Are rich people really worse behaved? Here’s the science

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:13Who would steal sweets from a kid? According to science, it's the rich. A study seemingly confirming our suspicions about the moral behaviour of the wealthy was just one of the winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes, which honour research that makes you laugh and then think. So today we're discussing our favourites from this year, including an award for a surprising quality we look for in our friends and the biomechanical definition of kissing. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly.

1:03Ian, it's September, which means back to school time. And for us, it means the Ig Nobel Prizes. These are kind of like the cheeky younger sibling of the Nobels. There are 10 awards given out and we're going to talk about a few of them. But first, I want to know, you cover these every year. What do you like about them?

1:23Madeleine Finlay: You're right. They really are the sort of the irreverent, playful cousin of the very serious Nobel Prizes. And the reason I like these prizes is that they are, I mean, first and foremost, just an enormous amount of fun, right? I mean, it's routinely pulling out these research studies that really often do make you laugh out loud, but they also show you the importance and sort of encourage you to think about creativity in science. What might science be able to tell us about the world? I really like that aspect of it. But the thing is, it's just an enormous hoot, right? Because this is a ceremony where you have bona fide Nobel laureates handing out prizes to these researchers who come on stage and then they have to describe their work in 24 seconds and then in seven words.

2:13Madeleine Finlay: So they're called the 24-7 lectures. You know, they get a$10 trillion bill as their prize, but it's actually from Zimbabwe's era of hyperinflation. And that note's been phased out. It's worthless apart from to collectors. And, you know, the physical prize this year was this sort of horrible blue cheese shape with a foot on top and a mushroom sprouting out and toadstools coming up between the toes. Quite a grotesque prize. and when people go up and get their prizes people are throwing paper airplanes and it's just a big old fun bash. Ian as I was reading through the list of the prize recipients I was laughing chuckling away as you said out loud there are some really funny ones but the the first one that you're going to tell me about is the economics prize so who did this go to?

3:00Madeleine Finlay: So this prize went to researchers at the University of California Irvine and the researcher I spoke to there was Dr. Paul Piff. And they were really interested in this question, which actually scholars have been looking at for literally millennia, as to whether you get sort of more or less ethical behaviour depending on your class. So in this research, the scientists use these terms sort of upper and lower class. But what they mean is when you get people to either self-rate their class or you look at their wealth and their sort of social economic status, you can rank them relative to each other.

3:35Madeleine Finlay: So some will be sort of higher up that scale than others. And in the research, that's what they call them, sort of upper and lower class, but it's all relative. Okay. And there's some reasons to think, well, you know, lower class people, if you've got fewer resources, there's maybe more incentive to behave unethically, to try and overcome your disadvantage, to try and get more resources. But there's also, you know, a lot of evidence that it actually works the other way as well. Plato and Aristotle thought that greed was at the root of personal immorality. and we don't need to look far to see examples of this.

4:06Madeleine Finlay: So this research, they had seven separate experiments to just look at, okay, in these seven situations that we're contriving, or even not contriving in some examples, who behaves more ethically? And it turned out that actually across the board in these studies, it was the upper class who made these ethical infringements. Well, I think, you know, it would be very easy for listeners to be thinking right now, oh, typical Guardian, blaming everything on the rich. So it's good that there's some scientific legitimacy going on here. So tell me a bit more about what kind of situations they were looking at.

4:40Madeleine Finlay: Yeah, and I totally take that criticism. It's one of those reasons where you look at the research and it just makes you laugh because you think, I suspect a lot of people would think this may be the case, right? And obviously the findings they have are purely those findings from the studies and how people behave is broader than you're ever going to cover in seven studies. But they did a whole bunch of different things. They had two studies looking at how drivers behaved. You know, this isn't a watertight way of doing it, obviously, but they were assessing people's sort of social economic status, what sort of class they were at relatively, by the type of car they were driving.

5:12Madeleine Finlay: But what they did find was that people in these sort of more flashier cars, they would be, I suppose we call them worse drivers, but in the examples they were cutting off other drivers at junctions more often than the lower class people or the people in the lower class cars. And they were also doing this thing that we see all the time is just driving over pedestrian crossings when there's clearly people waiting. That sort of oblivious nature to other people existing in the world and having needs which may take priority over yours is a way I might interpret it. One of the funniest studies they did was they said to all the participants, you know, one after the other.

