money social experiment

John Money Gender Experiment: Reimer Twins

Julia Simkus

Editor at Simply Psychology

BA (Hons) Psychology, Princeton University

Julia Simkus is a graduate of Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. She is currently studying for a Master's Degree in Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness in September 2023. Julia's research has been published in peer reviewed journals.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

The John Money Experiment involved David Reimer, a twin boy raised as a girl following a botched circumcision. Money asserted gender was primarily learned, not innate.

However, David struggled with his female identity and transitioned back to male in adolescence. The case challenged Money’s theory, highlighting the influence of biological sex on gender identity.

• David Reimer was born in 1965; he had a MZ twin brother. When he was 8 months old his penis was accidentally cut off during surgery.
• His parents contacted John Money, a psychologist who was developing a theory of gender neutrality. His theory claimed that a child would take the gender identity he/she was raised with rather than the gender identity corresponding to the biological sex.
• David’s parents brought him up as a girl and Money wrote extensively about this case claiming it supported his theory. However, Brenda as he was named was suffering from severe psychological and emotional difficulties and in her teens, when she found out what had happened, she reverted back to being a boy.
• This case study supports the influence of testosterone on gender development as it shows that David’s brain development was influenced by the presence of this hormone and its effects on gender identity was stronger that the influence of social factors.

What Did John Money Do To The Twins

David Reimer was an identical twin boy born in Canada in 1965. When he was 8 months old, his penis was irreparably damaged during a botched circumcision.

John Money, a psychologist from Johns Hopkins University, had a prominent reputation in the field of sexual development and gender identity.

David’s parents took David to see Dr. Money at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he advised that David be “sex reassigned” as a girl through surgical, hormonal, and psychological treatments.

John Money believed that gender identity is primarily learned through one’s upbringing (nurture) as opposed to one’s inborn traits (nature).

He proposed that gender identity could be changed through behavioral interventions, and he advocated that gender reassignment was the solution for treating any child with intersex traits or atypical sex anatomies.

Dr. John Money argued that it’s possible to habilitate a baby with a defective penis more effectively as a girl than a boy.

At the age of 22 months, David underwent extensive surgery in which his testes and penis were surgically removed and rudimentary female genitals were constructed.

David’s parents raised him as a female and gave him the name Brenda (this name was chosen to be similar to his birth name, Bruce). David was given estrogen during adolescence to promote the development of breasts.

He was forced to wear dresses and was directed to engage in typical female norms, such as playing with dolls and mingling with other girls.

Throughout his childhood, David was never informed that he was biologically male and that he was an experimental subject in a controversial investigation to bolster Money’s belief in the theory of gender neutrality – that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity and sexual orientation.

David’s twin brother, Brian, served as the ideal control because the brothers had the same genetic makeup, but one was raised as a girl and the other as a boy. Money continued to see David and Brian for consultations and checkups annually.

During these check-ups, Money would force the twins to rehearse sexual acts and inspect one another’s genitals. On some occasions, Money would even photograph the twins doing these exercises. Money claimed that childhood sexual rehearsal play was important for healthy childhood sexual exploration.

David also recalls receiving anger and verbal abuse from Money if they resisted participation.

Money (1972) reported on Reimer’s progress as the “John/Joan case” to keep the identity of David anonymous. Money described David’s transition as successful.

He claimed that David behaved like a little girl and did not demonstrate any of the boyish mannerisms of his twin brother Brian. Money would publish this data to reinforce his theories on gender fluidity and to justify that gender identity is primarily learned.

In reality, though, David was never happy as a girl. He rejected his female identity and experienced severe gender dysphoria . He would complain to his parents and teachers that he felt like a boy and would refuse to wear dresses or play with dolls.

He was severely bullied in school and experienced suicidal depression throughout adolescence. Upon learning about the truth about his birth and sex of rearing from his father at the age of 15, David assumed a male gender identity, calling himself David.

David Reimer underwent treatments to reverse the assignment such as testosterone injections and surgeries to remove his breasts and reconstruct a penis.

David married a woman named Jane at 22 years and adopted three children.

Dr. Milton Diamond, a psychologist and sexologist at the University of Hawaii and a longtime academic rival of John Money, met with David to discuss his story in the mid-1990s.

Diamond (1997) brought David’s experiences to international attention by reporting the true outcome of David’s case to prevent physicians from making similar decisions when treating other infants. Diamond helped debunk Money’s theory that gender identity could be completely learned through intervention.

David continued to suffer from psychological trauma throughout adulthood due to Money’s experiments and his harrowing childhood experiences. David endured unemployment, the death of his twin brother Brian, and marital difficulties.

At the age of thirty-eight, David committed suicide.

David’s case became the subject of multiple books, magazine articles, and documentaries. He brought to attention to the complications of gender identity and called into question the ethicality of sex reassignment of infants and children.

Originally, Money’s view of gender malleability dominated the field as his initial report on David was that the reassignment had been a success. However, this view was disproved once the truth about David came to light.

His case led to a decline in the number of sex reassignment surgeries for unambiguous XY male infants with a micropenis and other congenital malformations and brought into question the malleability of gender and sex.

At present, however, the clinical literature is still deeply divided on the best way to manage cases of intersex infants.

Colapinto, J. (2000). As nature made him: The boy who was raised as a girl. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Colapinto, J. (2018). As nature made him: The boy who was raised as a girl. Langara College.

Diamond, M., & Sigmundson, H. K. (1997). Sex reassignment at birth: Long-term review and clinical implications . Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 151(3), 298-304.

Money, J., & Ehrhardt, A. A. (1972). Man & Woman, Boy & Girl : The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Money, J., & Tucker, P. (1975). Sexual signatures: On being a man or a woman.

Money, J. (1994). The concept of gender identity disorder in childhood and adolescence after 39 years . Journal of sex & marital therapy, 20(3), 163-177.

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The Money-Empathy Gap

In a windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, two undergrads are playing a Monopoly game that one of them has no chance of winning. A team of psychologists has rigged it so that skill, brains, savvy, and luck—those ingredients that ineffably combine to create success in games as in life—have been made immaterial. Here, the only thing that matters is money.

One of the players, a brown-haired guy in a striped T-shirt, has been made “rich.” He got $2,000 from the Monopoly bank at the start of the game and receives $200 each time he passes Go. The second player, a chubby young man in glasses, is comparatively impoverished. He was given $1,000 at the start and collects $100 for passing Go. T-Shirt can roll two dice, but Glasses can only roll one, limiting how fast he can advance. The students play for fifteen minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall in another windowless room, the researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording in a giant spreadsheet the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.

T-Shirt isn’t just winning; he’s crushing Glasses. Initially, he reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. “Hey,” his expression seemed to say, “this is weird and unfair, but whatever.” Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate. He’s a skinny kid, but he balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece (in the experiment, the wealthy player gets the Rolls-Royce) as he makes the circuit— smack, smack, smack—­ ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang ! Four minutes in, he picks up Glasses’s piece, the little elf shoe, and moves it for him. As the game nears its finish, T-Shirt moves his Rolls faster. The taunting is over now: He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet Glasses’s gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash.

For a long time, primatologists have known that chimpanzees will act out ­social dominance with a special ferociousness, slapping hands, stamping feet, or “charging back and forth and dragging huge branches,” as Jane Goodall once wrote. And sociologists and anthropologists have explored the effects of hierarchy in tribes and groups. But psychology has only recently begun seriously investigating how having money, that major marker of status in the modern world, ­affects psychosocial behavior in the species Homo sapiens. By making real people temporarily very affluent, without regard to their actual economic circumstances and within the controlled environment of a psych lab, the Berkeley researchers aim to demonstrate the potency of that one variable. “Putting someone in a role where they’re more privileged and have more power in a game makes them behave like people who actually do have more power, more money, and more status,” says Paul Piff, the psychologist who designed the experiment. The Monopoly results, based on a year of watching inequitable games between pairs like Glasses and T-Shirt, have not yet been ­released. But Piff believes that they will support and amplify his previous provocative research.

Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

These findings, in combination with a researcher eager to promote them, reverberated online. On message boards, detractors accused Piff of using his lab to promote a leftist agenda; that his home base was Berkeley only fueled those ­suspicions. Piff’s e-mail box filled with messages calling him a “liberal idiot” and his work “junk science.” “I would wager,” says Wharton business-school psychologist Philip ­Tetlock, “that a congressional committee chair who favors redistribution of wealth would be far more likely to call these experts in as witnesses than would a committee chair who opposes redistribution.”

It is easy to see Piff’s research as ideologically motivated. The point is to “shed light on some of the consequences of social class,” he says. But whatever his goal, the “results are apolitical,” he says, and the data point in a clear direction. “Would I be less excited if we found that higher-status people were more generous?” he asks. “I’d probably be less excited, but that’s not what we found.”

When was the last time, as Piff puts it, that you prioritized your own interests above the interests of other people? Was it yesterday, when you barked at the waitress for not delivering your cappuccino with sufficient promptness? Perhaps it was last week, when, late to work, you zoomed past a mom struggling with a stroller on the subway stairs and justified your heedlessness with a ruthless but inarguable arithmetic: Today, the 9 a.m. meeting has got to come first; that lady’s stroller can’t be my problem. Piff is one of a new generation of scientists—psychologists, economists, marketing professors, and neurobiologists—who are exploiting this moment of unprecedented income inequality to explore behaviors like those. As Piff’s colleague Michael Kraus explains in a forthcoming article co-­authored with Piff and three other scientists in Psychological Review, their focus is on “predictable social cognitive thought patterns and world views” of the people familiarly known as “the haves.” Their field is less than ten years old, and its conclusions are thus “incomplete,” says John Dovidio, a social psychologist at Yale. Money has a million symbolic meanings and reflects as many human yearnings; wanting it, getting it, having it, using it, and abusing it are entirely different impulses with entirely different effects on personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships, and no single researcher has yet captured all of that nuance. But in a country that likes to think that class doesn’t matter, these social scientists are beginning to prove just how determinative money is.

This research is not intended to prosecute the one percent, those families with an average net worth of $14 million. Nor does it attempt to apply its conclusions about the selfishness and solipsism of a broad social stratum to every member within it: Gateses and Carnegies have obviously saved lives and edified generations, and one of the biggest predictors of a person’s inclination to donate to charity is how much money he has. But when the top fifth of American families have seen their incomes rise by 45 percent since 1979, whereas the bottom fifth has seen a decline of almost 11 percent, these ­researchers want to explore a timely question: How does living in an environment defined by individual achievement—­measured by money, privilege, and ­status—alter a person’s mental machinery to the point where he begins to see the people around him only as aids or obstacles to his own ambitions? Piff won’t name a tipping point after which the personality transformation kicks in, only that his studies of ethical behavior indicate a strong correlation between high socio­economic status and interpersonal dis­regard. It’s an “additive” effect; the fever line points straight up. “People higher up on the socioeconomic ladder are about three times more likely to cheat than people on the lower rungs,” he says. Piff’s research also suggests that people who yearn to be richer or more prominent make different choices than those more content with their present level of material comfort. No matter how much money you actually have, you’re likelier to behave unethically if you check the “agree” box next to the following statement: “In order to be a successful person in this society, it is important to make use of every opportunity.”

Unlike the discovery that the Earth is round or that lifesaving medicine can be made from mold, the results of this new field of inquiry hardly challenge human intuition. Philosophers and writers going back at least to Aristotle have had something to say about the potentially corrupting influence of wealth. Jesus warned that one might more easily push a camel through the eye of a needle than encounter a rich man in Heaven, and Dante designed the fourth ring of his Inferno for the greedy. Scrooge, Lily Bart, and ­Sherman McCoy are modernity’s Virgils, guides to the hell of living too much in money’s thrall. But science looks for solutions, and though affluence has been held up as a potential hazard to the soul, it has not in the United States been, empirically speaking, a problem. (The health and fortunes of the poor, by contrast, have been abundantly studied.) Rich people are thinner than poor people and have better cardiovascular health. They live longer. They’re better educated. They score higher on standardized tests. “They have more money,” as ­Ernest Hemingway was said to have quipped. Experiments over the past three years have shown that wealthier people suffer less from mood disorders than poorer people and that they have less cortisol in their saliva, a sign that they feel more impervious to threat.

But as the 2012 election approaches—an election framed more than most as a referendum on how much prosperity should be shared—those on opposite sides of the income spectrum appear not just different, but as alien tribes who have accidentally washed up on the same beach. The economic data are well known: The top 20 percent of Americans own about 87 percent of the wealth; the bottom 80 percent splits the rest. Social mobility, never as attainable as imagined, is stagnant. Forty percent of Americans inhabit the same social class as their grandparents, making the United States less socially mobile than Japan or France.

Political divisions mirror the economic chasm. The solution to America’s $15 trillion debt is either “cut spending” or “raise taxes,” a polarity of world views that has led social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt to seek out the roots of those moral prejudices. When Mitt Romney, one of the richest men ever to run for president, fails to convincingly relish his “cheesy grits,” it is taken by critics as evidence that he is too out of touch to steward the economy to all citizens’ benefit—just as the fortune he amassed in private equity is proof to his supporters of his acumen as a leader of men.

Americans across the board can have a high tolerance for inequality if they believe it is meritocratic. The research by Piff and his colleagues points to a different possible explanation for the income gap: that it may be at least in part psychologically destined. This in turn raises the ancient conundrum of chicken and egg. If getting or having money can make you hard-hearted, do you also have to be hard-hearted to become well-off in the first place? The bulk of the new research points decisively in the direction of the former, says Kraus, who now works at the University of Illinois, Urbana ­Champaign. “Just the idea of holding money can make people selfish.” Data on the temperament factor lag far behind, partly because temperament is an even more slippery variable than money when it comes to designing a sound study. “It has something to do with how you grew up; it has something to do with your genes too. It has something to with the behaviors that lead you to get raises,” Kraus says. (It also has something to do with social status. The biggest ­predictor of personal prosperity is your parents’ income level, and only 16 percent of people in the lowest income bracket move to the middle or above in ten years, according to the Economic Policy Institute.)

