Why Rich People Seem So Mean: The Psychology of Wealth and Empathy
Sunday, November 9, 2025
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.
Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
In every generation, wealth needs a mascot. The 1980s gave us Gordon Gekko—greed with a gym membership.
The 2000s crowned the venture capitalist in a Patagonia vest.
And the 2020s, naturally, offered the crypto messiah livestreaming from a tax haven.
America loves its rich like it loves its villains: with curiosity, envy, and moral outrage. We claim to despise them, yet we study them for tips, because they’ve always run the show.
Every era revises the American gospel of greed and insists this is the version that is truly moral.
Do Rich People Really Act Differently?
Psychological research says yes—repeatedly, and, to be fair, even across other cultures, according to research..
At the University of California, Berkeley, social psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues have shown that wealth consistently predicts self-focused behavior.
Upper-class participants in their studies were more likely to cheat at games, take more than their fair share of communal goods, and even ignore traffic laws when driving luxury cars (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012).
Their finding: courtesy dropped roughly 3% for every additional thousand dollars the vehicle was worth. In short, money may not buy happiness, but it can lease entitlement.
Meanwhile, Michael Kraus, Stephane Côté, and Dacher Keltner found that people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds were less accurate at reading emotional expressions—literally less sensitive to distress (Psychological Science, 2012).
The wealthy aren’t uniquely cruel. They’re simply less attuned to suffering they don’t experience.
Why Wealth Dulls Empathy: What Psychology and Neuroscience Reveal
Recent neuroscience supports this picture.
Keely Muscatell and colleagues found that people with higher incomes show reduced activation in empathy-related regions of the brain—specifically, the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex—when viewing images of suffering (Muscatell et al., 2012, Psychological Science).
But this empathy deficit isn’t permanent.
When participants were primed to think about community or shared humanity, their neural empathy responses rebounded.
Wealth, it seems, doesn’t actually kill empathy; it just puts it into sleep mode.
The Dark Triad Economy
If you’ve ever wondered why so many CEOs sound like Bond villains with MBAs, psychology offers a framework: the Dark Triad—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
A study by Peter Jonason and Gregory Webster found that people high in these traits tend to earn more and rise faster in hierarchies (Psychological Assessment, 2010).
Corporate researcher Paul Babiak and psychopathy expert Robert Hare estimated that clinical psychopathy occurs three times more often among executives than in the general population (Snakes in Suits, 2006).
In a moral system indexed to quarterly profits, traits that once read as defects—detachment, manipulation, risk-seeking—become assets. Capitalism doesn’t simply tolerate these traits; it selects for them.
Moral Disengagement: Bandura’s Missing Link
The late psychologist Albert Bandura called this process moral disengagement: the ability to act against one’s ethical standards without feeling guilt. People justify exploitation by reframing it as “strategy,” “competition,” or “market efficiency.”
In wealth-saturated environments, these cognitive tricks are cultural norms. “It’s just business” becomes the secular absolution. Bandura’s research shows that such rationalizations allow cruelty to coexist with self-respect.
Wealth, in this sense, doesn’t corrupt; it lubricates moral distance.
Disconnection as a Luxury Good
Psychologist Steve Taylor describes this as psychological separation—a condition of chronic disconnection that masquerades as independence (The Fall, 2005).
You can see it in microcosm: the Silicon Valley café where the new priesthood of prosperity debates ethics over $14 matcha lattes. Their Allbirds shoes whisper humility; their eyes never leave the screen.
Disconnection becomes a luxury item. If you can’t feel friction, nothing slows you down. Empathy, once a human default, becomes a discretionary expense.
The Protestant Work Ethic, Rebranded
Every age baptizes greed in a new moral language. Max Weber called it the Protestant work ethic—the belief that diligence and profit signal divine favor. The Gilded Age renamed it efficiency. Wall Street called it growth. Silicon Valley calls it disruption.
The vocabulary evolves; the theology doesn’t.
America needs its rich to be both enviable and damnable—it keeps the dream alive that decency, like capital, can scale.
