Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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rigged Monopoly games to see how people would respond to being placed randomly into a position of privilege. Some 200 student volunteers were pitted against one another. The “rich” player was given twice as much cash as the “poor” player, collected twice as much money when passing Go, and passed Go more often, because he got to roll two dice while the poorer player got only one. (Richie Rich also got the most popular playing piece, the little car, while his opponent received the undesirable boot.)
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Which brings us back to Monopoly. The most interesting part of the experiment, Piff said, came after, when players were asked to talk about what they had done to affect the game’s outcome. The obvious answer was that the fix was in and the rich player got lucky. But the rich players were almost twice as likely as the poor ones to talk about game strategy—how they’d earned their win. And so it goes in the world. Some of us are born better off than others, “but that’s not how people experience relative privilege or relative disadvantage,” Piff said. “What people do is attune to the things they’ve done: ‘I’ve worked hard. I worked hard in school.’ You start plucking out those things.” Successful people tend to feel deserving of their lot. As a corollary, they tend to view less-fortunate people as having earned their lack of success. “So you’re more likely to make sense of inequality,” Piff explained, “to justify it, make inequality seem equitable.”
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These findings should call into question any beliefs in noblesse oblige—elevated rank does not appear to obligate wealthy individuals to do good for the benefit of society.”