T. Byram Karasu, a psychiatrist at Albert Einstein/Montefiore Medical Center who treats wealthy clients, believes all very successful people share certain fundamental character traits. They have above-average intelligence, street smarts, and a high tolerance for anxiety. “They are sexual and aggressive,” he says. “They are also competitive with anyone and have no fear of confrontations; in fact, they thrive on them. And in contrast to their image, they are not extroverted. They become charmingly engaging when needed, but in their private world, they are private people.” They are, in the parlance, all business.

Earlier this year, researchers led by Timothy Judge at Notre Dame went some way toward proving Karasu’s observation when they published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “Do Nice Guys—And Gals—Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income.” The paper explored, in part, the financial penalties that women suffer in the workplace for being perceived as pushovers. But it also found a strong correlation, especially dramatic in men, between disagreeableness and income. Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Then they were given an agreeableness score. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; those with the highest agreeableness earned $31,259. Disagreeableness was also correlated to job responsibility and recommendations for the management track. This seeming correlation between money and insensitivity perpetuates itself, says Kathleen Vohs, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. “You’re reminded of money, and you act like a jerk. People don’t like you, and you’re reminded of money more.”

Piff’s most notorious research seemed to demonstrate the extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them. Last year, he spent three months hanging out at the ­intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway, near the Berkeley Marina. It’s a gritty, busy corner with a four-way stop that might be anywhere, if “anywhere” were in Northern California. On the brilliant day that I visited this spring, purple wildflowers were clustered along the highway’s shoulder, and a bike path meandered through them. Piff and his research team would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs near the Sea Breeze Market and Deli, and catalogue the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (Five would be a new-model Mercedes, say, and one would be an old, battered Honda like the one Piff drives.) Then the researchers would observe the drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a complete stop—a violation, he reminds readers in his PNAS study, of the ­California ­Vehicle Code. “Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex, and amount of traffic.” When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers’ regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering. Like New Yorkers rushing past that stroller mom on their way to work, fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. “It’s like they didn’t even see them,” Piff told me.

Two thousand miles away, in her lab at the University of Minnesota, Vohs does experiments indicating that merely thinking about money can decrease empathy. Vohs is a 38-year-old psychologist who was inspired to study the effects of money on social behavior nine years ago, when she left a junior faculty position where she was making $32,000 a year, and started working at a Canadian business school, where she earned five times that much. Suddenly she was no longer asking her friends for rides to the airport. She hired a personal shopper. “I was becoming more independent and less interdependent,” she says. This led her to the next thought: “We need to understand at a theoretical level what happens to people’s minds in the context of wealth.”

In experiments she published in the journal Science in 2006, Vohs “primed” her subjects to think about money, which is to say she planted the idea of money in their minds without their knowledge before observing their social interactions compared with a control group. In one case, she asked participants to wait alone in a room at a big table, which happened to be strewn with gold, green, and burnt-orange Monopoly bills. After ten minutes, she’d get the subject, take him to a different room, and ask him to fill out piles of questionnaires seeking detailed psychological ­information. The point was to muddle the subject’s mind: He knew he was ­participating in an experiment but had no idea what he was being tested for.

Vohs got her result only after the ­subject believed the session was over. Heading for the door, he would bump into a person whose arms were piled ­precariously high with books and office supplies. That person (who worked for Vohs) would drop 27 tiny yellow pencils, like those you get at a mini-golf course. Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group. In a conversation in her office in May, Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious—just disinterested. “It’s not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic,” she said. “I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.”

Over and over, Vohs has found that money can make people antisocial. She primes subjects by seating them near a screen-saver showing currency floating like fish in a tank or asking them to descramble sentences, some of which include words like bill, check, or cash. Then she tests their sensitivity to other people. In her Science article, Vohs showed that money-primed subjects gave less time to a colleague in need of assistance and less money to a hypothetical charity. When asked to pull up a chair so a stranger might join a meeting, money-primed subjects placed the chair at a greater distance from themselves than those in a control group. When asked how they’d prefer to spend their leisure time, money-primed people chose a personal cooking lesson over a ­catered group dinner. Given a choice ­between working collaboratively or alone, they opted to go solo. Vohs even found that money-primed people described feeling less emotional and physical pain: They can keep their hand under burning-hot water longer and feel less emotional distress when excluded from a ball-tossing game. ­“Money,” says Vohs, “brings you into ­functionality mode. When that gets applied to other people, things get mucked up. You can get things done, but it does come at the expense of people’s feelings or caring about them as individuals.”

Critics of Vohs’s work complain that her priming technique confuses more than it clarifies, for how is one to know whether it replicates a real-life mental state of needing money, getting it, or having it? Vohs counters that she measures her subjects for anxiety and usually finds none. Therefore she isn’t creating a condition of stress—of need—but of something more like material comfort. I know a man who made a lot of money very quickly who might agree with Vohs’s findings. Wealth is “very isolating,” he says. You work like a dog to make the best widgets, and when you look up, 20 or 30 years later, you’ve succeeded. But your high-school buddies can’t relate to you anymore and you’ve lost touch with your wife. “You’re dealing with your problems. You’re sitting in your class,” he says. “It’s hard to know the problems of the other.”

Public-health research has long shown that poverty can have devastating effects on the brain. At 3 years old, poor kids have vocabularies that are three times smaller than their better-off peers. Their memories do not work as well. In poor children, executive function is not as developed as it is in more affluent children, which means they have a harder time sorting and organizing information, planning ahead, and coping in the event of changed circumstances. Research by Robert Knight at Berkeley has shown that kids raised in a poor neighborhood are more likely to have frontal lobes—the area in the brain that enables attention and focus—that appear damaged. A psychologist at Oregon’s Willamette University has discovered that when very young children are given headphones that play two different stories simultaneously, one in each ear, and are told to reiterate the story heard in the right ear, affluent and poor children perform equally well. But EEGs taken of the poor kids show that they have a harder time filtering out the extraneous stimulus.

The corollaries to this poverty work are potentially explosive: Wealth may give you a better brain. It may make you a more strategic thinker, a savvier planner. (Research has shown that the more a ­person is able to imagine himself in the future, the more cash he is likely to have in his savings account.) And the cognitive benefits of affluence may accrue incrementally, speculates Dovidio, so that very rich people have better brain functioning than moderately rich people. These hypotheses are at the untested frontier of the new science: “I think in ten years we’ll have a compelling story on this,” says Dacher Keltner, the psychologist who oversees the work of Piff and his colleagues. But already the outline is becoming clear. Princeton University psychologist Eldar Shafir has shown that in environments of abundance, people make better financial decisions—it’s not that rich people tend to be better educated and can afford better advice, but that people living paycheck to paycheck don’t have the mental space to make the smartest long-term moves. The efficiencies of the affluent brain may trigger the shutting down of what the researchers call “pro-social” impulses and lead people toward the kinds of behaviors that a hedge-fund manager I spoke to characterized as “ruthless.” “They’re more willing to hurt others in their quest for money,” he said. “When you look at people who’ve done exceptionally well, it tends to be the difficult people.”

Last fall, another of Keltner’s students, a 27-year-old named Jennifer Stellar, made headlines. She tested the correlation ­between social class and compassion, using physiology, not behavior, as her measure. First, Stellar asked 65 Berkeley under­graduates to fill out questionnaires describing their family education and income levels. Then she hooked up each subject to a heart-rate monitor and showed him a pair of short videos: an instructional clip about how to build a backyard deck (this was the control) and an advertisement for St. Jude’s hospital, a facility that specializes in treating children with cancer. The ad shows young kids with chemotherapy-bald heads submitting to medical tests as if they were everyday occurrences, while their devastated parents try to be brave. It is, in nontechnical terms, a tearjerker.

In postscreening interviews, all the subjects said they found the St. Jude’s video moving. But compassion can also be empirically measured, because it manifests in facial expressions and a slowing of the heart rate. Looking at the data from the heart monitors, Stellar found a direct, negative correlation in biological terms between class and compassion. “Lower-class individuals showed greater heart-rate deceleration in response to the suffering of others,” Stellar wrote. The heart rates of the upper-class subjects generally did not change. When I met her, Stellar was careful, like Vohs, to stress that this upper-class numbness was not intentional. “It’s not, ‘I can see you’re suffering. I can tell. But I don’t care,’ ” she explains. “They’re just not attuned to it.”

The aforementioned research seems to show that getting money and having money makes people selfish and anti­social. But it also appears to be true that selfish, antisocial people are the ones that ascend. And that is, in part, because rich or striving people tend to pass on their values and priorities to their children, as all parents do. Members of the lower and upper classes usually date and marry within their own ranks and “live in neighborhoods and attend schools and work with individuals who share similar levels of educational training and income,” write Kraus and his co-authors in their forthcoming article . And so the values of each group become both more and more clearly entrenched and incomprehensible to the other. “Parents in ­working-class contexts are relatively more likely to stress to their children that ‘It’s not just about you’ and to emphasize that although it is important to be strong and to stand up for oneself, it is also essential to be aware of the needs of others and to adhere to socially accepted rules and standards for behavior,” wrote a team led by Nicole Stephens, with Stanford University psychologist Hazel Markus, in 2007 in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Parents with higher incomes “more often tell their children that ‘It’s your world’ and emphasize the value of promoting oneself and developing one’s own interests.” The cries of “Go get ’em!” you hear in the playgrounds and on the baseball diamonds of America’s best neighborhoods reflect not just concern for children’s self-esteem but a worldview that emphasizes looking out for No. 1.

This is Markus’s main research interest: the mind-sets of class. She and her colleagues have found, broadly speaking, that the affluent value individuality—uniqueness, differentiation, achievement—whereas people lower down on the ladder tend to stress homogeneity, harmonious interpersonal relationships, and group affiliation. In 2005, Markus co-authored a paper that showed those with only a high-school education like country music for its message of group coherence, while those with college educations like indie music because it emphasizes personal uniqueness. In her 2007 paper, Stephens found this same variance in self-image by testing people’s preferences in ballpoint pens. She divided her subjects into two groups of lower and higher incomes and showed each subject five pens and asked him to choose one. The pens were identical and were widely considered to be good, even desirable. The only difference among them was their color. Three pens in the handful would be one color (say, green); two would be another (orange). In the test, lower-class people overwhelmingly chose the green pens, whereas higher-class people picked the less common color. ­Lower-class people wanted to be the same as their peers, whereas ­better-off subjects showed, Stephens wrote, “a preference for uniqueness and individuation.”

In another experiment, Stephens presented firefighters and MBA students with the following hypothetical situation: “You just bought a new car, and then you find that your friend has purchased the exact same car. How do you feel?” The firefighters were overwhelmingly pleased and said things like, “Fantastic. He gets a great car.” The MBA students were negative or ­ambivalent. “I would feel slightly irritated,” one said. “It spoils my differentiation,” said another. (Madison Avenue discovered and manipulated this bifurcation in the American self-image long ago: When it sells trucks, the ads might show a parking lot full, pulled up at a multigenerational picnic, with slogans like “Take Family Time ­Further.” When it sells sports cars, the commercials show a car zooming down the highway alone. The slogan for the BMW M3 even nods in the direction of Piff’s discovery about the drivers of high-end cars and traffic rules: “Street Legal. Pretty Much.”)

The American Dream is really two dreams. There’s the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there’s the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus’s work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken. (Research shows that the rich tend to blame individuals for their own failure and likewise credit themselves for their own success, whereas those in the lower classes find explanations for inequality in circumstances and events outside their control.) But the truth is much more nuanced. Every American, rich and poor, bounces back and forth between these two ideals of self, calibrating ambitions and adjusting behaviors accordingly. Nearly half of Americans between 18 and 29 believe that it’s “likely” they’ll get rich, according to Gallup—in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Those who have already gotten wealthy wrestle openly and with real anguish over how to raise children who are productive, community-minded, and hardworking. Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, made a documentary in 2003 called Born Rich and, since then, has become a kind of confessor to the anxious wealthy. “Everyone says, ‘I don’t want my kids to turn out to be the next Paris Hilton,’ ” says Johnson, “It’s weird. You know they want their kids to be superior. They want their kids’ lives to reflect the wealth and the position they have in society. But they don’t want their kids to be elitist and arrogant.”

Across the income and class spectrum, people confront these competing impulses day to day and even minute by minute. A friend of mine feels the conflict each time he’s heading home to downtown Manhattan after a weekend away. He’s an environmentally conscious, left-leaning thirtysomething who drives a 2008 diesel Volkswagen. (That’s a three on the Piff scale.) When he confronts the inevitable, mile-long backup on the FDR, near the exit by the Brooklyn Bridge, his first instinct, supported by his conscientious values learned over long years by parents who preached the Golden Rule, is to wait in line. He believes in traffic rules and in waiting one’s turn. He supports all the small, civic formalities that help to hold the community’s interest and general order over the chaos of every man for himself. But sometimes, he admits, he can’t help himself. “I think, What the hell? And I cut the line.”

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6 studies on how money affects the mind

Paul Piff shares some of his research on the science of greed at TEDxMarin.

How does being rich affect the way we behave? In today’s talk, social psychologist Paul Piff provides a convincing case for the answer: not well .

The swath of evidence Piff has accumulated isn’t meant to incriminate wealthy people. “We all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people,” he says. That’s understandable—in fact, it’s a logical outgrowth of the so-called “American dream,” he says. And yet our unprecedented levels of economic inequality are concerning, and since wealth perpetuates self-interest, the gap could continue to widen.

The good news: it doesn’t take all that much to counteract the psychological effects of wealth. “Small nudges in certain directions can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy,” Piff says. Simply reminding wealthy individuals of the benefits of cooperation or community can prompt them to act just as egalitarian as poor people.

To hear more of Piff’s thoughts on the effects of having—or lacking—wealth, watch his compelling talk . Below, a look at some of studies from Piff’s lab and elsewhere.

Finding #1: We rationalize advantage by convincing ourselves we deserve it

The study: In a UC Berkeley study, Piff had more than 100 pairs of strangers play Monopoly. A coin-flip randomly assigned one person in each pair to be the rich player: they got twice as much money to start with, collected twice the salary when they passed go, and rolled both dice instead of one, so they could move a lot farther. Piff used hidden cameras to watch the duos play for 15 minutes.

