By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an Emancipation Proclamation of sorts for campaign money. No longer, based on the 5-4 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, would individual donors be held to limits on their total donations in any given campaign season. That decision has unleashed another wave of public disgust over the role of money in politics. The perception of the Court’s grant of even more access and influence to the very wealthy reflects, to many Americans, a system that protects economic advantage and enshrines entitlement and greed. Now, whether these perceptions are valid or whether they’re the products of misdirected “class warfare,” these perceptions are nonetheless real. And these doubts over the motives and ethics connected to wealth are actually well-established in social science research.
A long line of social psychology studies, usefully summarized in an eight-minute video (embedded below and linked here), shows that wealth — or more specifically, the feeling of having wealth or advantage — leads to a belief in entitlement: If I have this advantage, it must be because I deserve it. That subjective belief in a special status, as I’ve written before, can make people more punitive and more likely to believe that class characteristics are essential and immutable. According to the line of research led by Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley, the entitlement brought on by perceived wealth also causes people to downplay ethics, to behave less ethically, and to rationalize and support greed. The experimental support for these findings is surprising and robust. The bottom line reveals a fundamental dynamic for those seeking to understand human behavior and communication: Our views of where we stand in the pecking order mediate a whole host of attitudes and actions. The importance of this dynamic isn’t limited to the occasional blue blood sitting in your jury box, but also extends to witnesses and parties as well.
Wealth Equals Entitlement, and Entitlement Equals a Looser Ethical Standard
The following video focusing on the work of Paul Piff and his team in more than thirty studies is well worth the watch: It’s simple, clear, well-produced, and absolutely profound in its implications.
A number of important and surprising conclusions come out of these studies:
- Owners of luxury vehicles are 3-4 times more likely to drive through crosswalks without stopping for a pedestrian
- Wealthier participants took two times as much candy represented as being for children
- Participants making more than $150,000 per year were four times less likely to honestly report dice scores
- Members of higher social classes are more likely to tell lies in negotiations, and more likely to rationalize or endorse unethical behavior
- Those randomly made to feel advantaged via a knowingly rigged Monopoly game, still believe that they deserved to win and become more demanding and entitled in their behavior
- Conversely, those who are made to feel less advantaged tend to become more compassionate and more generous
I believe these findings on the entitlement dynamic are relevant to any setting for human psychology and persuasion. In a few ways, that includes the litigation setting as well:
The Entitled Jury
The feeling of wealth influences how kind or how punitive jurors are likely to be, with — as you might guess — the wealthy being significantly more punitive. This effect isn’t just absolute, it is relative: A middle class person can feel “rich” when comparing themselves to the poor, or “poor” when comparing themselves to the rich. It is also situational: Different settings or contextual cues can activate or suppress this feeling of wealth. What this implies for the legal persuader is that, since this feeling of advantage is not constant, one cannot assume consistent or uniform attitudes on ethics or greed. If a particular juror is situationally feeling more advantaged, then they’ll be more punitive and less generous. In order to determine how a particular panel is feeling, it helps to ask. You probably cannot directly ask income, or ask if they consider themselves “rich” or not, but you can find creative ways to measure the mindset. In a supplemental juror questionnaire, for example, ask how the potential juror believes they’ve fared in the recent recession: better than most, about average, or worse than most. Because the factor of entitlement or advantage is turning out to be pretty central to one’s view of fairness, it will be worth assessing in many cases.
The Entitled Witness
Witnesses, particularly when they’re company executives, professionals, or experts, are often speaking across a gulf of class and wealth when they testify before juries. The fact finders are often quite different from those who are presenting the evidence. That difference creates a need to identify and find common ground, playing up similarities and not differences. But this general gap also suggests a need for witnesses to check their own assessments and assumptions. Because witnesses are often in the position of justifying themselves and their actions (particularly, though not exclusively, when they’re defendants), a witness’s own thinking can be shaped by the kinds of entitlement thinking demonstrated in these studies. A company executive, for example, might subtly believe that she should be held to a different standard, and if a hint of that comes across through words or manner while on the stand, jurors will see distance and arrogance. Part of the preparation process for witnesses should be to really explore and interrogate their justifications, to escape a self-serving rationale and to clarify that the witness is holding himself to the same yardstick that applies to everyone.
The Entitled Party
We know that only a small slice of the battles that define litigation happens in the courtroom. What motivates the dispute in the first place, and what motivates parties to sue, to keep litigating, and to resist reasonable settlements? Frequently, it may be that one or both parties are operating from a sense of “I deserve this” or “I don’t deserve this.” That motivation can, of course, be legitimate, but it can also be warped by all the filters of self-perception. Looking at Piff’s Monopoly players, for example, it would be easy to imagine that the structural “winners” of those games who come to feel that they’ve earned the win, would also become more quick to assert their rights and to press a grievance when faced with a perceived wrong. Setting aside the actual harms that lead to litigation, the psychology that keeps it running could be traced back to entitlement thinking based on real, perceived, or anticipated advantage. That psychological dimension suggests that parties should be self-reflective in case assessment and should remember to seek out opinions other than their own. Watching a mock jury deliberate can be a jarring experience, in part because it reminds us that fact finders won’t see the same entitlement that we do.
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Other Posts on Class and Wealth:
- Watch Out For Scrooge
- View Your Case Through a Rich/Poor Lens
- Assess Your Juror’s Economic Security: A Vulnerable Juror Can Make for a Vulnerable Defense (Part One)
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Piff, P. K., Stancato, D. M., Côté, S., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Keltner, D. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(11), 4086-4091.
Image Credit: Kieth Ramsey, Flickr Creative Commons