5:54Madeleine Finlay: and so look i've got to go to the room next door we're doing another study with children um i'm going to leave this jar of sweets in here while i go there the sweets are for the children but you know for as a sort of reward as part of their study if you really want one you can have one but like you know the sweets for the children they go away and they come back after about 30 seconds and the upper class people um had eaten twice as many sweets as the lower class people when they were given that opportunity. And so study after study, it's just amusing. Do the researchers have any theories as to what might be behind this difference in moral behaviour depending on class?

6:36Madeleine Finlay: Yeah, they do. And there's a couple of things that came out from the interview I did with Paul on this. He was saying, well, first of all, their surveys and other surveys have shown that upper class people did tend to have a more positive view of greed, or at least not see as big a moral issue with greed, you know, as in wanting to gain things for ourselves, even when we have plenty already. The other thing I thought was really interesting was that they were saying, look, we've evolved in a resource scarce environment, okay? So for humans, personal relationships, social relationships have become incredibly important.

7:11Madeleine Finlay: If you find yourself in a life where your resources are abundant, then you kind of break that bond. You can start behaving more, well, I'm just going to behave how I want to behave, because you're not so sort of wedded to these social contracts. This is speculation, but this is what they think may be underpinning why they see these results. Why you can steal candy from a baby. That's right. That's exactly right.

7:49Madeleine Finlay: Maddy the next award we're going to talk about is the Peace Prize who won that this year? So this went to a study from a group of researchers who at the time of publication were based at Oklahoma State University the University of Texas at Austin and Hamilton College in the US. And there had been a lot of research before about the kinds of characteristics that we look for in a friend. And through all these different studies, the two main ones that would always come up are kindness and trustworthiness. And that's not a surprise, right? When we're thinking about what we want from a friend, we want them to be nice to us and we want to be able to trust them.

8:29But the way that this was always done is asking in the context of our a relationship to our friends or the general characteristics of our friends. And actually, our friendships sit in this wider social context. There's a big complex network of people that we have around us and those relationships are relevant as well. So what these researchers did is they did a series of studies with around a thousand participants and they asked the participants, how would you like your friend to behave towards not just yourself, but towards others as well, including strangers, and in particular, the participants' rival?

9:12And what they found is we want our friends to be more vicious towards our enemies.

9:21Madeleine Finlay: Okay, so we want our friends to be kind and trustworthy towards us, but we want sort of our enemies to be our friends' enemies as well, right? And what do the researchers want us to take away from this, though? Well, in the paper, they talk about this adaptationalist model of friendship. And basically what that means is, do our friends have our back? So are they going to help us out when we're ill, when we come into conflict, when we're in a spot of bother? and in that context you can see why it would make sense that we want our enemies to be our friends enemies as well because I'll give you an example so imagine Ian that I have a foe who is sort of plotting my downfall if my friend finds out about the plan and then doesn't tell me is kind and trustworthy to them instead of me I'm in big trouble you know I want my friend to find out about the plot and viciously sabotage it.

10:23Madeleine Finlay: Is this something you can relate to Maddy? Have you ever had anyone or a need for anyone to go into battle for you? I don't think I have. I will admit that I think I'm a bit melodramatic when it comes to people who have wronged me and I would say maybe I have an ongoing list of enemies. I hope they don't know that they're necessarily on the list and I want my friends to kind of back me up in this. I wouldn't expect them to go into battle for me, but I think the point is there's a social bonding that comes with having a common enemy and feeling like you're on the same team. And I would say I've got very good bloodthirsty friends.

11:11Coming up, how do you define kissing and why would you want to?

11:25Madeleine Finlay: Around the time that I was finishing my PhD, I was feeling really awful. You message your mum saying, I'm struggling. Her reply is suspiciously polished. I called my mom and I just railed on her. I was like, Mom, did you just use ChatGPT? Blackbox, The Chatbots, a new series from The Guardian Investigates about the strange things happening between AI and us. The whole series is out right now. Search for Blackbox wherever you get your podcasts.

