Human behavior under economic inequality shapes inequality.

In his 1926 short story, “The Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald observes: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are. . .” (1). The rich often behave differently than the poor, in particular with respect to others. But why? One explanation is that the behavior of the rich relates not to accidents of birth, but to their social environment. Using both survey data and experiments with online subjects from the United States, Côté et al. show that high economic inequality is itself a force that makes the rich less generous (2). Economic inequality has many effects on outcomes as diverse as health and mortality (3), and trust and cooperation (4–9). But inequality does not affect us all equally. In their experiments, Côté et al. (2) experimentally manipulated the level of the inequality about which study participants were informed (regardless of the actual level of inequality in their places of residence). By asking subjects to play a “dictator game” (a test of altruism in which one subject proposes how to divide a common resource with another subject), the authors find a negative effect of high inequality on generosity in richer participants, but not in poorer participants. In other words, when economic inequality is low, the rich are more generous than when it is high.