Are rich people more likely to be jerks, or are jerks more likely to get rich?

I know plenty of poor jerks so I don’t think the second hypothesis holds.

Studies schmudies. I know some very nice rich people and poor jerks. It all comes out in the wash, and upbringing.

Jerks are more likely to get rich. Here’s a very interesting recent paper that looks at precisely this. From the paper:

“People who are low in agreeableness may be perceived as more competent by virtue of their lack of warmth . Amabile and Glazebrook (1982) found that people who were highly critical of others were rated as more competent than those offering favorable evaluations. Furthermore, in an experimental study, Tieden (2001) found that people recommended a higher-status position and higher pay for job applicants who expressed anger—a display that is more likely among disagreeable people. The relationship between anger and recommendations for status and pay was mediated by competence perceptions; liking of the applicant, on the other hand, had no effect on recommendations. Thus, while agreeable people might be well-liked, their warmth may undermine perceptions of their competence relative to their disagreeable peers who may, in fact, be no better equipped for the job. Disagreeable behaviors, particularly in settings where competitiveness and aggressiveness are valued, seem to signal ability and promise.”

From my personal experience in life: Extremely wealthy people are more likely to have a low empathy quotient.

According to this MSNBC article, the sum results of 12 different studies conclude that wealthier people are less empathetic than poor people. When you grow up rich (and thus having power), you do not need to rely on your community for your needs which is how most people build their sense of empathy, compassion and connection to others as they grow up. Growing up without this means you’re going to act purely in your own interests without concern for others.

There was also a recent article that I can’t find that says a fair percentage of top level CEOs have sociopathic tendencies. So yeah, i’d believe that being a jerk gets you more money.

It actually can work both ways.

The dividing line could possibly be an IQ of 150.

@sinscriven Nice link…so my observations are real, then.

@john65pennington : Do you have any kind of back-up for that idea?

@john65pennington Aren’t we talking about income figures, not intelligence figures?

I think it’s a little bit of both. I definitely think jerks are more likely to climb the ladder and be more aggressive in pursuing their career no matter what the cost to others, but I’ve also seen people get less empathetic as they get richer – or, to put it another way, stop even trying to connect with and care about people once they didn’t have to.

Jill, yes first-hand experience with a thief I arrested. He had an IQ of 154(according to his mother). He used his intelligence to illegally take money out of peoples checking and savings account at ATMs. How he did this was brillant and I will not devulge his MO on Fluther. He also dismantled a high-tech x-ray machine from Vanderbilt Hospital and reassembled it in the basement of another local hospital. He did this, just to see if he could do so, without being arrested. He wrote a letter to me, from jail, explaining how he accomplished this without being caught.

He had the intelligence, but used it in the wrong avenue of life. He is still in prison.

I once had the unfortunate experience of taking a “soon to be” company VP to Korea. It was cold, snowy December night with temps below freezing. As we walked through the street looking at the street vendors’ wares he saw old woman selling leather gloves for $10. He offered $5. She said $8 he offered $5. She said $7 They were good gloves and a steal at $10 but he wanted them at $5 and she refused. He just loved the dickering. The jerk has more money than he knew what to do with. He was getting paid in the 7 figures with bonus but the cheap dick would not give that frozen old lady a dollar. Asshole.
I refused to work for him when he offered me a promotion.

Sorry, @john65pennington, but one example simply doesn’t cut it, and “according to his mother” is not a valid measuring device. The individual you described may well have been a very high scorer, and obviously had some mad tech skills, but again I say that one example does not a demographic make.

Edit: This is a bit off-topic, sorry @Aethelflaed

Jill, I had more than one experience in 44 years with people with high IQ’s.

One, is good enough for me. You have to know these people, in order to understand their personality as a jerk. Each person I have met in the criminal world, with high IQ’s have mostly been jerks. I have also been acquainted with white collar crime and here is the real difference. These people, for the most part, are not jerks….......they are just clever.

I will admit that “job creators” sounds a heck of a lot better than “disagreeable jerks”.

rich jerks just want to be known more. So the data is skewed. You always hear about rich bastards and you love to hate them.

Let’s see…. In today’s paper they say HSBC Holdings CEO, Stuart Gulliver received $10.5 Million last year (up 70% from last year) while announcing plans to cut 30,000 jobs.
Hmmmm, how many service jobs would his and his other cronies salaries cover? Are you telling me he would not take that job with only a $5 million package? Would he really not work hard for $5 million?
He has the attitude that he is worth it and others are not.
I’m just guessing here but it is highly doubtful that HSBC’s service will improve after these cuts.

@SpatzieLover : Apparently so!

@LuckyGuy : That’s funny. Coulda sworn HSBC had to sell of an entire division of their US operations to capital one because they couldn’t make it work.

It has been my experience that “rich” people tend to think that they are better than those of us who are not rich. This seems to make it perfectly ok (in their mind) to do whatever they choose to do where the rest of us are concerned. So they seem to be comfortable with lying, cheating, breaking laws, etc. Rich people have almost no empathy for anyone – especially the poor.

