A 2012 study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, by a group of five researchers, demonstrated that people with higher purchasing power tend to exhibit less ethical conduct compared to individuals from lower social classes. This work received the Ig Nobel Prize in 2026, recognized for research considered unusual and humorous.
The original article, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comprised seven distinct experiments designed to analyze the ethics of people from different social strata in specific scenarios. One notable test involved a jar containing sweets intended for children. When invited to take one or two sweets, participants with higher incomes took twice as many as participants from other social brackets.
Furthermore, other experiments investigated driving behavior. In this context, the wealthiest participants showed four times the probability of overtaking other drivers and three times the chance of running over a pedestrian waiting to cross the road. In the workplace, assuming the role of employer, individuals from higher classes also showed a greater tendency to conceal sensitive information from their employees.
The researchers responsible for the study—Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner—were awarded the Ig Nobel in Economics. They were honored for providing evidence that people from higher classes are more inclined to take sweets reserved for children and engage in other types of unethical behavior.
The award ceremony took place on the 3rd and also featured participation from a Brazilian group that won an award for stepping on stingrays 40,000 times, aiming to understand why a snake bites a human.