The results: The rich players moved their pieces more loudly, banging them around the board, and displayed the type of enthusiastic gestures you see from a football player who’s just scored a touchdown. They even ate more pretzels from a bowl sitting off to the side than the players who’d been assigned to the poor condition, and started to become ruder to their opponents. Moreover, the rich players’ understanding of the situation was completely warped: after the game, they talked about how they’d earned their success, even though the game was blatantly rigged, and their win should have been seen as inevitable. “That’s a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage,” Piff says.

Finding #2: People who make less are more generous…on the small scale

The study: Piff brought rich and poor members of the community into his lab, and gave each participant the equivalent of $10. They were told they cold keep the money for themselves, or share a portion with a stranger.

The results: The participants who made under $25,000, and even sometimes $15,000, gave 44% more to the stranger than those making $150,000 to $200,000 per year.

Finding #3: People who make less are more generous…on the large scale

The study: A 2012 Chronicle of Philanthropy study examined Internal Revenue Service records of Americans who earned at least $50,000 in 2008, then charted charitable giving across every state, city and ZIP code in the US.

The results: On average, households that earned $50,000 to $75,000 gave of 7.6 percent of their income to charity, while those who made make $100,000 or more gave 4.2 percent. Rich people who lived in less economically diverse—that is, wealthier—neighborhoods gave an even smaller percentage of their income to charity than those in more diverse neighborhoods: in ZIP codes where more than 40 percent of people made more than $200,000 a year, the average rate of giving was just 2.8 percent.

Finding #4: Rich people are more likely to ignore pedestrians

The study: In California, where drivers are legally required to stop for pedestrians, Piff had a confederate approach a crosswalk repeatedly as cars passed by, trying to cross the street. He videotaped the scenario for hundreds of vehicles over several days.

The results: The more expensive the car, the less likely the driver was to stop for the pedestrian—that is, the more likely they were to break the law. None of the drivers in the least-expensive-car category broke the law. Close to 50 percent of drivers in the most-expensive-car category did, simply ignoring the pedestrian on the side of the road.

Finding #5: Poverty impedes cognitive function  

The study: In this study published a few months ago, researchers Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and others measured farmers’ mental function a month before their harvests (when they were hurting for money) and then again a month after (when they felt flush). In a separate part of the study, they had poor and well-off participants think about finances, then determined the participants’ cognitive performance.

The results: As Mullainathan details in The New York Times , the same farmers performed worse before the harvest, when they had less money, than afterward, when they had more. And not just a little worse: their I.Q. before the harvest was 9-10 points lower, the same detriment caused by an entire night without sleep. As for the other part of the study: when poor participants thought about finances, they performed worse. Rich participants weren’t affected at all.

Finding #6: Those with less are better at reading facial expressions

The study: In 2010, a series of studies out of UCSF asked more than 300 upper- and lower-class participants to analyze the facial expressions of people in photos, and of strangers in mock interviews, to discern their emotions.

The results: The lower-class participants were better able to read faces in both cases. That is, they exhibited more “emotional intelligence, the ability to read the emotions that others are feeling,” as one of the study authors told NBC . But, if upper-class participants were told to imagine themselves in the position of lower-class people, it boosted their ability to detect other people’s emotions, counteracting the blinders-like effect of their wealth.

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A California city gave some residents $500 a month, no strings attached. Here’s how they spent it.

Stockton is conducting a basic income experiment — and the early results are in.

by Sigal Samuel

What woulda needy person do if you gave them $500 a month, no strings attached?

Stockton, California, is finding out. The city is eight months into an 18-month experiment with basic income , the idea that the government should give citizens a regular infusion of unconditional free cash. And it just released the first batch of data about how recipients are spending the money.

It turns out, they’re mostly spending it on food, clothes, and utility bills.

The data is provisional — the basic income experiment still has 10 months to go — and the number of participants is small: 125 people (out of an estimated 311,000 Stockton residents)who live at or below the median income line (around $46,000), nearly half of whom are working full- or part-time.

But it offers a counter to critics of basic income, who often claim that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances, and that they won’t bother to find work. The evidence does not support that belief.

“In this country, we have an issue with associating people who are struggling economically and people of color with vices like drug use, alcohol use, gambling,” said Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs. “I thought it was important to illustrate folks aren’t using this money for things like that. They are using it for literal necessities.”

In other words, Tubbs wants to destroy a myth — one that persists despite findings to the contrary — that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation. (If anything, evidence suggests it’s the other way around: Poverty itself hurts people’s decision-making abilities by imposing a terrible cognitive burden.)

Stockton was the largest city in the US to declare bankruptcy at the time it announced in 2012. It has an unemployment rate of about 7.5 percent (the state average is 4.3 percent), and it’s ranked 18th for child poverty out of all American cities.

The early results of Stockton’s trial — one of the first in the country — come at a moment when the idea of a basic income is enjoying a surge of mainstream attention.In addition to being endorsed by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk , it’s a centerpiece of Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s platform. Yang says that if he becomes president, the government will send a check for $1,000 per month ($12,000 annually) to every American adult over 18. He calls it the Freedom Dividend.

Given the idea’s high profile, many will be watching Stockton closely to see how the trial there turns out. That makes it especially important to understand what its data can — and cannot — tell us.

The limitations of the Stockton data

Stockton’s basic income initiative is a passion project for the 29-year-old Tubbs, the city’s first black mayor. When he started kicking around the idea, he hoped the experiment would run for at least three years. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote in 2017:

The first $1 million in funding comes from the Economic Security Project, a pro-basic income advocacy and research group co-chaired by Facebook co-founder and former New Republic publisher Chris Hughes and activists Natalie Foster and Dorian Warren; Hughes provided the group’s initial funding. Tubbs says his goal with the Stockton experiment is to see the myriad ways recipients invest the money, whether that’s toward taking more time off work to spend on other activities, or going back to school, or volunteering. “I’m excited about just showing what people do with increased economic opportunity,” he says. “Being able to devote their time full time as a parent or caregiver, going back to school to reskill, investing in a new business. I know the ingenuity of some of the folks in my city.”

But Tubbs also made clear this experiment is about a lot more than just his city. “Stockton is a proxy for America: its diversity, its people,” he said. “It’s a place that’s emerging and has big bold ideas.”

In the Stockton trial so far, recipients are making financial decisions that are “really rational,” according to Stacia Martin-West, a University of Tennessee professor acting as co-principal investigator on the experiment.

Recipients have spent almost 40 percent of their basic income on food, 24 percent on sales and merchandise, 11 percent on utility bills, and 9 percent on car repairs and gas. This information is a useful corrective to the myth that people become poor because they’re irrational agents. As one of the Stockton recipients, 48-year-old Zohna Everett, put it , “A poor person knows how to budget.”

But from a social scientific perspective, the Stockton trial — with its short duration and small number of participants — may not necessarily bevery instructive. It’s “really more about storytelling than it is about social science,” according to Matt Zwolinski, director of the University of San Diego’s Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy.

“What you get out of a program like this is some fairly compelling anecdotes from people,” Zwolinski told the Associated Press. “That makes for good public relations if you are trying to drum up interest in a basic income program, but it doesn’t really tell you much about what a basic income program would do if implemented on a long-term and large-scale basis.”

For example, if you know you’re going to be receiving a guaranteed income for the next several years, you might change your behavior dramatically by choosing to get a college degree. But you may not do that if you’re told the money will dry up after 18 months.

Here’s another wrinkle in the Stockton basic income trial:Each participant was given $500 per month on a debit card, so that researchers would be able to see how they were using the money. However, 40 percent of it was withdrawn as cash, so researchers had to rely on participants to tell them where the money went.

Although the experiment clearly has limitations in ascertaining how a basic income changes behavior, the researchers say their main goal is actually to measure something else: how the income affectsparticipants’ physical and mental health. Its impact on human suffering is an important metric in itself, andthat data will be released in the coming months.

In basic income trials conducted elsewhere, recipients have demonstrated improved health. Finland’s recipients reported feeling happier and less stressed after getting free money; they also reported increased trust in social institutions . In Dauphin, a town in Manitoba, Canada, a basic income scheme in the 1970s saw a decline in doctor visits and an 8.5 percent reduction in the rate of hospitalization.

Feeling less of the pernicious kind of stress that often results from economic insecurity is not just an inherent good — it’s also an instrumental good for any government looking to decrease the money it’ll later have to spend on citizens who develop the serious health problems that excessive stress can cause.

But there’s still a lot to be learned about how basic income affects a society. That’s why the Economic Security Project, the nonprofit that sponsored Stockton’s guaranteed income trial, funds a lot of research to better understand the promise and perils of unconditional cash stipends. It has provided funding for, or sponsored research on, basic income projects in places ranging from Oakland, California (through Y Combinator) to Kenya (through GiveDirectly) to Alaska (through the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend) .

Basic income policies have yielded some expected benefits — and taken some unexpected turns. In Alaska’s case, for example, the promise of a sizable monthly stipend has warped the state’s politics , though it has reduced poverty in the state.

Meanwhile, the Canadian province of Ontario has shown that basic income projects are very vulnerable to the shifting winds of politics (which is, to be clear, not the fault of the idea itself). In 2017, the former Liberal government launched a basic income pilot project in three cities. It was supposed to help 4,000 low-income people and last for three years. But then a new Progressive Conservative government came to power, and in 2018 it canceled the project. Now, a handful of participants in the pilot are filing a class-action lawsuit against the government.

Stockton’s basic income program, then, is both an investment in, and a bet on, its residents.As the data continues to roll in, we’ll see how well the program pays off in terms of the participants’ physical and mental health. If it significantly decreases their suffering, that will be a takeaway well worth paying attention to.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

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Why rich people tend to think they deserve their money

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This interview is from our series Econ Extra Credit with David Brancaccio: Documentary Studies , a conversation about the economics lessons we can learn from documentary films. We’re watching and discussing a new documentary each month. To watch along with us, sign up for our newsletter.

It turns out that having more money doesn’t necessarily make a person more inclined to share their money with others — in fact, research suggests the opposite is true.

One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.

“So one possibility is that rich players are kind of embarrassed by the situation, doing what they can to help out this other person who undeservedly is a poor player — and that’s actually the opposite of what we found,” said Paul Piff, the psychologist who conducted the experiment. (Piff is featured in “ Capital in the 21st Century ,” a film we’re watching as part of our Econ Extra Credit project).

In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice.

At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck.

“They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,” that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio.

Piff said the experiment reveals a fundamental bias that most humans share.

“When something good happens to you, we think about the things that we did that contributed to that success,” Piff said.

That can be a problem when it comes to inequality, which has skyrocketed in advanced economies in recent decades.

“It can get people who are winning at the game of life — who have more money, who have more privilege, who have more power — to think about their resources as things that they deserve; to be less likely to think that inequality is a problem, because after all, they deserve what they have; and as a result, to be less willing to do things about it,” Piff said.

The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

David Brancaccio:  So here are these players, one of them doing well because of a flip of a coin, the other one not doing well. And what happens to the players doing better? It kind of goes to their head?

Paul Piff:  Yeah. I think what was notable was that, within just a couple of minutes, dynamics start to crystallize. The rich players start to take up more space at the table, so they actually take on a more physically dominant posture. They start making more noise. They start banging the table louder with their pieces as they move around. And over the course of the 15 minutes, one of the things that we noticed is that they actually became ruder in their behavior.

So one possibility is that rich players are kind of embarrassed by the situation, doing what they can to help out this other person who undeservedly is a poor player — and that’s actually the opposite of what we found. The rich player became ruder; became less sensitive to the plight of the other player. They started eating more pretzels and did so in ruder fashion; we had a bowl of pretzels positioned on the table as another way of watching dominance in our rich players. They start showcasing their property, their wealth, sort of exhibiting how well they’re doing.

So across all these different indexes we found that rich players, despite winning the game through really very little effort — because of the coin flip that went their way — they still acted as if they deserved to win and that the poor player deserved to lose.

Brancaccio:  They think it’s their own awesomeness. You gotta love human beings, don’t you? We’re just such great people.

Piff:  And I think that’s the kicker. At the end of the study, we ask rich players why they inevitably won, and they don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision or that thing that they did.

And I think that this is a basic human bias that’s true of all of us: When something good happens to you, we — I think because of the cognitive machinery that we’re equipped with — think about the things that we did that contributed to that success. And we see that in people who win in all walks of life. When you’re winning, you think about the things that you did to help you win. The problem is, that bias writ large, at least in the domain of inequality, it can get people who are winning at the game of life — who have more money, who have more privilege, who have more power — to think about their resources as things that they deserve, to be less likely to think that inequality is a problem because after all, they deserve what they have, and as a result, to be less willing to do things about it, to be less willing to contribute to people who have less, to be less willing to behave in ways that are compassionate, that help the needs of those who have less than they do.

Brancaccio:  And we can see why it’s such a challenge to deal with widening inequality that we see. But we’ve got to remember though that life isn’t completely a randomized game of Monopoly. Sometimes it’s because you did work harder and that’s why you’re making more.

Piff:  I think that’s absolutely true. There’s obviously lots of situations in which wealthy people and people who are more privileged have obviously done things to contribute and to help generate the resources and the privilege that they have. But I think across all people, it’s universally true that there are things that you benefit from that you did not contribute to. There are things that you benefit from that you did not build; there are things that you benefit from that you did not make. You benefit from the roads that are built, from people that have helped you along the way, from the mentors that you accidentally found yourself in the same classroom with. And it’s those kinds of key ingredients that, in recent work, we’re trying to highlight to get people to think about how no matter what they’ve done to help generate the power and success they have, they’ve inevitably benefited from the help of other people, and as a result, get people to see other people as potentially unlucky and be more willing to contribute to their benefit.

Brancaccio:  I was thinking maybe your test subjects in the Irvine, California, area were just especially entitled twits, but you’ve tested this elsewhere.

