Popular wisdom has it that excessive material wealth leads to decreased prosocial behavior. This notion has empirical support in the literature, but there are open questions about how strong, specific, and general this effect is. Here, we aimed to test the hypothesis that increased SES is associated with decreased prosocial behavior in a high-powered laboratory task. We find thatthere are no statistically significant differences in generosity as a function of social class. However, there are subtle - yet statistically significant - patterns linking SES and dark triad personality traits. We conclude that the relationship between SES and social behavior isconsiderably more nuanced than commonly believed.
We wanted to validate commonly used instruments to measure psychopathic tendencies in a college student population. To do so, we administered both the “Dark Triad Dirty Dozen” and the "Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy scale" to a high-powered sample of college students. Participants also performed a social discounting task to measure generosity. We correlated all of these measures and found that both instruments correlate well and negatively with generosity. We take these findings to indicate that both instruments are valid measures of psychopathic tendencies in non-institutionalized populations.
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