The relationship between social class and unethical and prosocial (traffic) behavior: two naturalistic replication studies

ABSTRACT

Whereas some previous studies have shown that upper-class individuals are more unethical and less prosocial than lower-class individuals, other studies reported contradictory results. The present research provides two replication attempts by examining whether upper-class drivers would be more likely to cut off a pedestrian at a marked crosswalk (Study 1) and less likely to let a pedestrian cross an unmarked pedestrian crossing (Study 2) than lower-class drivers. In both studies, the vehicle status as an index of the social class of the driver was not significantly related to whether the driver let the pedestrian cross the street. Overall, it appears that the associations between social class and unethical behavior and prosocial behavior are less robust and generalizable than initially thought.

KEYWORDS:

• Social class
• socioeconomic status
• ethical behavior
• prosocial behavior

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Anna Seelos and Christina Daum for their help in carrying out this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

data availability

The data are available here: https://osf.io/7zuny/?view_only=fdb6fa741104427089885576fecde150

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/7zuny/?view_only=fdb6fa741104427089885576fecde150.

Notes

1. We are grateful to Paul Piff for providing us with a vehicle coding scheme.