Lower status’ people more likely to share wealth than ‘higher status’ people

What is it about?

When playing an economic game, those that were assigned as ‘lower status’ were more likely to share their wealth than their ‘higher status’ counterparts. The social experiment involved a series of economic games in which people played with other people for real money. The games involved participants deciding how much money they kept and how much they gave to a group pot. The money in the pot was always shared out to the players. Participants were assigned a status, either ‘higher status’ (richer) or ‘lower status’ (poorer) than a group of other participants they played with. The study found that the poorer participants contributed more than the richer participants. Richer participants contributed even less when they had earned their wealth compared to those who had acquired their riches through luck.

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Why is it important?

What we did was run an experiment which, under controlled conditions, is designed to be analogous to situations that approximate reality, albeit in a stripped down way. In our case we set up situations in which people make a decision as to how much of the financial resources they keep for themselves and how much they want to contribute to a community pot from which others as well as themselves will benefit. We replicate the key findings that those with relative less financial resources contribute more to the community pot than those with relatively more financial resources. So, our findings are reliable. To they scale up to society? Depends what you want them to scale up to, and what contexts. The novelty of this study is that we look at the way in people gain their financial status (high status, low status). That is, chance dictates whether you end up as high status, or low status, or effort dictates it - meaning that depending on how well you performed, if you performed well you end up as high status, and if you perform less well you end up as low status. It makes no difference how you gained your low status, you are more generous than the high status people. It does make a difference how you gained your high status, those that worked for their high status are even less generous than those that ended up gaining their high status by chance.