Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard yesterday

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · Are rich people really worse behaved? Here’s the science · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

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 behavior depending on your class. matched

So in this research, the scientists use these terms sort of upper and lower class. matched

What they mean is um 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. matched

So some will be sort of higher up that scale than others. matched

And in the research, that's what they call them, sort of upper and lower class, but it's all relative. matched

Okay. matched

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. matched

Become your disadvantage to try and get more resources. matched

But there's also, you know, a lot of evidence that it actually works the other way as well. matched

Plato and Aristotle thought that greed was at the root of personal immorality. matched

And we don't need to look far to see examples of this. matched

So this research, they had seven separate experiments to just look at, okay, in these seven situations that we're contriving. matched

or even not contriving in some examples, who behaves more ethically? matched

And it turned out that actually across the board in these studies it was the upper class who made these ethical infringements. matched

Yeah, and I totally take that criticism. matched

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? matched

And obviously the findings they have are purely those findings from the studies, and you know, how people behave is broader than you're ever going to cover in seven studies. matched

But they did a whole bunch of different things. matched

They had two studies looking at how drivers behaved. matched

You know, this isn't um, you know, a watertight way of matched

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