Piff:  Yeah, so we ran a similar study in South Africa. We’ve run some versions of this in Europe. In different contexts that we’ve run this experiment, or versions of this experiment where people just become sort of randomly privileged or randomly disadvantaged, you find very similar differences where, if you have it play out, all of a sudden people that have benefited from a coin flip, start to think that they deserved to win.

Brancaccio:  So your lab there works on really interesting things. I mean, you study this idea of inequality and altruism. Give us a taste of maybe something you’re working on now.

Piff:  Yeah, so one of the things we’re really interested in is if it’s the case that inequality, in part, is perpetuated because of the biases that emerge from inequality in the first place, we’re really interested in what are the simple psychological levers that we could leverage to get people across the board to think about how life may not be fair, and how things can happen just like a global pandemic that can all of a sudden cause people, through no responsibility of their own, to experience distress and to experience for instance, even poverty or unemployment.

And how can getting people to think about these undeserved, unfair, potentially unjust world events or life outcomes get them to switch how they think about what happens to people — the circumstances that people’s lives take, and the things that happen to people ultimately — as not fair and not deserved, but things that may warrant individual, societal and even government intervention.

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Inside the Nation’s Largest Guaranteed Income Experiment

O ne evening in early June, Leo and his family were able to enjoy a treat they hadn’t experienced in months: a sit-down meal at a restaurant.

At a fried chicken chain in a Compton, California strip mall, they splurged on a few plates of fried rice, each costing under $13.99. The money Leo, 39, makes as a mechanic never seems to satisfy the deluge of bills that pile up on his kitchen counter each month, so the modest meal felt like a luxury. “It made me very happy,” Leo says in Spanish through an interpreter.

The family was only able to afford the meal because Leo is part of a groundbreaking guaranteed income experiment in his city called the Compton Pledge. In regular installments between late 2020 and the end of 2022, Leo and 799 other individuals are receiving up to $7,200 annually to spend however they like. Leo, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who TIME has agreed to refer to by a pseudonym to protect his identity, receives quarterly payments of $900.

The organization running Compton Pledge , called the Fund for Guaranteed Income, is building the technological infrastructure necessary to distribute cash payments on a broad scale and has partnered with an independent research group to study the extent to which a minimum income floor can lift families like Leo’s out of poverty. The pilot, which distributes money derived from private donors, is not just about giving people the ability to buy small indulgences. It’s testing whether giving poor families a financial cushion can have a demonstrable impact on their physical and psychological health, job prospects and communities. And perhaps the biggest question of all: Can these cash infusions transcend their status as a small research project in progressive Los Angeles and someday work as a nationwide program funded by taxpayers?

The theory is gaining momentum in the U.S. Six years ago, there were no programs distributing and studying the effects of providing swaths of Americans no-strings-attached cash, according to Stanford’s Basic Income Lab, an academic hub tracking such programs. But now, pilot programs are taking place in roughly 20 cities around the country, from St. Paul, Minnesota to Paterson, New Jersey, with Compton’s exercise serving as the nation’s largest city-based experiment in terms of number of people served. Most of the programs are philanthropically funded—including Compton’s—and distribute different amounts of money to targeted populations, from Black pregnant women to former foster children to single parents. These laboratories for wealth redistribution all have one thing in common: they give some of society’s poorest and most marginalized people cold-hard cash, and then let them spend it however they want.

There is limited polling on support for nationwide guaranteed income programs, but 45% of Americans supported giving every adult citizen—regardless of employment or income—$1,000 per month, through a subtype of guaranteed income called Universal Basic Income (UBI), according to an August 2020 survey from Pew Research Center. Andrew Yang, who popularized the idea of UBI during his long-shot 2020 presidential campaign, wants the proposed benefit to replace most existing government welfare programs. Most other proponents of a guaranteed income in the U.S., however, resist being lumped in with his plan , believing instead that the cash benefit should supplement other forms of government assistance and target individuals who need it most.

If any form of a national guaranteed income were to advance beyond a talking point, it would mark a striking shift in how Americans view the role of government in society. Less restricted forms of cash assistance largely ended in the 1990s with President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, as both Republicans and Democrats argued government benefits were disincentivizing work. The country’s social safety net in recent years has offered more limited relief through a patchwork of difficult-to-navigate programs, like food stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers, which often have stringent rules and leave many poor families ineligible. But after a year and a half of the pandemic, three rounds of stimulus checks and a newly expanded child tax credit , proponents of cash-based programs feel the tide turning. “This is an inevitable future,” argues Nika Soon-Shiong, the executive director of the Fund for Guaranteed Income.

Many of the country’s most significant social reform movements have been provoked by national crises, from the Great Depression’s birth of the New Deal to the 2008 financial crisis paving the way for the Affordable Care Act. Even if guaranteed income never catches on, economists and public officials may glean lessons about giving poor families financial breathing room from 2020’s pandemic relief packages and Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion budget proposal , which includes a permanent expansion of the child tax credit and a paid family leave program for new parents. By one measure, U.S. poverty fell in 2020, largely thanks to federal aid aimed at helping people weather the worst financial crisis in decades, the Census Bureau reported in September.

But the window to enact major change closes quickly. Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package is feeding inflationary pressure and inciting labor shortages. It remains unclear whether Democrats will have enough support in Congress to make the assistance efforts they passed this year last beyond 2021. And despite the proliferation of guaranteed income pilots, cementing them beyond experiments funded through charity is proving tremendously politically challenging amid fears that such policies keep low-income Americans on the government dole.

That’s not how Leo sees it. While he used few bucks from Compton Pledge for a fried rice dinner, the rest of it went to more pressing causes: a $250 car diagnostic tool enabling him to take on more mechanic jobs, a college textbook for his 23-year-old stepdaughter Lesley, a few hundred dollars sent to his ailing mother in Guatemala, and payments towards a $3,000 payday loan that has accrued nearly $1,000 in interest fees in less than two years. The extra financial padding hasn’t kept him from needing to work, even through severe pain caused by his gout flare-ups. Leo, who does not have health insurance due to his immigration status, now also faces the daunting prospect of paying down a $10,612.80 hospital bill after a recent emergency room visit for chest pains that a physician linked to stress.

That stress has been building for a long time. Earlier this year, the mounting anxiety brought Leo to a Catholic church in downtown Los Angeles where he begged for a reprieve. “I asked the Virgin Mary for some sort of miracle,” he says from the covered patio outside his home that doubles as his stepson’s bedroom. Asked whether being selected to receive money from Compton Pledge was that miracle he was searching for, Leo replies with a grin: “Cien por ciento.” He feels 100% certain that it was.

‘There were no cockroaches’

Soon-Shiong, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, initially planned to launch the Fund for Guaranteed income after completing her thesis on cash transfer systems in India. But the pandemic made her realize people much closer to home needed help—and fast.

“It really felt like there were not enough people thinking about the solution,” Soon-Shiong, the daughter of billionaire business tycoon and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, tells TIME from her spacious West Hollywood apartment. “But a lot of people talking about the problem.”

She approached Aja Brown, who was finishing her second and final term as Compton’s Mayor, to create a program to bring monetary help to the struggling city, where 29% of inhabitants are Black and 68% are Hispanic or Latino. As Compton’s unemployment rate eclipsed 20% and thousands of residents fell ill with the virus—including many undocumented ones like Leo who lack health insurance—Brown and Soon-Shiong felt compelled to create an inclusive guaranteed income initiative. Unlike some forms of federal assistance, Compton Pledge would be open to undocumented immigrants and formerly incarcerated individuals. And rather than make marginalized people who are wary of giving strangers their home addresses and financial information apply for the program, Brown and Soon-Shiong used an advisory council to help them randomly select the Compton residents, including those the city government might not have records of. Starting in August 2020, Compton Pledge raised $9.2 million from donors including Amazon Studios and the California Wellness Foundation to go directly to the eventual recipients of Compton Pledge.

Compton certainly isn’t the only American city with inadequate resources, but its health and economic deficits are compounded by the absence of well-paying jobs and a high proportion of undocumented immigrants who lack health insurance. “The combination of all that leads to what we have here, which is an epidemic of poorly treated chronic disease,” says Dr. Elaine Batchlor, the CEO of MLK Community Healthcare, a hospital and healthcare system in South Los Angeles. An estimated 40% of adults in the 100,000-person city are considered obese, 12% of the adult population has diabetes, and residents are significantly more likely to die due to lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease compared to the surrounding county’s residents, according to data compiled by the LA County Department of Public Health.

Three out of the four Compton Pledge families TIME interviewed over the first six months they received checks expressed that they are battling some sort of chronic illness. In addition to Leo’s gout, his wife Brenda is diabetic, and their daughter Lesley is an asthmatic. Tiffany Hosley, a 40-year-old former paraeducator for Compton Unified School District, has been unable to work since she had a serious heart attack last October, and her insurance denied coverage for her $988 heart medication. Christine S., a 44-year-old transportation worker who asked TIME not to use her last name because she feared the money she gets from Compton Pledge could cost her other government benefits, also has a daughter with asthma. (Compton Pledge does not expect the funds to impact recipients’ eligibility for existing government support, but has set up a fund to reimburse participants in case they do. It has not had to use those reserves yet.)

The Fund for Guaranteed Income hopes these families can use the cash support to offset some of their medical expenses, and that the funds will also improve the recipients’ physical and mental health. Compton Pledge had promised in early press releases that Jain Family Institute, the independent research group it contracted to measure the success of the pilot, would be publishing data on the impact of the program at regular intervals, but it has not yet done so. Initial findings from a separate guaranteed income pilot in Stockton, California show promise, however. In March, the pilot reported that the recipients of its $500 per-month stipend showed statistically significant improvements in their mental health versus the control group, moving from likely having a mild mental health disorder to likely being mentally well. One year into the two-year pilot, Stockton recipients had spent 37% of their allotments on food, 22% on home goods and personal clothing items, and 11% on utilities. They spent less than 1% on alcohol and tobacco.

Beyond covering their own needs, some of the Compton recipients have committed to using the funds to pay it forward. That’s part of what the program’s organizers hope to demonstrate: that redistributing wealth through direct payments could improve access to education, housing and nutrition; reduce the racial wealth gap; and stimulate economic activity—which in turn can lift up a whole community.

Already, at least two members of the Compton Pledge have used some of their funding to start their own nonprofits. Georgia Horton endured molestation as a child, and after fleeing home with nothing but “five pieces of burnt bologna” she stole off the stove, she was arrested in the late 1980s for a murder she says she didn’t commit. During her 25-year prison stint, she became an evangelist preacher for her fellow inmates, and when she was paroled in 2017, she took that work to the greater Los Angeles area until the pandemic shuttered gathering spaces. The Compton Pledge funds posted to her account at just the right time: Horton was able to put her first $400 monthly allotment towards the tools she needed to preach the gospel virtually—namely, a new HP laptop and a ring light. With subsequent checks, she paid registration and notarization fees to launch a nonprofit, Georgia Horton Ministries, which will lead trauma-informed prison workshops and support other formerly incarcerated people.

Christine S. puts some of the $1,800 she receives quarterly towards feeding homeless individuals in Compton’s historic Lueders Park, inspired by her own past experiences with homelessness. She wants to purchase a mobile shower so homeless people don’t have to use garden hoses like she did. But the money she receives from the experiment has also helped her take her daughter Alex on a vacation to San Diego, where the toddler got to swim in a pool for the first time. “We didn’t have to get a super cheap hotel,” ​​Christine says. “There were no cockroaches.” Without the Compton Pledge money, she says, “I wouldn’t have had the financial ability to do much.”

‘She was getting more money staying home’

A UBI providing every American adult $12,000 per year would cost the U.S. government more than $3.1 trillion per year — a sum equal to roughly 90% of all the money the federal government collected in revenue last year.

Guaranteed income advocates say wealth taxes, such as those advocated by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, could make the math work—at least for a program that helps very low-income people. And they argue that while it takes money to invest in a larger social safety net, it’s more expensive in the long run not to. Providing health care for uninsured people cost the country roughly $42.4 billion per year between 2015 and 2017, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation . People who can’t pay rent or other bills are likely to need other services the government will end up paying for, like housing assistance. Poverty is also strongly linked to incarceration, which costs taxpayers at least $80 billion per year.

But conservative economists don’t believe throwing more money at the problem is a solution, especially when the national debt is already $28 trillion. “We’ve been completely irresponsible since the 21st century arrived,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the center-right American Action Forum. Holtz-Eakin is also worried about free cash feeding inflationary pressure. He says increases in the consumer price index in the last year can at least partially be attributed to the pandemic-era stimulus spending: “There’s no doubt in my mind that the American Rescue Plan and those checks that went out along with the other subsidies fueled the inflation we’ve seen,” he says.

There are political risks, too. Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, whose small city jumpstarted the recent boom of guaranteed income experiments in 2017, lost reelection to a Republican challenger by 13 points in the Democratic stronghold in 2020 after launching his pilot. Conservative criticism has only intensified as direct cash payments become more mainstream. And if Republicans and moderate Democrats are reluctant to give U.S. citizens free cash, many are sure to express even more opposition to giving this kind of government assistance to undocumented immigrants like Leo: Donald Trump was elected President in 2016 vowing to crack down on illegal immigration, and has falsely claimed undocumented immigrants drain public benefits .

During the height of the pandemic, Trump and many congressional Republicans supported stimulus checks to help Americans make it through the country’s economic collapse. By this spring, Democrats agreed to smaller checks and limited unemployment benefits when members of their own caucus, like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, demanded the relief be targeted toward those with lower incomes. And once Biden’s stimulus package passed, Republicans pushed back against the pandemic unemployment insurance, expanded child tax credit and other assistance measures. When California approved the nation’s first state-funded guaranteed income project in July, which will dispense $35 million in monthly cash payments to pregnant women and youth who have recently aged out of foster care, Republican Assemblyman Vince Fong of Bakersfield abstained from voting for similar reasons. The cash would “undermine incentives to work and increase dependence on government,” he told the Associated Press.

Some experts say these critiques don’t hold up to reality. “There’s little to no evidence” that the federally passed income support programs are leading to work shortages, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Despite 26 states voluntarily ending supplemental unemployment insurance early, there was little difference in their employment numbers and workforce participation rate in July.

