Watching about 300 cars at a busy intersection in the San Francisco Bay area, researchers ranked each driver's class on a scale of one to five according to the model, age, and appearance of the car. They then noted whether the car illegally cut in front of another. Those in the less classy cars cut-off people up less than 10% of the time, but drivers in the more expensive cars did so around one-third of the time. These results, presented at the SPSP annual meeting in January, are part of a suite of studies published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues. They found that upper class individuals may be more likely to engage in unethical behavior, including cheating and lying.
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