Money, Monopoly & Moi

The Atlantic has an article disavowing our fantasy notion of noblesse oblige, part of which was a Monopoly experiment in which one person started out with tremendous advantages over their opponent: twice as much money, two dice instead of one so they passed GO more often etc etc. And it turns out they acted more like jerks as they won more and more:

As the games progressed, rich players became more and more cocksure. They spoke louder, moved their pieces more aggressively...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.”

But here's my favorite part:

...and even consumed more pretzels from bowls that the researchers had put out as part of the experiment. 

Pretzels! The least desirable of all the snack not called "raisins", and these people were still happy to use them to show they're dicks!

And then there's this, which extends to real life: 

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.”

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you call this bullshit a decade ago?" 

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers. Yes I did:

I think the need to feel like an oppressed underdog who has succeeded against all odds is as American as apple pie.  Nobody likes to admit "part of my success is due to economic and social conditions cemented long before I was even born"; we must be made to believe that Successful Person X was left to die in a dumpster, then pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and became a real rags to riches story.  Nobody's happy simply to have been given the keys to the kingdom.