But if guaranteed income pilot programs explore how free money helps recipients, they’re also testing the ripple effects on the broader community, and some small businesses in Compton aren’t on board. Nearly half a dozen Compton businesses—including a taco truck, insurance shop, and a Chinese restaurant—told TIME that increased government benefits and cash programs were making it difficult for them to hire workers. “That sign has been out here for six months,” Roland Barsoum, the manager of a local auto insurance outlet, says of a ‘help wanted’ placard in his window. He hired two people to fill the clerical position, but neither lasted more than a few weeks. “One of them stayed for about a month,” he says, “but she was getting more money staying home.”

‘Breathing room’

For all the political pushback, guaranteed income programs are proliferating in the U.S. At least 40 new guaranteed income projects have started or been announced in the last six years.

Many of these new programs are trying to help populations with a specific need or historically marginalized communities. In Cambridge, Mass., for example, the guaranteed income pilot consists of single-caretaker households and is giving more than 100 families $500 per month for 18 months. St. Paul, Minnesota is helping up to 150 families whose finances were negatively impacted by COVID-19 with $500 monthly payments for 18 months. Oakland, Calif. is focusing on non-white residents and offering $500 monthly for 18 months to 600 families earning below the area median income. A group in San Francisco is partnering with the city’s Department of Health to give pregnant Black and Pacific Islander women $1,000 a month for the duration of their pregnancies and at least six months of the child’s life. And in Jackson, Mississippi, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, now in its third cycle, is giving 100 Black mothers $1,000 for 12 months.

Support from wealthy tech moguls has spurred some of that growth. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has repeatedly given to guaranteed income projects through his #startsmall initiative, including donations of $15 million to the Open Research Lab (formerly Y Combinator’s UBI project) and $18 million to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a group founded by former Stockton Mayor Tubbs that is funding many of the cash experiments. In March, New York University used $3.5 million from Dorsey to launch the Cash Transfer Lab, a center that will study the effect of such policies.

The focus on Black women in several of the programs is not a coincidence. “The data shows that Black women, Black mothers specifically, have been left out of opportunities for not only wealth creation, but opportunities for income in a way that the rest of this country has been allowed to succeed,” says Aisha Nyandoro, the chief executive officer of Springboard To Opportunities, the organization behind Magnolia Mother’s Trust. Black families have the second-highest poverty rate in the U.S. after only Native Americans, with 21.2% living below the poverty line, and 27% of Black families with single mothers living in poverty, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Proponents say that for guaranteed income programs to most effectively target these populations, they must break the stigma of accepting help that many poor Americans have internalized. In San Francisco, prospective participants said they feared being viewed as “welfare queens,” according to program organizers, and some mothers in Jackson described how important their independence is to their identity.

The promise of some relief from crushing financial stress can outweigh those concerns. “There always comes a time where you’re going to need help,” says Danel Paige, 28, a member of the Jackson program. Throughout the pandemic, she has been working as a Head Start teacher, attending graduate school and taking care of her two children, ages 8 and 3, while their father’s military job keeps him stationed several states away. The money from Magnolia Mother’s Trust has helped her keep up with her electric bill and her car payment, and she’s hoping she can save enough to move to a safer neighborhood after losing a loved one to gun violence earlier this year. “I’m trying to lead a different life for myself,” she says. “This money is a huge part of that decision.”

That Paige is getting closer—but not yet able—to leave her neighborhood isn’t shocking to the guaranteed income advocates who designed these free cash projects. The money was never intended to be a panacea. “It’s not going to solve all of the systemic challenges that this country has,” says Nyandoro.

Poverty persists, as do its root causes. But for the lucky 800 in Compton, the unconditional money is a breath of fresh air in a smog-laden city. “Having a guaranteed income and a poverty floor enables people to have breathing room to make better decisions for their families,” former mayor Brown says, “to be able to spend time to maybe be able to actually go on an interview, to be able to plan a few years in advance instead of having to live paycheck to paycheck.”

Such is the reality for Leo, at least until his quarterly checks stop coming. An extra $3,600 per year won’t pay off his payday loans, get him health insurance, or allow his family to rent a home that wasn’t converted from a former car garage. But the money has loosened the financial noose fastened around their necks. Like an old family mantra promises, they can finally breathe a little easier: “Dios aprieta pero no ahoga,” recites Leo’s daughter Lesley. In English: God squeezes but doesn’t choke.

-With reporting by Mariah Espada and Nik Popli/Washington and Leslie Dickstein/New York.

More Must-Reads from TIME

• Melinda French Gates Is Going It Alone
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• Forget Having It All . Let’s Try Having Enough
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• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Write to Abby Vesoulis/Compton, CA at [email protected] and Abigail Abrams at [email protected]

A NYC TikToker films a ‘social experiment’ about whether people want to keep money or give double to a stranger. The results might surprise you

Ever wished money would come easy? In New York City it may come easier than expected if you stumble upon a certain TikToker. 

Kris Chellani, or @cashwithkris, as he’s known on TikTok, walked around New York City asking people if they’d rather take money he offered them or pass and double the amount for the next person. 

For many people, money is tight right now. So it might be surprising that anyone would pass up free cash. But it seems to be easier for people to pass on lower amounts rather than the higher figures that Chellani offered later in the experiment. Still, there were a few people who, even at the higher amounts, passed the money along, taking the “pay it forward” philosophy to a new level. 

In a TikTok video Chellani posted just a day ago that got over 3 million views, he started by offering $1 to someone, who said they would pass it on. Then, after raising the stakes to $2, $4, $8, $16—he finally found someone who wanted to pocket the $32. 

“I just won $32 because I’m selfish?” the man who chose to keep the money asked. 

In another video Chellani posted earlier this week, he started with $5. When he reached the third person, he asked if she wanted $20 or to double it and give it to the next person. She said to double it. But her friend, standing beside her, reached for the cash before Chellani pulled back. The experiment continued and the next person was offered $40, to which the person said he’d rather have the $40.

Some users in the comment section say they would have taken the money at $20, others say $5.

Chellani captioned this next video , posted two days ago, “the furthest the doubling has gone so far.” Like the video mentioned above, he started with $5. The amount went from $5, to $10, to $20, to $40, before someone who was offered $80 finally chose to keep it. That person said it was his birthday—a free $80 is quite a birthday present. 

One user in the comments wrote, “It woulda stopped with me babe.”

Her comment got over 28,000 likes, maybe signaling how most people felt watching this video.  

In his most recent video , Chellani started at $1 and made it all the way to $64 before someone decided to keep it. The man who took the $64 said he did it because he needed the money, but then added that he was going to turn it into $300 without explaining how. 

In each of the videos mentioned above, it was a male who took the money instead of doubling it and passing it on to the next stranger. But even so, once that number went over $20 it seemed harder to pass up.

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The Money Effect: A Social Experiment

February 3, 2015

Writing the piece  Martin Luther King Jr: One Teacher’s Lesson on Understanding , a few weeks ago reminded me of a social experiment I’d heard about in a documentary on PBS a while ago. It discussed another social division of power prevalent in our society, the wealthy and the “poorer” class. The studies researched adults, not children, but it made me worry about my kids just the same.

I have long struggled with balancing two ideas. My husband and I work so hard to provide for our children, not just things that money buys, but also experiences, comfort, stability and so on. On the other hand, our loving parenting seems to be creating a sense of entitlement in our kids. They feel like of course they should have an adventure after school rather than go straight home or, I’m sure anyone with kids in school has heard, “… but everybody else has one!” In the end, I feel like banging my head against a brick wall. Short of traumatizing them, how do I keep them level-headed?

And then we come to the documentary. Right away it shows us a pedestrian at a crosswalk on a busy street. Which cars will stop? Sadly, there is a good chance that the more expensive or prestigious vehicle will blow right through it.

The studies cited come out of UC Berkley, headed by researcher, Paul Piff. It showed that the wealthier a person was coming into the experiment, the more likely they were to lie, cheat, and steal even if the “prize” was something as simple as points toward winning a $50 gift card. They were less inclined to be generous or show empathy.

If you’re like me, you aren’t too worried right now. My kids probably won’t be feeling wealthy any time soon. The scary part for me as a parent came later, when Mr. Piff created a scenario in which participants FELT rich. He set up a Monopoly game in which one player received more money to begin, more privileges during play, and an extra di to roll. A coin toss decided which player that would be. Both contestants knew all of the facts as they started playing. Even so, as the game went on the “wealthy” participants took on more and more of the characteristics noted for the actual wealthy, no matter what their backgrounds were coming into the experiment. In fact many of them stated in a survey afterward that they “deserved” to win.

Essentially, no one is immune to the effects of money. This doesn’t mean that all wealthy people are bad. We see wonderful examples of extreme generosity from wealthy people all the time. But what made them that way? I hope that my kids experience success in their life which might mean they make a lot of money. How do I teach them now, so that later, no matter what financial bracket they land in, they will remain generous, empathetic, and considerate individuals?

I don’t have an answer yet. I just keep going back to the ideas I talked about in  Developing Gratitude , awareness and getting outside the world we know as well as modeling it like in  Let Them See You: Be Grateful . As much as it tempts me some days to just throw up my hands and tell them they can see what it really means to be hungry, or bored, or lonely, or whatever other dilemma afflicts them at the moment, I suppose a positive example is the best I’ve got so far.

If you’re interested in seeing a short PBS segment on this research discussing all of these same studies, here is a video.

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Experiment with ‘lost’ wallets reveals that people are surprisingly honest

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They say honesty is the best policy — and now there’s scientific evidence to prove it.

An unconventional study that offered volunteers the chance to pocket nearly $100 found that the more people stood to gain by hiding the truth, the more likely they were to come clean.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Science, offer surprising insights into the ways that money influences honesty.

The findings could help shape policies that encourage conscientious behavior in a range of situations, researchers said. The Internal Revenue Service could design its forms in a way that discourages people from cheating on their taxes, for example, while insurance companies could change the way they collect information about a car accident so that lying becomes less appealing.

“Honesty is essential for almost all social and economic relations,” said Michel Maréchal , an economics professor at the University of Zurich who helped lead the study.

Scientists have studied how the temptation of money affects honesty in laboratory settings, but little is known about how they’re related in the real world — especially on a global scale.

So a team of economists devised an experiment involving more than 170,000 “lost” wallets that turned up in 335 cities across 40 countries, from Indonesia to Ghana to Brazil.

Each wallet contained a grocery list, a key, and three business cards with the same male name and email address. Some of them had no money, while others had the equivalent of about $13.50.

To kick off the experiment, a research assistant brought a wallet to the front desk of a hotel, bank, post office or other public place. He or she would claim to have found it on outside and push it toward the person behind the desk.

“Somebody must have lost it,” the research assistant would tell the unwitting employee. “I’m in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?”

The study authors hypothesized that employees would be more likely to email the wallet’s “owner” (using the address on the business card) if it contained no cash. After all, economists assume people will behave rationally and maximize their utility — which in this case would mean keeping the $13.50 windfall.

But that’s not what happened.

“Much to our surprise, we observed the opposite effect,” Maréchal said. “People were more likely to return the wallet when it contained a higher amount of money.”

READ MORE: Science proves it: Money really can buy happiness »

In the experiment, 51% of wallets with cash were returned, compared with 40% of those without bills or coins.

And people were not treating themselves to a finder’s fee. Spot checks of the wallets showed that 98% of the money was turned in.

“When there was something missing, it was coins,” said study leader Alain Cohn , a behavioral economist at the University of Michigan. In those cases, he said, the researchers figured the coins simply “fell out of the wallet.”

Perhaps $13.50 was such a pittance “that people simply wouldn’t bother stealing it,” said co-author Christian Zünd , a graduate student at the University of Zurich. So the researchers expanded their experiment to include wallets with the equivalent of about $94.

The extra cash seemed to induce yet more honesty. Wallets with the big bucks were returned 72% of the time, compared with 61% of the wallets with less money and 46% of wallets with no cash. Once again, the economists were stumped.

“Why are people more likely to return a wallet that contains more rather than less money?” Zünd said.

Perhaps people were afraid of getting into legal trouble if they kept the money for themselves. The researchers checked to see if the return rates were higher when the wallet was dropped off in the presence of witnesses or security cameras, but those factors didn’t seem to make a difference. Nor was there a correlation between return rates and local lost-property laws.

If people weren’t acting out of fear or being influenced by peer pressure, maybe they were sincerely concerned about the well-being of the wallet’s “owner.” So the researchers introduced “lost” wallets that contained money but no key. The result: Employees were 9.2% more likely to return a wallet with a key than a wallet without one — a sign of altruism, the study authors said.

But that wouldn’t explain why wallets with $94 were returned at higher rates than wallets with $13.50. The researchers conducted a survey in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Poland (the three places where big-money wallets were “lost”) and asked people to rate how much they would feel like thieves if they kept a wallet, with or without money.

Keeping a wallet with no money in it did not feel like stealing, Zünd said. “With money, however, it suddenly feels like stealing, and it feels even more like stealing when the money in the wallet increases.”

In other words, the more money the ”lost” wallet contained, the greater the psychological cost of seeing oneself as a thief. That was a price people didn’t want to pay.

The results bolster the idea “that people care about maintaining a positive moral view of themselves,” said Nina Mažar , a Boston University behavioral economist who was not involved in the study.

Policymakers could use this insight to encourage better behavior among citizens “by making it more difficult for them to convince themselves that they are honest, when in fact, they did something wrong,” Cohn said.

Previous research has shown that reminding people about their moral standards just before they perform a specific task helps reduce their temptation to cheat. For example, people were more likely to fill out an insurance form honestly if they had to sign an honor statement at the beginning of the form rather than at the end.

Future studies should test whether these results would hold up if the owner of the “lost” wallet appeared to be a foreigner, according to Shaul Shavi , who studies behavioral ethics and economics at the University of Amsterdam.

“People find it worthwhile to act kindly toward members of their own group but not members of other groups,” he wrote in an essay that accompanies the study.

