Big charities often make headlines - like the ones Bill Gates and Warren Buffett rallied to persuade 40 billionaires to donate at least half of their fortune. But Paul Piff, a psychology researcher at the University of California, has found that, in fact, poor people are more charitable than the rich.
The study began by recruiting adults and asking them to complete an online questionnaire that essentially asked them to indicate what their socio-economic status was.
In the lab, people were told:
"You will play a game in which you are given 10 credits, which will be equal to money at the end of the experiment, and we are interested in knowing how many of those credits you want to give, if you will, a person you will never meet again. "
"Interestingly and perhaps counterintuitively, we found that people who were actually ranking themselves as relatively high in their socioeconomic status were less likely to score points than were people who ranked themselves as relatively lower in social class, "says Professor Piff.
So basically, people who have more, or who identify themselves as having more, tend to give less in this very simple task of generosity to a stranger.
According to the study, there was a statistically significant difference, and what was found was that lower-class people, or relatively lower-class individuals, tended to give 44% more of their points or credits.
Piff says that in these experiments, "the key variable we find that consistently explains this different pattern of giving, helping, and generosity between the upper and lower classes is the sense of empathy and concern for other people's well-being and, in essence, emotion. which we call compassion.
Source: NPR
