Are the rich more selfish than the rest of us?

“Using a theoretical model to help us interpret the data, we can measure a household’s ‘neediness’ of the cash and how financial stress changes over the course of a month. When we do so, as one might expect, we find big differences in needs and stresses between rich and poor. But what is more important is that, when we statistically remove the influence of these factors, we no longer find differences in the relative altruism of the rich versus the poor.
These findings show the perils of inferring deeper motives from casual behavior. While our raw data show clear differences between the rich and poor in terms of pro-social behavior, digging a little deeper erases them. Our conclusion is that incentives are the biggest determinants of pro-social behavior and that neither the rich nor the poor are inherently kinder or more selfish – in the end all of us are susceptible to behaving this way.”