Are rich people really worse behaved? Here’s the science
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What is the Ig Nobel Prize and why does it matter for everyday science?
This is the Guardian.
Who would steal sweets from a kid? According to science, said It's the rich A study seemingly confirming our suspicions about the moral behavior of the wealthy was just one of the winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes, which honor 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 Finley and this is Science Weekly.
Ian, 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 ten awards given out, and we're gonna talk about a few of them, but first I want to know, you cover these every year. What do you like about them?
You're right. They really are the sort of the irreverent, playful cousin of the 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 and sort Encourage you to think about creativity in science. Like 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? Yeah. Because this is um 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.
So they called the 20. Lectures, you know, they get um 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 toes coming up between the toes, quite 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.
In 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 gonna tell me about is the economics prize. So who did this go to?
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 behavior depending on your class. So in this research, the scientists use these terms sort of upper and lower class. 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. 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. Become 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. 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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the Ig Nobel Prize and why does it matter for everyday science?
0:00–6:12
2
How did the 2026 economics Ig Nobel study link wealth to moral behaviour?
6:12–10:31
3
Why might richer people be more likely to steal candy or break traffic rules?
10:31–13:26
4
What theories do researchers propose to explain class‑based ethical differences?
13:26–17:01
5
What did the peace‑prize research reveal about the traits we want in friends?
17:01–17:54
Speakers
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