Can Money Buy Happiness?
It depends which kind.
Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that happiness rises with income only until about $75,000 per year (about $110,000 today) (PNAS, 2010). After that, well-being plateaus. That was a widely discussed piece of research, perhaps overly so.
Later, Matt Killingsworth and Kahneman found that for some, happiness continues to rise—but only for those not obsessed with wealth (PNAS Nexus, 2023). For the financially fixated, satisfaction actually declines as income grows.
Wealth buys freedom, not fulfillment. It builds walls, not warmth.
The Empathy Dividend
If money dulls connection, generosity reawakens it.
Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and Michael Norton found that spending money on others increases happiness more than spending on oneself (Science, 2008).
And Stephane Côté, House, and Willer (2015) found that in societies with greater inequality, the wealthy become less generous. Privilege narrows perspective; altruism widens it.
Altruism, biologically speaking, activates the same brain regions as pleasure. Generosity is not moral poetry—it’s neurochemistry.
Power, Stress, and the Erosion of Empathy
Emerging research connects chronic power to compassion fatigue. Folks in high-status positions often show higher cortisol reactivity when their authority is challenged (Sherman et al., 2015, PNAS). Over time, this physiological stress can reduce emotional availability.
In couples therapy, I often see this in microcosm: the high-achieving spouse who manages people all day but can’t manage intimacy at home. The same neural habits that succeed in leadership—control, competition, dispassion—strangle connection.
Wealth isolates. Power anesthetizes. But both are reversible with reflection, bestowed attention, and a little humility.
FAQ
Why are rich people sometimes less empathetic?
Wealth reduces empathic accuracy by dampening neural responses to others’ distress (Muscatell et al., 2012). Psychologically, power creates distance and moral disengagement (Bandura, 2002).
Can money make you happier?
Only up to a point. Happiness rises with income until basic needs and social security are met (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010), then levels off unless generosity and a sense of purpose are restored.
How can therapy help wealthy or high-achieving couples?
Therapy can restore emotional attunement by addressing power imbalances and chronic disconnection—the same dynamics research show tend to worsen with success.
Final Thoughts
Money doesn’t ruin people; it reveals them.
A kind person with money becomes a benefactor. A narcissist becomes a brand. A psychopath becomes a keynote speaker.
Middle-class morality rests on the illusion of restraint.
We call the rich ruthless because we can’t afford to be. But the America that revels in, and rewards ruthlessness belongs to us all.
Wealth magnifies personality, corrodes inhibition, and rewards the traits that look visionary in a shareholder letter and monstrous just about everywhere else.
Money doesn’t buy happiness—it buys stillness, the kind that passes for peace when no one dares mention the cost.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Babiak, P., & Hare, R. D. (2006). Snakes in suits: When psychopaths go to work. HarperCollins.
Bandura, A. (2002). Selective moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101–119.
Côté, S., House, J., & Willer, R. (2015). High economic inequality leads higher-income individuals to be less generous. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(52), 15838–15843.
Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B., & Norton, M. I. (2008). Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science, 319(5870), 1687–1688.
Jonason, P. K., & Webster, G. D. (2010). The Dirty Dozen: A concise measure of the Dark Triad. Psychological Assessment, 22(2), 420–432.
Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), 16489–16493.
Killingsworth, M. A., & Kahneman, D. (2023). Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year. PNAS Nexus, 2(3), pgad019.
Kraus, M. W., Côté, S., & Keltner, D. (2012). Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy. Psychological Science, 23(11), 1377–1383.
Muscatell, K. A., et al. (2012). Socioeconomic status and neural responses to social threat and reward. Psychological Science, 23(11), 1351–1359.
Piff, P. K., Stancato, D. M., Côté, S., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Keltner, D. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(11), 4086–4091.
Sherman, G. D., et al. (2015). Leadership is associated with lower levels of stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(19), 6528–6533.
Taylor, S. (2005). The Fall: The insanity of the ego in human history and the dawning of a new era. O Books.
Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Scribner.