Over the last few years, Greater Good—along with many, many other media outlets—has reported frequently on new research suggesting that people of higher socioeconomic status are less generous, less compassionate, and less empathic than others.

People who believe they are more important than others also believe that resources rightfully belong to them.

Actually, the new findings suggest, higher-income people are less generous only when they live in a place that has high levels of inequality between rich and poor. When the gap between the rich and poor is low, the rich might actually be more generous.

They found that in states with high inequality, higher-income people were less generous than people who had lower incomes. However, in states with low inequality, the opposite was true: People with higher incomes were more generous with their raffle tickets. In states where inequality was neither especially high nor low, residents’ income was unrelated to their levels of generosity.

According to the authors, one answer might involve a sense of entitlement—“the belief that one is more important and deserving than others”—that high-income people feel when their state’s income is more concentrated in their hands. Those feelings of entitlement and deservingness, they speculate, might help high-income people justify their extreme good fortune to themselves—and may, in turn, reduce their generosity because “people who believe they are more important than others also believe that resources rightfully belong to them.”

Read the source article at Greater Good

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Jason Marsh is the founding editor in chief of Greater Good.