Mažar said she’d like to know more about how honest behavior varies across countries. In the experiment, for instance, the odds of a wallet with money being returned were more than three times higher in Switzerland than in China.

“We want to understand, ‘What are the commonalities, what are the differences?’” Mažar said. “Because if we understand those, maybe we’ll have a better sense of how we could increase civil honesty on a much larger scale or reduce corruption.”

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, the monopoly experiment: wealthy people are more selfish.

Does having more money make a person more inclined to share their wealth with others and acknowledge their good fortune? No. Research suggests precisely the opposite .

One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.

Now did the inevitable winners ascribe their winning to good luck—to their head start in the game? No. Instead, they believed they deserved their money and the others deserved their fate. The winners had no empathy for the losers.

I must say I don’t find this surprising. Consider, for example, how we have a word for when we fail at something perhaps because of bad luck—excuse. Failing to arrive on time may really have been because of an accident on the freeway or an inordinate amount of traffic. Perhaps the dog really did eat my homework. Why don’t I play professional basketball? My excuse is that I wasn’t born with the genes that in large part would have allowed me to.

Notice though we don’t have a word to eliminate credit. We might use that word for situations where we achieved something because we were, in large part, lucky. Instead, we usually say that we achieved because we were smart, perseverant, amiable, or we were just winners. We tend to take credit for our successes but not for our failures.

If interested here is the TED Talk b the social psychologist Paul Piff sharing his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy.

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4 thoughts on “ the monopoly experiment: wealthy people are more selfish ”.

I asked two people about this, and the first one—who isn’t rich—said wealthy people don’t like to lose because they don’t want to be taken advantage of. That is to say pride rather than greed. The second person, who is rich, said “rich people don’t know what to do, anymore than anyone else.” In other words, since they’re as clueless as others, they cannot be expected to be wiser than others, or behave more wisely. — At any rate, rich people can always buy people out, so there’s little hope for the near future. An organized crime organization simply purchases capos and soldiers with large sums, and favors. The legal world isn’t that much different than the world of secret societies, is it? The overall principle is the same: give loyal retainers funds and swag. — But it isn’t so much about the rich themselves—it is their descendants who matter to them. Oligarch leaders such as Trump, Putin, and Xi will be gone someday, however they know that their descendants will take over their legacies, insuring their genetic continuation. — So we can see three factors above: the rich not wanting to be taken advantage of. Their cluelessness. Their dynastic continuation. — And finally, it goes without saying they strongly believe that if it wasn’t they themselves dominating, it would be usurpers taking their place. Survey rightwing magazines, and you’ll see many an article beginning with “When Stalin took over the the Soviet Union in 1928…” A shiver runs up the spine of the subscriber as they read the main body of a piece concerning Chuck Schumer, Ocasio-Cortez, or Biden. “We were right! These leftists are totalitarian usurpers and always have been.” Then the slippery-slope is invoked: you start out with Schumer, Ocasio-Cortez, and Biden—and the outcome is the Holodomor, cattle cars, and GULAG. “We must nip these usurpers in the bud, so please donate to the Gipper Memorial Barbecue Fund, so we don’t all end up in the GULAG, eating bread made of sawdust!”

Two things I know: It’s a long way to Tipperary and certainly even longer until we’re ever guided by someone resembling a “Philosopher King.”

When you have never had money, money isn’t your obsession, you aren’t greedy you share with others who also haven’t much surplus, and then,,,you get some money and it becomes very important to have your money because you are your money, your money opens doors for you, people who wouldn’t even ever notice you are now asking for your advice and doing things because you’ve told them to! Modern man’s God is money, as such, a person who has Money exhibits the favor of God because, how could a man be rich except that the God has given it to him! ( That is why we believe in Bill Gates the Philanthropist ) He has Money and he gets good press! Money is the Talisman most sought after by modern people, the true talisman with power, standing between the man who has it and the World, he perceives, of Hunger and chaos that those who don’t have it live in. The more Money you have the greater burden you bear, the more money you have the greater your fear of losing it! “Money is the drug you can’t stop chasing”

Since the future hasn’t happened yet no one ‘Really’ knows what the future will bring, but the World of Men, that World that lives in the minds of all men around the World,, is becoming heavily laden with anxiety of the free floating kind, since it can’t really be objectively dealt with, like Covid in the fully vaxxed, it appears where we think it couldn’t or certainly shouldn’t, or at least where we were told it wouldn’t, yet there it is!

@ Al Brooks, I’ve read everything you have posted here for the last two years, you are unfailingly polite, always of a good nature and always hopeful for a good out come, I also hope for a good outcome Al, please be assured of that, we are both singing from the same page, But, you maybe more prophetic that was your original intention. See you at the Barbecue!

If you use the “model of the mind” by C.H. Rathbun a model designed by advanced hypnotherapy, age regression, this makes perfect sense. The position of the ego, not Freud or Jung, as the critical mind between the conscious mind and the subconscious associated memory files chooses the ego belief system (cognitive bias) over a true self of applied critical thought. This may not lead to full blow narcissistic personality disorder or other variations of psychopathy, but the individual should lean in this direction because of narcissistic supply from domination of the other. It is natural that the mind chooses the ego thought system, the problem is that critical thought appears to come from the mind when in fact it comes from stored emotional associations that are already programed this way.

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Research Proves It: There’s No Such Thing as Noblesse Oblige

To understand how money affects politics, we need to understand how money affects psychology.

P aul Piff just landed on Park Place. I own it. “Shit,” he says.

I also own three railroads, a couple of high-rent monopolies, and a smattering of random properties. Piff is low on cash. He’s toast.

We’re playing Monopoly on a sunny pre-pandemic afternoon in Piff’s modest office at UC Irvine. The 39-year-old psychology professor is an expert on how differences in wealth and status affect people’s values and behavior. On his desk, accompanying an Iggy Pop figurine and a squeeze toy in the shape of a brain, is a framed print of a Campbell’s soup can with the slogan Empathy… Have some! Piff may be an empathetic guy, but his frustration is showing. He’s ready, he says, for this “absurd” game to be done so he can go home for dinner.

The game is absurd because it’s rigged heavily in my favor. More than a decade ago, as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of the UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, Piff used a series of rigged Monopoly games to see how people would respond to being placed randomly into a position of privilege. Some 200 student volunteers were pitted against one another. The “rich” player was given twice as much cash as the “poor” player, collected twice as much money when passing Go, and passed Go more often, because he got to roll two dice while the poorer player got only one. (Richie Rich also got the most popular playing piece, the little car, while his opponent received the undesirable boot.)

Mary Pilon: The racism on your Monopoly board

As the games progressed, rich players became more and more cocksure. They spoke louder, moved their pieces more aggressively, and even consumed more pretzels from bowls that the researchers had put out as part of the experiment. “We had little gradients on the table where you could measure how much space a person is taking up from when they began to when they ended,” Piff told me. “The richer players began to take up more room. They got bigger as they got richer.”

It’s Piff’s turn; he rolls his die. “Five. Tennessee. I’m not going to buy it.”

He can’t afford it.

The Monopoly experiment wasn’t the most rigorous science ever, and Piff never published the results, although the study was later replicated by others and referenced in Piff’s popular TED Talk, “ Does Money Make You Mean? ” But his observations were consistent with a large body of social science finding that people of higher socioeconomic status, compared with those lower down the ladder, are more prone to entitlement and narcissistic behavior . Wealthier subjects also tend to be more self-oriented and more willing to behave unethically in their own self-interest (to lie during negotiations, say, or to steal from an employer). In one study , Piff and his colleagues stationed a pedestrian at the edge of a busy crosswalk and watched to see which cars would let the person cross. Suffice it to say that Fords and Subarus were far more likely to stop than Mercedeses and BMWs.

We find such research amusing because it jibes with our stereotypes of rich people. But there’s nothing frivolous about asking how having an abundance of money affects our psychology. After all, the ranks of the rich, and the wealth they command, have exploded in the United States since the end of the Great Recession. Not even a pandemic could stop this avalanche of assets. The ultrawealthy—Americans with $30 million and up—suffered a brief setback, but by September 2020 the markets had rebounded and the rich were very nearly whole again. Even as the poor and middle class reeled from job losses and the threat of evictions and foreclosures, scores of new billionaires were minted.

Early in his career, Piff had observed that people were studying the causes and effects of poverty ad nauseam, but nobody was addressing the questions he wanted to ask. Namely: What are the social and psychological ramifications of being on top of the economic food chain, of occupying positions of privilege? Wealth-related differences in attitudes and behavior are particularly important wherever the rich have an outsize sway over politics and policy. If, for instance, wealth makes people less compassionate, then a government that believes that the rich should behave in the interests of the populace may have to force them to do so.

P olitical scientists such as Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens have found notable differences in the policy preferences of affluent versus middle-class Americans, not only on purely economic matters like taxation but also on public-education funding, racial equity, and environmental protections, all of which the rich have been significantly less likely to support. This matters because of the influence the rich have over government officials. In one study , Gilens, now a professor at UCLA, combed through thousands of public survey responses and discovered that, on issues where the views of wealthy voters diverged significantly from those of the rest of the populace, the policies ultimately put in place “strongly” reflected the desires of the most affluent respondents—the top-earning 10 percent. Those policies, the study concluded, bore “virtually no relationship to the preferences” of poorer Americans.

Read: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy

Wealthy people are less likely than poor ones, in lab settings at least, to relate to the suffering of others. When people experience compassion, it turns out, our hearts actually slow down. In 2012, Piff’s then-colleagues Michael Kraus and Jennifer Stellar hooked volunteers up to ECG machines and showed them two short videos: a “neutral” video of a woman explaining how to construct a patio wall and a “compassion” video of children receiving chemotherapy treatments for cancer. Relative to the wealthier participants, the poorer ones not only reported feeling greater compassion for the kids but also exhibited a significantly larger slowdown in heart rate from one video to the next.

If affluent people are less moved by the suffering of others, they should be less likely to help those in need, and this too seems to be true both in the lab and outside it. While wealthy families donate significantly more money to charity on average than poor families do, they tend to give away a smaller share of their income . “As wealth goes up, the stinginess seems to increase,” Piff said.

Raymond Fisman, a behavioral economist at Boston University, has found that the elite—regardless of political affiliation—tend to be “ efficiency minded ” as opposed to “equality minded.” He and several colleagues, including Daniel Markovits, the author of 2019’s The Meritocracy Trap , recruited a group of high-status liberals (Yale Law students) who identified as Democrats by a margin of more than 10 to one, and had them play a version of the so-called dictator game. Participants were given tokens redeemable for cash and were told they could give as many tokens as they liked (or none at all) to a fellow participant. An efficiency-minded person behaves more generously when helping someone else doesn’t cost her much—for example, when she’s told she needs to give up only 10 tokens for the other participant to get 20. But an equality-minded person is just as willing to share even if it costs her more. These categories can be used to predict, for example, whether a person will support redistributive tax policies.

Despite their progressive leanings, 80 percent of the Yale students were efficiency focused compared with 50 percent of a public sample.

These results “offer a potential new explanation for the muted policy response to increased income inequality in the United States,” the study authors wrote, because “the policymaking elite” are “far less inclined than is the general population to sacrifice efficiency to promote equality.”

Which brings us back to Monopoly. The most interesting part of the experiment, Piff said, came after, when players were asked to talk about what they had done to affect the game’s outcome. The obvious answer was that the fix was in and the rich player got lucky. But the rich players were almost twice as likely as the poor ones to talk about game strategy—how they’d earned their win. And so it goes in the world. Some of us are born better off than others, “but that’s not how people experience relative privilege or relative disadvantage,” Piff said. “What people do is attune to the things they’ve done: ‘I’ve worked hard. I worked hard in school.’ You start plucking out those things.”

Successful people tend to feel deserving of their lot. As a corollary, they tend to view less-fortunate people as having earned their lack of success. “So you’re more likely to make sense of inequality,” Piff explained, “to justify it, make inequality seem equitable.”

Read: Who actually feels satisfied about money?

The psychologists Kraus and Keltner have found that people who rank themselves at the top of the social scale are significantly more likely to endorse essentialism, the notion that group characteristics are immutable and biologically determined—precisely the sort of beliefs used to justify the mistreatment of low-status groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities. Countless studies, Kraus writes , point to an upper-class tendency toward “self-preservation.” That is, people who view themselves as superior in education, occupation, and assets are inclined to protect their group’s status at the expense of groups they deem less deserving: “These findings should call into question any beliefs in noblesse oblige—elevated rank does not appear to obligate wealthy individuals to do good for the benefit of society.”

A layperson perusing the literature on wealth and behavior might conclude that wealthy people are assholes, but that’s not really fair. “When I’m talking about these findings, it can just sound like flat-out rich-bashing, which I’m not interested in doing,” Piff said. One can be extraordinarily rich and not exhibit these patterns, or be quite poor and exhibit them. The effects that he and his colleagues describe are “small to medium,” and they are averages.

Further complicating our stereotypes is the fact that the most compassionate choice isn’t necessarily the best one. Wealthy subjects, regardless of politics, are prone to a more utilitarian mindset than their less-wealthy counterparts, which enables them, as Piff and his co-authors note in one paper, to “make dispassionate choices to serve the greater good that others might find quite difficult.” During a pandemic, for example, health authorities may have to weigh the likelihood that a given vaccine could severely harm a small number of recipients against the prospect that it could save millions of lives.

Piff’s Monopoly experiment was fun, but it didn’t come close to approximating our nation’s true economic divide. He had to make sure the games weren’t too rigged, or the poor players wouldn’t bother trying. I instead proposed a game in which I had the wealth of an average member of the top 1 percent, versus Piff’s middle-class net worth. I would get about $53 for every $1 in his pocket. But then we had a problem: If we gave Piff $500 so he could buy a few properties, I would have been due $26,500. A Monopoly set contains only $20,580.

We tried a new setup. Piff would still represent the middle class, and I’d be a run-of-the-mill top-10 percenter. He’d start with $500, and I’d get $4,500.