Yeah sure, rich people have a tendency to be like “I’m better than the rest of you so your rules don’t apply to me/I’m rich, I can use money to get myself out of a tight spot.” However there are plenty of people on the other end of the spectrum who are like, “Fuck society, fuck the rules, they don’t help me, they don’t care for me, so why should I care back? I should just use and abuse the system and continue doing what I do. I haven’t been caught yet. Those mid and upper class pricks don’t give a shit about us.” So studies shmudies, you can find correlations anywhere.

@john65pennington

Uh… how many people have you met in prisons who weren’t jerks? I wouldn’t expect to meet a lot of nice people in a jail… on either side of the bars.

There might be a variety of reasons why people may snub others and look down on them. I’ve seen some poor jerks without any useful ability (to a far degree) do the same. I think that a clever jerk may more likely become rich. I think that in the end it mostly comes down to personal life experiences, since when one hasn’t been through what another person has they are more likely to lack the ability to emphasize with that person’s problems/situations.

Generally, being rich requires a certain degree of selfishness. One does not get rich by being generous, nor by passing up opportunities to become richer due to some minor moral issue. As for those rich people who are nice (yes, they do exist!) would be even richer if they were dicks. Put another way, Bill Gates did not get rich by being a nice guy, he merely became rich enough that money no longer mattered to him, and now he can afford to be nice.

Note that just being a dick is no guarantee of financial success though ;)

I think the jerk attitude revolves around, “me, me, me,” right? I’ve seen this on both sides, more with “Flashy” rich people and more with ultra, “Ghetto” folks.

“In another test, researchers observed cars at a busy intersection. Drivers in pricey vehicles were more likely to cut off other drivers and less likely to stop for pedestrians than drivers in cheaper cars.”

I see this every weekend in Downtown, San Diego.

So I think when it comes to being in line, or being involved in a group situation, the two extremes of the rich and poor will try to climb ahead due to “me” being above the rest. However according to that story, from the Washington Post (Who I highly respect when it comes to investigation and fact checking), it’s evident the rich mind tends to be more jerkish.

Related

Interesting tangent

@jerv Interesting. When participants were manipulated into thinking of themselves as belonging to a higher class than they did, the poorer ones, too, began to behave unethically. So, privilege promotes dishonesty – it’s not (at least entirely, or even mostly) that people who “just are” assholes climb the ranks, but that getting power and money (privilege) actually changes people for the ethical worse. Glad you found the answer to the question!

I think it depends on how you define rich. The report I read in the newspaper of that study did not mention figures. I think people like Brad and Angelina are used to having everything their way as are most famous actors and sports people. They may be building houses in New Orleans but that isn’t exactly a sacrifice, more like altruistic egoism. And the same is true of the “old money” types. I don’t think it is necessarily a conscious action, they simply expect their wants to be catered to because they always have been. So I think it is true about the super rich or the richest person in a small town.

@rooeytoo Well, you can read the study (or, for most people on Fluther, the abstract) here. Technically, the term the author uses is “upper classes”.

I’ll look into the details in the morning, after I’ve figured out how to get my school to let me actually see it. It’s really freakishly hard for me to get access to articles right after they’re published. Dunno why.

Yep that is what I read as well, but there is no definition of “upper classes.” Makes me curious where the line is drawn as to what is the “upper class.” I have never heard any statistics regarding car accidents that say “upper classes” cause more accidents because of this behavior which makes me wonder. I am not arguing the point, it’s probably true of ultra wealthy in general, but what about average rich people???

A lot depends on perspective – it usually does.

For example, I expect that rich people (defined as “people with more money than me”) are hit up for solicitations more frequently than I am as a consequence. I would expect that they would have developed an even more brusque way of sloughing them off than I have. And since I get a fair number of solicitations myself, and have had to learn to say “No” in several ways (because some solicitors are more persistent than others), I’m sure I seem to be “a jerk” to many who ask me for favors or money. Richer people may seem like “bigger jerks” to the same people. That’s one perspective.

For another, when we travel in many of the less developed areas of the world, we are specifically (and by that I mean “in so many words”) warned: “If you’re involved in an auto accident, DO NOT STOP if your vehicle can still travel.” Get out of the area and report it to authorities from a safe place. You don’t always know which “accidents” are legitimate and which may be a setup – a staged “accident” to effect a kidnapping, extortion or bribe from corrupt cops in the area. Fortunately I’ve never been in one of these, but I’m sure that if my driver (we aren’t even allowed to drive ourselves in these places) hit someone and sped off, I’d feel like the biggest jerk in the world – and would be perceived as such by innocent bystanders.

@CWOTUS I see what you are saying there, but that doesn’t explain why a higher percentage of people driving an expensive car act like they actually own the road.

Also, Leona Helmsley did not help perceptions any when she said, “Only little people pay taxes.”.

As for your hypothetical bystander situation, places don’t generally get that bad without enough exploitation and corruption at the top to make those at the bottom a little more morally flexible because they must be in order to survive. In other words, you rarely see it any place with a thriving middle class… which means that we may well see that sort of stuff in the US in the not-too-distant future. If that is the sort of thing that the upper claes need to do to stay safe, one must wonder what the upper classes did to bring that state of affairs into being.