to think things like, ‘If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,’” he says.
Piff’s research report, Wealth and the Inflated Self: Class, Entitlement, and Narcissism, published online August 20 in the academic journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, concluded that the rich generally feel more deserving, important, unique, omnipotent and infallible than others.
The narcissistic tendencies observed in upper-class people included a greater likelihood to look at themselves in a mirror, according to Piff’s study. “Vanity is a big piece of narcissism,” he said. “Wealthier people are more likely to look at their reflections.”
But not everyone agrees with the results.
“In terms of the wealthy, I think it’s an overreach to say that these people are narcissists,” said Steve Siebold, author of How Rich People Think. “There’s probably a fine line between high self-esteem, high self-confidence, high self-worth and narcissism, but I don’t think they cross it very often.”
Siebold, who has spent 29 years interviewing over 1,200 millionaires, thinks wealthy people who made their own money have self-esteem because they’ve earned it.
“They’ve actually done something with their lives that’s noteworthy, and they feel the self-confidence and the self-worth as a result,” he said. Of the self-made rich he interviews, Siebold says, “They feel good about themselves, and I think as a result of that, they do love to give back.”
A 2009 study by The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University showed that about 98 percent of high-net-worth households gave to charity as opposed to approximately 65 percent of the overall U.S. population.
Piff, however, feels the advantages of affluence and higher social standing allow the rich to be more independent, self-focused and self-interested, which leads to increased narcissism and entitlement.
By contrast, the disadvantages associated with poverty and lower social class encourage interdependence and other-focus, which in turn enhance egalitarianism and decrease self-importance, he says. The poor have much less control individually over their own lives and tend to live in environments that are more threatening.
“They turn to community, as opposed to being focused on themselves. They are really attuned and sensitive to the needs of others, because that’s so central to how they cope,” said Piff.
Those at the top can be taught to appreciate the plight of the less fortunate, Piff’s research found. By inducing egalitarian values in upper-class research subjects in the laboratory, Piff was able to decrease their narcissism to a level on par with lower-class study participants.
Piff’s previous studies found that richer people were more likely to take candy from children; luxury-car drivers were less likely to stop for pedestrians; and the wealthiest individuals were more likely to cheat in a game that offered the winner a $50 cash prize. According to Piff, the unscrupulous behavior seen in these studies was driven by greed. Across multiple studies, affluent subjects expressed the view that greed is good—even moral.
“The richer you are, the more likely you are to believe that self-interest is a moral good, that it’s a value worth striving for,” he said. “Because of that, in our earlier work, we find that richer people are more likely to behave unethically or cheat or lie.”