11:59finally ian we're on to the biomechanics prize so tell me about this so the biomechanics prize

12:07Madeleine Finlay: this year went to a research team largely based at university of oxford and they got the prize for coming up with a precise scientific definition of of kissing they wanted to look at the evolution of kissing and if you want to look at the evolution of kissing you need to look at where kissing sort of occurs across the animal kingdom, let's say. You want to see all the different species. So then you need to think, well, animals look different, different things can be going on. And so you have to work out, actually, what do we mean by kissing? And the definition they came up with was a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips stroke mouth parts and no food transfer.

12:53Ian, I think if you read me that definition without me knowing what it was about, would I land on kissing? I'm not sure, but it's obviously very precise. So tell me a bit more about why the researchers wanted to come up with this.

13:08Madeleine Finlay: If you look across the animal kingdom, there's actually an awful lot of behaviours that could look like kissing. Matilda Brindle, one of the researchers at Oxford, was telling me about these fish which fly towards each other with their mouths open and she said they look like sort of teenagers on a park bench like really just going in for it but um they make contact but you wouldn't really count that as kissing this is a territorial display this is an act of aggression that these fish are doing and so that's what you have to come up with like a really specific definition that will ensure that what you're trying to find out about is is valid so they looked across all these species to say, yes, we think this counts as kissing in this species and in this species and this species.

13:52Madeleine Finlay: And once you've done that across the species, you can sort of use these evolutionary trees to think, well, when do we think this evolved? And certainly when you look at primates, I mean, that team think that kissing probably evolved in the ancestors of large apes, at least, about 20 million years ago. So that may be the origin of the kissing that humans have end that ended up with today. If there is kissing across the animal kingdom, to me, it begs the question, well, why do we do it? It seems to be, you know, an act of trust and an act of sort of faith, because sometimes, you know, an adult animal could be putting itself at risk getting close to the teeth of some of these animals and getting close in there.

14:33Madeleine Finlay: And also there are risks of passing on infections. And so this is really saying something about your relationship if you're willing to kiss them um there may be some benefits in terms of you can transfer microbiomes between people who kiss and you look at people in relationships they have more similar oral microbiomes and than the rest of us than other people and you do see across the animal kingdom it's certainly a bunch of species certainly in the gray tapes you're sitting in chimpanzees and orangutans but you also see it in animals like you know galapagos albatrosses and if you really want to be put off your dinner, watch some YouTube videos of polar bears kissing because that can get very tonguey and very frothy very quickly.

15:19Oh. Now, the researcher that you mentioned, Dr. Matilda Brindle, you said in your piece that she might be a contender for another Ig Nobel Prize. Why is that?

15:35Madeleine Finlay: I do think that Matilda is on course to become the sort of the first Marie Curie, the first, as far as I know, sort of Marie Curie of the Ig Nobel, right? Marie Curie famously, you know, one of the very few people to win two actual Nobel Prizes. But Matilda's other work, she tackles a lot of questions that, for one reason or another, a lot of researchers won't go near. And a lot of these things are sort of non-reproductive sexual behaviours. And she's writing a book on this at the moment. Another bit of work she's done is looking at the evolution of masturbation, right? And she had a paper come out that traced masturbation back at least 40 million years.

16:13Madeleine Finlay: And then another paper came out that was essentially warning vets and people who eat birds not to worry if your pet birds are masturbating because it's actually a normal behaviour. It's not a stress response. And so she does a lot of research in these areas. And let's face it, those are ripe for ignobels. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I like, though, that somebody is kind of taking on these taboos and asking the really interesting questions about them. Yeah. And those questions, you know, you have to be concerned if questions aren't being asked because people just think, oh, I don't want to go there.

16:49Madeleine Finlay: That's not a good reason not to do the science, right? Well, we'll have to see if her work comes up again. I think she'll be chuffed if it does. Well, Ian, thank you so much. Thank you. thanks again to ian and you can find his piece on the ignoble prizes at theguardian.com before you go i wanted to tell you about a new series of the guardian's chart-topping podcast black box hosted by michael safie which is back for a second series the new season will explore people's relationship with ai chatbots and how they're quietly reshaping lives all six episodes are out now, so search for Black Box, the chatbots, wherever you get your podcasts.

17:34And that's all from us. This episode was produced by me, Madeleine Finlay, the sound design was by Joel Cox, and the executive producer was Ellie Bury. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then.

17:53This is The Guardian. You