News

Some More News, the podcast and YouTube show, has a great episode on this called "Are Rich people OK?". Basically, they dive into all the research suggesting that getting rich basically breaks people's brains. As relevant here, rich people tend to believe that they are rich because they are super smart, and that leads to them thinking any decisions they make must be correct because how could they be wrong?

The Some More News episode discusses this study which stuck with me

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.

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.