Money Can’t Buy Trustworthiness
It may have to do less with the class you’re born into and more with how your income compares to those around you... At the lowest end of the class gradient, every single driver stopped to let the pedestrian entering the crosswalk continue on his way. Midway up the class ladder, about 30 percent of drivers broke the law and cut off the pedestrian so that they could keep going. At the upper end of SES, almost 50 percent of drivers broke the law to put their own needs first. At the most basic level, these findings offer a provocative warning. When you’re vulnerable, upper-class individuals are more likely to disregard the trust you place in them if doing so furthers their own ends.
Again, significantly more upper-class individuals indicated that they would lie—that they would intentionally betray the trust the job-seeker placed in them as an honest supervisor... More upper-class individuals inflated their rolls, thereby ensuring they’d receive larger sums of money from the experimenters than they deserved