Stuck in the eye of the needle

Are the rich and powerful truly less moral than the poor and meek?

This is our first Data Brief. In these Data Briefs, we will discuss research relevant to class and well-being in America. We might present findings from our own analyses, or we may summarize the existing academic literature on a given topic. This data brief is a bit of both. The aim of these briefs is to make academic research relevant and engaging for general audiences. Since this is our first Data Brief, we look forward to your feedback.

There is a common belief that social class and morality are closely linked. Contemporary films like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street suggest that the intersection of wealth, status, and power can corrupt our moral compass. Such concerns are ancient, with nearly every world religion warning of the corrupting influence of wealth, status, and power. The Christian Bible, for instance, is full of these warnings. Jesus famously says it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He praises the poor widow who gives all she has to the synagogue, while the rich are criticized for hoarding their wealth. In the book of Matthew, Jesus tell us: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Given these teachings, we might expect that the wealthy and powerful are less morally virtuous than those of lower socioeconomic status (SES).

However, some argue that poverty and weakness are often the result of moral failings, such as laziness or addiction. From this perspective, having money and worldly success can be seen as a sign of God's favor. This idea was implicit in early Calvinist economic thought, which inspired Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Similarly, philosophers from Plato to John Dewey have argued that education plays a central role in moral development. By extension, those with more education might be expected to adhere to higher moral standards. In this view, we might expect higher-class individuals to act  more virtuously than those of lower socioeconomic status (SES).

Thus, it remains unclear how social class impacts morality. I am currently working on a series of papers exploring class differences in human flourishing. I am using data from The Global Flourishing Study, a multidisciplinary effort funded by the Templeton Foundation and others, seeking to understand the conditions that promote flourishing worldwide. So far, they have collected survey data from 200,000 individuals across more than 20 countries.

One set of questions on the survey asks individuals to assess their moral lives. For example, one question asks respondents to agree or disagree with the following statement: I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations.

The paper I’m currently working on examines flourishing among prime working-age men (25-55) in the United States. As part of this research, I investigated whether perceptions of morality vary by class. I found that men without a college degree rated themselves slightly lower on this measure, suggesting they perceive themselves as less moral than men who had completed college.

But is this perception accurate? Perhaps not. Many researchers have studied the relationship between social class and "prosociality," which involves feelings of compassion and care for others, as well as actions that prioritize others' needs over one's own. While prosocial behavior isn't the same as morality, it is certainly a key component of living a moral life.

Studies show that individuals of lower socioeconomic status (SES) actually experience more prosocial emotional states. For example, in laboratory settings, lower-SES individuals are better at reading others' emotions from photographs and display more compassion and empathy when shown images of suffering. This even extends to differences in brain activity, with neuroimaging showing distinct patterns when they think about others' needs. These emotional differences may be driven by environmental factors. Higher-SES individuals tend to have more stable external environments, allowing them to focus more on their own internal states. In contrast, lower-SES individuals often face more precarious and threatening environments, requiring them to focus more on the external world.

These emotional differences also lead to varying dispositions toward the world. Many personality tests show that individuals with higher SES report higher levels of narcissism and disagreeableness, while lower-SES individuals tend to exhibit more agreeableness. However, the causal direction of this relationship is hard to pinpoint. Disagreeableness is often correlated with workplace success—disagreeable people are more likely to negotiate for higher salaries and promotions. This has been used to explain why women, who tend to score higher on agreeableness, often have lower salaries. Therefore, it's unclear whether higher SES fosters these personality traits, or if certain traits, like disagreeableness, contribute to achieving higher SES.

Ultimately, these differences in emotional experiences and dispositions lead individuals of lower SES to behave more prosocially, at least in laboratory settings. In psychological studies, researchers create conditions where participants can respond prosocially, such as by sharing money or helping others. They might also observe how people of different social classes play games like Monopoly. In these experiments, lower-SES individuals tend to be more generous and help others more often.¹

It may seem like a closed case: those with lower SES are more prosocial. However, a strange paradox emerges when we look at real-world prosocial behavior. The generous tendencies observed in laboratory settings do not always translate into everyday life. High-profile studies have shown that Americans with higher SES are actually more prosocial in practice, particularly when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering. Being college-educated is a strong predictor of charitable donations. A recent study found that people with college degrees were 35% more likely to have donated to charity in the past year compared to those without a high school diploma, even after controlling for family income. The most significant and consistent differences across SES are seen in rates of formal volunteering, results that have been observed in many, many studies. The same study (discussed above) found that college graduates were 20% more likely to volunteer formally than those who did not finish high school. While family income has similar effects, the relationships are less pronounced.

Why would it be that those with lower SES are more prosocial in laboratory settings but arguably not the real world? This seems like a paradox. First, much of the charitable giving research obscures an important finding. Namely, while those with higher SES may be more likely to give any money at all, those with lower SES tend to give a higher percentage of their income overall.  So, those previous results simply do not tell the whole story. Essentially, it is harder for people of lower SES to start giving but, when they do give, they give to a point of higher pain. That is an important distinction.

But, more generally, the are likely differences in the way that people from different SES groups express their prosociality in practice. Several laboratory studies have shown that individuals with higher SES were more likely to act prosocially if these activities were public and could be viewed by others. The opposite was true of lower SES individuals. Charitable giving and (especially) formal volunteering are a largely public acts. It is fashionable to be seen volunteering, and it helps with college applications. It is reasonable then to expect those of higher SES to be drawn to these sorts of prosocial activities.

However, the prosocial activities that lower SES individuals perform may be more anonymous, spontaneous, and informal such as helping a friend move or watching his children in a pinch. These acts do not show up in the “formal volunteering” studies. Furthermore, individuals with lower SES likely do not have the same access to formal, institutional volunteering activities and, in fact, may be the target and, therefore, formally excluded from higher-SES volunteering efforts. Likewise, individuals of higher SES may insulate themselves from opportunities to informally care for one another by outsourcing informal prosocial acts to the market. I know it is very hard in my high-SES neighborhood to spontaneously care for my neighbors as Doordash and Care.com are one click away.

Class differences in informal caring are difficult to assess as such items are rarely included in large public datasets. I did try to approximate something like this in the GFS data. I found, like previous studies, that people with high SES were more likely to formally volunteer with an organization but were less likely to help a stranger. This seem to confirm the notion that people with high SES act more prosocially in formal, institutional, and public settings while the opposite is true of those from lower SES.

Ultimately, the relationship between class and prosociality is quite complicated, but the evidence does seem to suggest that working-class Americans are more prosocial than those of higher SES.

1. While it's important to note that some studies fail to replicate these findings, the overall trend appears robust across many studies.