As We Become Richer, Do We Become Stingier? Shankar Vedantam - NPR.org
go to original September 4, 2013

Take two 'normal' people, add money to just one of them, and watch what happens next... In a series of startling studies, psychologists at UC Berkeley have found that "upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals." Ongoing research is trying to find out what it is about wealth - or lack of it - that makes people behave they way they do. (PBSNewsHour)

Patricia Greenfield has tracked families in Chiapas, Mexico, over four decades. Many were very poor when she started her study. Slowly, over time, they grew wealthier.

Along the way, Greenfield noticed something: As the people she followed grew richer, they became more individualistic. Community ties frayed and weakened.

Greenfield expanded her findings to form a more general theory about the effects that wealth has on people: "We become more individualistic, less family and community oriented."

In a new study, the UCLA researcher makes the argument that the same thing has happened in the U.S. over a longer period.

Greenfield bases her finding on an analysis she conducted of more than 1 million books published in the U.S. between 1800 and 2000. Greenfield used the Google Ngram viewer, a tool that allows rapid keyword searches of the frequency of words in the books.

As the country grew wealthy over that 200-year period, Greenfield found, some words became more likely to be used in books, while other words became less frequent.

"The frequency of the word 'get' went up, and the frequency of the word 'give' went down," she said.

Read the rest at NPR.org

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