While we counted out our cash, Piff told me about the backlash his work has received over the years. Tons of hate mail. “I used to get a lot more. But I still probably get an email a day. I think most of it is political, because it seems so clearly ideologically driven.” I asked whether he thought his progressive values affected his research findings. “Probably inherently,” he admitted. They likely affect the questions he chooses to ask.

As he elaborated, I suddenly realized I’d screwed up my math. I actually should have had 10 times as much money as he had, not nine. “So I’ll just take another $500, okay?” He regarded me with a bemused expression. “I love that as I was doing some personally revelatory sharing,” he said, “probably some large proportion of your mind and attention was devoted to calculating out how much more you should’ve gotten.”

The nerve of the little people.

This essay was adapted from Mechanic’s forthcoming book, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live―And How Their Wealth Harms Us All .

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Places across the U.S. are testing no-strings cash as part of the social safety net

Jennifer Ludden

Christopher Santiago, 38, hangs out at home in Alsip, Ill., with one of his three children, 9-year-old Calliope. He says Cook County's basic income program has let him provide more for his kids. Taylor Glascock for NPR hide caption

Christopher Santiago, 38, hangs out at home in Alsip, Ill., with one of his three children, 9-year-old Calliope. He says Cook County's basic income program has let him provide more for his kids.

Christopher Santiago recalls being skeptical the first time he heard about basic income — giving people cash with no conditions on how to spend it. It was 2020, when presidential candidate Andrew Yang pitched it for all American adults, and Santiago thought, "That doesn't make much sense."

But for a year now, Santiago has been getting $500 a month through one of the largest cash aid pilots in the U.S., and he's come around.

The single dad of three lives in Alsip, Ill., and was one of a whopping 233,000 people who applied for the program in Cook County, which includes Chicago. (There was a lottery to pick the 3,250 participants.) As a public employee, his income is toward the upper end of the program cutoff, but he says it hardly feels like enough for a family of four.

Snuggling on the couch next to his youngest daughter, 9-year-old Calliope, he says the extra cash has helped him manage skyrocketing prices for everything. And it's let him provide more for his children, including ballet classes, a birthday visit to Disney on Ice, and family trips.

"It's a hard thing to have to tell a child, 'No,' " he says. "It kind of kills you a little bit."

Santiago was also able to avoid a mini-emergency when right after a weekend trip, his furnace broke. "It was a $700 part and I was just like, 'Oh God, this would have sunk me.' "

A once radical idea got a boost during the pandemic

Cash aid without conditions was considered a radical idea before the pandemic. But early results from a program in Stockton, Calif., showed promise. Then interest exploded after it became clear how much COVID stimulus checks and emergency rental payments had helped people. The U.S. Census Bureau found that an expanded child tax credit cut child poverty in half. That is, until the expansion ended and child poverty spiked .

Child poverty more than doubles — a year after hitting record low, Census data shows

Around the country, from big cities to rural counties, there've been more than 150 basic income pilots , and counting. Supporters say it works because people can spend the money on whatever they need most.

"They can pursue education for themselves and their children," says Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. "They can invest in their families in ways that makes them more productive and more stable over time."

Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, says she hopes to prove basic income works so that it could someday go nationwide. Taylor Glascock for NPR hide caption

Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, says she hopes to prove basic income works so that it could someday go nationwide.

The idea is not new. Preckwinkle notes that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers called for guaranteed income. So, briefly, did President Richard Nixon . These days, some tech entrepreneurs argue that cash aid will be needed as gig work, automation and AI threaten jobs.

Preckwinkle thinks cash aid should be a permanent part of the social safety net. And she wants to prove it works, so it could someday go nationwide.

"The federal government is really the only entity that has the resources to do this on the mass scale that it needs to be done," she says.

As pandemic money runs out, basic income programs might sputter

The pandemic also spurred cash aid because cities got their own pot of COVID relief money. Many are using that to fund guaranteed income pilots. Philanthropic donations are another major funding source, including from groups that have long organized direct cash payments to combat poverty in developing nations.

The pilots target low- to moderate-income people, from a few hundred to a few thousand households, and generally pay them $500 or $1,000 a month for a year or two.

When Cook County's two-year pilot ends, Preckwinkle has vowed to use the county's own budget to keep it going. A few states have also allocated funding to cash aid programs. But as pandemic money runs out, it's possible this mass experiment could fizzle.

"That's a concern, and that's what we are pushing back against," says Natalie Foster, president of the Economic Security Project, which advocates for guaranteed income. She founded the group along with Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook.

Foster says the U.S. has more poverty than almost any other rich nation and that its social safety net is one of the stingiest.

The Indicator from Planet Money

Could cash payments ease recessions.

"If you look at so many other countries with similar economies, you understand that college is free," Foster says. "They ensure that health care is cheap and affordable. Oftentimes, child care is free. That is the type of life we could offer Americans and choose not to."

The problem hit home for Ameya Pawar with a trip to his local pharmacy. He's now a senior adviser with the Economic Security Project in Chicago. But in 2016, he was a new dad who was sent to get diapers and was puzzled to find them and other baby products under lock and key.

Ameya Pawar is a senior adviser with the Economic Security Project in Chicago. He says cash can help people buy things as simple as diapers and wipes, which are not covered by the existing U.S. social safety net. Taylor Glascock for NPR hide caption

Ameya Pawar is a senior adviser with the Economic Security Project in Chicago. He says cash can help people buy things as simple as diapers and wipes, which are not covered by the existing U.S. social safety net.

He came to realize that people are not allowed to use public assistance to buy diapers or wipes, and saw the locks as a heartbreaking sign of their desperation. Because "you need to send your infant with diapers or wipes to attend child care, so you can go to work," he says.

Pawar and others point to welfare reform in the 1990s, which dramatically reduced the amount of cash assistance. For the poorest families, that lack of cash can make it hard to pay for things like utilities, transportation to a job, enough food for a full month or school supplies for children.

This is partly why advocates for basic income say it's not meant to replace other assistance, but to add to it.

An extra $500 a month may still not be enough to get ahead

TaylorRaquel Adams says the $500 she gets each month from the Cook County pilot is a blessing, even if she's "still in poverty."

She works an overnight shift at an Amazon plant — 3:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. — in the department where things get returned. "I'm inspecting it to see if we can resell it, if it needs to be refurbished, or if it's salvage," she says.

Adams is 42, single and has no children. She's worked since she was 15 and would love to work full time again. But she says it would be tough, given that she suffers PTSD from childhood trauma and has schizoaffective disorder.

Adams gets disability income, a housing subsidy and food aid. And still, despite her conscientious budgeting, the extra cash basically helps her make ends meet. "I'm hoping in the next couple of months I get some savings," she says.

Much of the money has gone for medical expenses. Adams' Medicare plan does not cover dental or vision, and she needs to spend $500 more a month for that. Two years ago, she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and the supplements and vitamins her doctor recommends can mean spending hundreds of dollars some months.

The cash aid also let her buy Christmas presents last year for the first time in a while. And it allowed her to splurge on a pedicure for her birthday — what she calls "pamper-me time." One month's payment went for a pricey repair on her Chevy Spark, an enormous help given her nearly hourlong commute to Amazon.

"You need income to work," she says. "There's only so many jobs in my area that's within walking distance."

Matt Harvey, 25, recently started working at a Chicago nonprofit called Equity and Transformation. He says extra cash from Cook County's basic income pilot program helps him and his partner pay for day care for their 2-year-old son. Taylor Glascock for NPR hide caption

Matt Harvey, 25, recently started working at a Chicago nonprofit called Equity and Transformation. He says extra cash from Cook County's basic income pilot program helps him and his partner pay for day care for their 2-year-old son.

For Matt Harvey, the extra monthly income has made it far easier for him to work full time.

Harvey is 25 and was unemployed when he applied for Cook County's basic income pilot. He and his girlfriend lived separately at the time, but he did most of the parenting for their toddler son while she worked.

After they moved in together, they used the extra money for groceries and household items. Harvey says the payments lowered his stress and made him "feel more like I'm contributing."

He tried to ramp up side gigs as a driver for Uber and Amazon Flex. But he says it was always a calculation over whether the money he made from those hours was worth the cost of day care, "because the day care is expensive."

Then Harvey got a full-time job in research and communications at a nonprofit. It meant his son would have to be in child care full time at a cost that felt out of reach: $2,000 a month.

"We were only able to put him in day care because of the extra $500," he says.

Their rent is going up again this year. And though Harvey didn't finish college, he still owes about $20,000 in student debt. Still, he feels they're in better shape with his new job. And they're planning ahead so they can be prepared for when the extra monthly payments stop.

Cash aid can also help people's psychological well-being

Guaranteed income programs specifically do not require people to work. That's a selling point for supporters, who say the extra cash can create the time and space to find a better job or perhaps a new direction.

But the lack of any work requirement is a main concern for opponents, especially if no-strings cash aid were to be made permanent.

"My fear is that we would see earnings and hours and work decrease amongst low income Americans," says Leslie Ford, with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

She agrees the U.S. social safety net needs to change but says work should remain at the heart of it.

"Ultimately, if we want this person to become self-sufficient, if we want the outcome of our safety net to not merely be subsistence, work is a key aspect of flourishing long term," Ford says.

So far, with one- to two-year cash aid pilots, researchers say there's been no significant impact on whether people have jobs. Some parents, though, have cut back on gig work to spend more time with their children.

To tackle poverty, more states will offer bigger child tax credits in 2024

Researchers also reject the stigma that poor people can't be trusted with free money.

Calliope Santiago with her cat, Pixel. Among other things, her dad has used extra cash payments to pay for her ballet classes and family trips. Taylor Glascock for NPR hide caption

Calliope Santiago with her cat, Pixel. Among other things, her dad has used extra cash payments to pay for her ballet classes and family trips.

"They spend the money in ways that everyone does," says Stacia West with the University of Tennessee, and a co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Guaranteed Income Research. "Going to the grocery store, making sure the rent is paid, paying the car note."

She and her co-researcher Amy Castro have published peer-reviewed research on several cash aid pilots, including in Stockton, Calif. , and are following others around the country . They find that — no surprise — the extra income makes people more financially stable. After about six months of payments, they also start to see "little glimmers of changes in a person's psychology," says West. "We see increases in a person's psychological well-being, so a reduction in psychological distress."

They also find the changes fade within months after the money stops, as more households report they would not have $400 for an emergency.

Castro says public momentum on basic income is moving faster than the data, and there are still many open questions.

"How long do people need to be receiving cash in order to create change? And how do we put that into policy in such a way that it actually makes sense?" she asks. "These programs are expensive. People should be asking those questions."

Castro, West and others are racing to find answers, as more and more places turn to direct cash payments to help struggling Americans.

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Social Experiment: Do You Have a Dollar?

‘Tis the season… for social experiments? Why not? It’s definitely the season for people asking you for money. Chances are, you can’t walk more than a couple blocks before seeing someone in a red outfit ringing a bell and asking you for a $1. The only problem is, most people don’t carry much cash on them these days and physically reaching large amounts of people is nearly impossible.

But a New Yorker named Eric Briarley thinks he has a solution. He wants to help feed the city’s poor and hungry by using Social Media . He has challenged one million New Yorkers to employ their individual social networks one dollar at a time. That’s right. You can only give one dollar. The goal is to raise 1 million dollars in 40 days. His website, DoYouHaveOneDollar.org , asks you to donate just one dollar between Nov. 22nd (Thanksgiving) and Dec. 31st (New Year’s Eve) and share that experience with your social networks. The proceeds will go to an established New York City charity called The Bowery Mission .

Do you have a dollar to spare and a moment to share? Donate and share here at DoYouHaveOneDollar.org .

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Abortion United Evangelicals and Republicans. Now That Alliance Is Fraying.

The southern baptist convention, long a bellwether for american evangelicalism, voted to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.”

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, voted at its annual gathering last week to condemn IVF fertility treatments. Today, my colleague Ruth Graham on the story behind the vote the Republicans scrambled and prompted, and what it could eventually mean for the rest of the country.

It’s Monday, June 17.

So, Ruth, you write about religion for “The Times” and you were covering the big annual meeting of Southern baptists last week. And they made a pretty big decision. Tell us about it.

The Southern Baptist Convention, it’s the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States. They have almost 13 million members, more than 45,000 churches. It’s a huge group.

And Southern Baptists know their political power. And they are basically a barometer of evangelical sentiment in the US. You know, what they say kind of indicates what the typical evangelical cares about in any given moment. And fun for reporters, they all meet once a year in this giant gathering that any church can send delegates to. The delegates are called messengers.

So this year that meeting was in Indianapolis. There were almost 11,000 messengers there in the convention center. And one of the important political topics they took on this year was something they have never discussed as a full body before, and that’s the ethics of in-vitro fertilization.

OK. So this very important conference of Southern Baptists takes up IVF. In other words, the medical procedure that allows people to get pregnant through fertilization in a lab. So what do they say?

So a lot of Southern Baptists historically have not taken issue with IVF per se at all. They view it as a technology used to create life. You know, it’s used by families who desperately want to be parents, and they view that as a positive thing.

But the procedure does involve, typically, the production of more embryos than will be used by the couple that created them. And those embryos end up sometimes discarded, sometimes frozen indefinitely, sometimes donated, but not used in the way that they were originally created to be used. So some Southern Baptists do take issue with discarding those excess embryos. And the reason is they say life begins at conception.

This is sort of a core anti-abortion belief. The moment that the sperm meets the egg, that is the stuff of life. There’s a verse in Psalms, “You created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

And you’ll hear that cited in Christian anti-abortion spaces a lot as evidence that God cares about and views as fully human human beings at the very moment of conception. And that would include these frozen embryos.

Right. If you truly believe that life begins at conception, you probably would not agree to abortion at any stage of gestation. And that same logic would apply to IVF. So when this issue gets raised at the conference, what happens? What are people saying?

So there’s a resolution that comes to the floor. Resolutions in Southern Baptist language are nonbinding. This would not be a ban. It’s just a statement of concern that’s meant to summarize Southern Baptist opinion on this particular topic.

