(15-09-2023, 11:30 AM)Lilith7 Wrote: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor...%20credits
Study: Poor Are More Charitable Than The Wealthy
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/new...ggest.html
"The rich are different - & not in a good way
Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish.
“We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.”
For the first link I found this https://www.uky.edu/AS/PoliSci/Peffley/p...havior.pdf which I think might have been what Piff was talking about. The studies do have issues though - small samples of mainly American undergraduate students plus some people from paid university research/email groups. So while the results where interesting, they are far from being a cross section of society. And some of it also used self-reporting of social status, which is likely biased and not necessarily reflective of true financial position. If you try to extract it to NZ social structures across all ages, the results could be totally different.
I see that Piff has done quite a bit of work in this area though so it would interesting but time-consuming to look at more of his articles. I did get side-tracked into this one http://www.the-brights.net/morality/stat...(2012).pdf about compassion, generosity and religion.
The second link looked more promising but again it was a news item rather than the actual article, and my computer couldn't access the full version - something to do with security settings. On looking further I found this https://rascl.berkeley.edu/assets/files/...ualism.pdf which might be the actual article, and if so, I notice that the other authors are Piff and Kraus. It looks interesting, but right at the start I can see that it is also assuming that social class is related to wealth. In some contexts that might be so, but in the sense of how much money people have available to choose between spending, investing or giving I think that separating out categories of class is a mistake, especially in NZ. Some of the richest people are the ones you will see downtown in a torn T-shirt and old jandals, and some of those with the least ready cash are the ones who appear to be living lavish lifestyles. And not forgetting than there are more ways to give than just financially.
Both articles were also old. I had a look for what has been published recently and there is plenty to choose from, including this one https://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl...ne.0286273 that seems to have a good balance, and at least includes the UK as well as the US.