So the language that’s proposed calls on Southern Baptists to reaffirm the value of human life. And then it narrows in on human life in an embryonic stage. And it urges them to just use reproductive technologies, fertility treatments that are consistent with that view of human life.

What does that mean?

They’re actually walking a pretty fine line here. They stopped short of saying that a Southern Baptist should never use IVF under any circumstances. They’re calling attention to these excess embryos and saying that, you know, Baptists really should only use reproductive technology with attention to life at this embryonic stage. And the resolution also goes so far as to ask Baptists to call on their governments to restrain these kind of technologies that violate the dignity of, as they put it, quote, “frozen embryonic human beings.”

Hm. So they’re also actually asking people to pressure their governments to respect this position, basically?

That’s right. It’s light on specifics, but that’s the suggestion.

But Ruth, why did they decide to raise this issue now? I mean, IVF obviously has been around for a long time,

Right. So back in February, there was a case that reached the Alabama Supreme Court that had started when a group of families in the state filed this wrongful death claim over a mistake at a fertility clinic where their frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed. They sue, and the state Supreme Court ends up ruling not only in their favor, but says really clearly that frozen embryos should be considered children. So the Chief Justice writes, “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing His glory.”

So really putting out this religious argument for human life in embryonic form. So that case lands like a bomb.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The stunning decision from Alabama’s Supreme Court has enormous and immediate consequences for fertility care.

And it really caught a lot of people off guard. You know, all along the spectrum.

A third fertility clinic in Alabama has shut down after the state Supreme Court ruled embryos are children.

The court offered no clear roadmap for what is and isn’t legal.

And it just places this question about the ethics and the legal aspects and all of this, it just puts IVF into the national conversation.

We’re concerned that with the new ruling, we may have to limit fertilization of eggs, which will limit success of treatment, limit efficiency, increase cost, and of course, risk to patients.

It’s a stressful process already. And I don’t need the added stress, and no woman does, of whether or not this might be moral to go through to have children when this is my only path.

And there’s this really strong backlash to the idea that embryos should be protected with the force of the law as full human beings. Because IVF is broadly popular, including among many Republican voters.

Alabama House of Representatives and the Senate have passed a law that restores access to in vitro fertilization. Doctors at clinics have told ABC News the new language will give them enough reassurance to resume IVF without facing legal risks.

Ultimately, the state legislature, the Republican governor work really quickly to reinstate it in the state. But it opens up this new conversation among conservative evangelicals who are broadly anti-abortion. And they’re starting to think should we think about this IVF conversation in the same way that we’ve thought about abortion? Should we be pushing on this more?

So most of the country takes the lesson from the Alabama case that IVF is not something to be interfered with. But for some in the evangelical community, they take the opposite lesson, it sounds like.

That’s right. For some evangelicals, this feels like the perfect moment to bring IVF into the abortion conversation and start to turn the tide against it. One of these people is an ethicist in Kentucky. His name is Andrew Walker. He works at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It’s a major Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville.

And he’s been wanting to bring IVF into sort of the mainstream Southern Baptist consciousness for a while. He first started writing about it about five years ago. He actually published an essay in a sort of mainstream evangelical publication about it, got a lot of pushback, never felt it was the right moment to bring a resolution to the meeting, but he’s had this tucked in the back of his mind because he has this pretty clear conviction that IVF does not comport with Christian anti-abortion values.

So when the Alabama ruling happens, and the backlash, and the broader conversation, Andrew Walker thinks, you know, this is the moment. So he calls his friend and mentor, Dr. Al Mohler, who’s the president of the seminary where they both work. And he says, let’s do it.

Let’s start crafting a resolution for the meeting this year. And we’ll see if it gets forward. We’ll see if it gets discussed. We’ll see if it gets approved. But we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot here.

And did Baptists like Walker understand that a resolution like this would have potentially quite bad implications for mainstream Republican politicians? Like, wasn’t that the lesson of Alabama?

Yes. And I talked with both Dr. Walker and Dr. Mohler about this. And they both said they were completely aware of that. They didn’t love it, but they both felt that that was not their highest priority. That was not their highest responsibility.

And if anything, Dr. Mohler said this in particular, he wanted to nudge Republicans on the issue. He actually said he wanted to do more than nudge Republicans. He wanted to call them out. And so this would be a really high profile way to show to Republicans, look, we’ve got thousands of mainstream Southern Baptists in a room here who are all expressing collective alarm and opposition to IVF as it’s commonly practiced.

OK. So Baptist leaders nevertheless put this proposal to a vote on the floor. Tell us about how that went, when they put this proposal in front of thousands of other evangelicals.

It was really dramatic.

[CHRISTIAN CHORAL MUSIC]

We’re in this cavernous convention hall where, over the course of the last few days, there’s been singing of hymns. People have heard sermons. There’s been prayers. They’ve sent missionaries out. They’ve been sort of together in the work of making their convention what they want it to be.

Microphone 3A, would you give us your name, your church, and proceed with your discussion?

Yes. Daniel Taylor, messenger —

And then there’s this incredibly dramatic discussion and debate about the ethics of something so personal.

Thank you, Mr President. I rise to speak in favor of this amendment, out of both a heart for the unborn and for those stricken with infertility.

Anyone is allowed to come to the microphone under Southern Baptist rules. And you had two men come to the microphone to share really personal stories —

From my friends, the initial steps of IVF yielded six viable embryos. Four of the embryos were implanted and two were frozen for a time. Only one survived to term, their son and my godson. Because of him, I thank God for IVF.

One has a godson born via IVF.

I have a son because of IVF. I have another son 20 weeks old in my wife’s womb because of IVF.

The other has one child and his wife pregnant with a second via IVF.

I am for the sanctity of life and for the sanctity of embryos. I am against the idea that this technology is so wicked that it cannot be employed.

And both spoke about just loving these children and seeing the technology as a blessing from God.

I thank the authors of the resolution and the committee for the opportunity for the SBC to be a voice of biblical truth and clarity in this pressing cultural issue.

A woman came to the microphone, sort of on the other side.

In addition to my living children, I am the mother of four babies that I never got to hold. Two of those babies we adopted as embryos. Nothing in the process of IVF upholds the sanctity of life. There is no way to describe the treatment of embryos at any point in the IVF process as ethical or dignified.

To share that she had participated in embryo adoption, meaning that she had another family’s embryos implanted in her womb to try to bring those pregnancies to fruition. And in this case, she miscarried both times. But she had done that out of a sense of really moral obligation to these embryos as human life.

And it was quiet. I mean, people are really listening to these really personal stories and wrestling with them. This is personal for a lot of people in that room. But at the end of all this, it’s time to vote on the resolution.

So in the end, the language has been really carefully crafted to kind of bring Southern Baptists along on this argument. So it affirms that God loves all children, no matter the circumstances of their conception. It expresses empathy for couples trying to conceive. It says it’s a good and positive thing to want to have children, to expand your family.

And then it arrives at this point of saying that IVF, as it’s commonly practiced, is not an ethical option for Southern Baptists in most circumstances. So this resolution comes to a vote, to the thousands of people in that room. They’re all sitting in folding chairs. They raise their little orange ballots in favor or against. And the resolution passes overwhelmingly.

So this resolution ultimately passes. But how important is it really if it’s just an expression of sentiment, it’s not actually a directive to do something?

It’s hugely significant. This is the first major public statement that this group of influential evangelicals, frankly, influential Republican voters have made on this issue. And it really sets them up on a collision course with mainstream Republicans.

We’ll be right back.

So Ruth, you said that this vote really sets evangelicals on a collision course with mainstream Republicans. What did that look like?

So mainstream Republicans, in the wake of the Alabama ruling, have really circled the wagons to try to show that they are not only totally comfortable with IVF, but are going to go to great lengths to preserve it. And they see it as pro-family. They know that’s how most of their constituents view it. They want to really show that they see that as totally separate from the conversation about abortion and that they are going to be the ones to preserve access to IVF. And so on the very same day this happened in Indianapolis, in Washington —

I want to yield to the senator from Alabama, Senator Britt.

Thank you so much.

— Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, she’s an evangelical Christian, she gets up on the floor of the Senate and gives this impassioned speech supporting IVF.

I was proud to join my colleague from Texas in introducing The IVF Protection Act. I am —

She, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has put forward this bill that they say is intended to protect IVF access by blocking Medicaid funding to states that ban it outright. Democrats say that actually would not have done anything to fix the problem. And there are these kind of jockeying bills. But still, she gets up on the Senate floor —

Look, as a mom, I know firsthand that there’s no greater joy in this life than that of being a mother. IVF helps aspiring parents —

— and speaks, as a mom, as she puts it, in defense of IVF.

IVF access is fundamentally pro-family.

She’s wearing this really prominent cross necklace. And she talks about how supporting IVF is pro-family, that that’s the pro-family point of view.

We all have loved ones, whether they’re family members or friends, who have become parents or grandparents through IVF.

And she puts out a statement the same day, with Senator Cruz, and it’s signed by all of her Republican colleagues, including Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn, every conservative across the spectrum in the Senate signs on to this support for IVF.

So even the most conservative Republicans in Congress are coming out with this position that’s really at odds with evangelicals.

That’s right. IVF is hugely popular. Fertility treatments are widely used, including by evangelicals. Most people don’t even think negatively about this stuff, let alone want to ban it. So it’s a real dilemma for Republicans to watch evangelicals potentially turn in this direction.

So there’s pressure from the Southern Baptist Convention on mainstream Republicans, which I have to imagine is making Democrats pretty happy. I mean, I saw President Biden out there with a fundraising email the day that the Southern Baptists voted.

That’s right. I mean, Democrats are really leaning into reproductive rights right now. They’re putting abortion measures on ballots in November. They know that’s going to attract their voters. It’s going to attract independents.

They’re pointing out these restrictions. They’re talking about this stuff. And the vote last week from the Southern Baptists is another suggestion that there’s this movement out there that doesn’t just want to regulate at 15 weeks, not just at 12 weeks, not just at 6 weeks, but, you know, all the way down to the embryo in the lab. So I think Democrats see an opportunity here to exploit this growing divide between evangelicals and Republicans, at least on this issue.

And this is all going to be all the more salient ahead of a very important presidential election. I mean, we’re really hurtling down the tracks toward a big decision point for people.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. The Republican Party and American evangelicals have been in lockstep really since the 1970s. And now for Republicans, there’s this question about whether or not it’s still politically advantageous for them to follow where the anti-abortion movement is going on this stuff, because they’re pushing into places that are really deeply unpopular among the American population overall.

And the anti-abortion movement itself at this point is pretty divided on where it’s going to go next. So we saw the Supreme Court last week on Thursday, they maintained access to the abortion pill. There were divisions even within the anti-abortion movement over whether or not to bring that case forward. Some within that movement were skeptical of it. So you’re seeing sort of confusion and disagreement even internally on where to go after the overturning of “Roe v. Wade.”

Ruth, what about the broader population of evangelical Christians? There were 10,000 people at the Southern Baptist Conference voting on this. But what about everybody else? Where are they on this?

I think that’s still a really open question at this point. I talked to this young pastor from Georgia at the meeting, who was saying, you know, I don’t want to go back to the people in my church and tell them that the creation of their children and grandchildren comes from these immoral means. And the language of the resolution was careful around that, but it’s still going to be really hard to get that across and to just translate it for the people in the pews. And if you’re an ordinary Southern Baptist kind of reading the headlines and even reading the text of this, it’s a tough one.

At the same time, talking with Andrew Walker about this, who co-wrote the resolution, he acknowledged that a lot of Southern Baptists have not really thought about this stuff in terms of ethics and morality and connected it to the abortion question. But when he has one-on-one conversations with people about the topic and sort of walks them through, basically, the logic of the resolution, he said almost everyone comes away from those conversations with, at the very least, a sort of skepticism and a level of critical thinking around fertility treatments that they didn’t come in with. And that suggests that there’s at least sort of an openness to thinking differently about fertility treatments.

And the reason all this matters is obviously evangelicals are this hugely influential voting bloc. They’re used to having the power to turn their theological beliefs into policy. And when they come together, you get this political force, the same political force that worked for decades over a lot of obstacles and was eventually successful in overturning “Roe v. Wade.”

Now, IVF is different than abortion. IVF is extremely popular, including, at this point, among evangelical Christians. But if we find out that evangelicals are persuadable on IVF, it doesn’t just have implications for their personal spiritual lives. If this is the beginning of a moral awakening on IVF, and that’s a big if, it would have real implications for the rest of the country.

Ruth, thank you.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on bump stocks which enable semiautomatic rifles to fire at speeds rivaling those of machine guns. The decision, by a vote of 6 to 3, split along ideological lines, had the effect of erasing one of the government’s rare firearm regulations that came from a mass shooting. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its power when it prohibited the device by issuing a rule that classified bump stocks as machine guns. And —

[CROWD CHANTING]

— tens of thousands of demonstrators crowded onto streets in France on Saturday to denounce the rise of the country’s far right as the nation prepared to vote in snap elections set to take place later this month. French president Emmanuel Macron shocked the country last week by announcing that he was dissolving the lower house of Parliament after his party was clobbered by far right opponents in a vote to seat the next European Parliament. Critics, including some in Macron’s own party, warned that the president’s move to call snap elections opened the door to empowering the far right in France for the first time since World War II.

Today’s episode was produced by Rob Szypko, Sydney Harper, Stella Tan, Aastha Chaturvedi, and Rachelle Bonja. It was edited by Marc Georges and Lisa Chow, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Ruth Graham

Produced by Rob Szypko ,  Sydney Harper ,  Stella Tan ,  Asthaa Chaturvedi and Rachelle Bonja

Edited by Marc Georges and Lisa Chow

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

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The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination of Protestant Christians in the United States, voted at an annual gathering last week to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization.

Ruth Graham, who covers religion, faith and values for The New York Times, discusses the story behind the vote, the Republican scramble it prompted and what it could eventually mean for the rest of the country.

On today’s episode

Ruth Graham , who covers religion, faith and values for The New York Times.

Background reading

How baptists and the Republican Party took different paths on I.V.F.

Here’s what to know about the vote .

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman.

Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times. More about Ruth Graham

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