It turns out the old saying about money changing people isn’t just a bitter observation from those of us with empty wallets.
In fact, there’s some pretty solid science behind why a fatter bank balance tends to rot a person’s ethical core. Psychologists have spent years watching how wealth warps the way we see others, and the results are fairly grim, showing that as the numbers in the account go up, the ability to actually give a toss about anyone else usually takes a dive.
It’s as if hitting a certain level of financial security flips a switch in the brain that makes cheating, lying, or just being a general prat feel like a perfectly reasonable way to get ahead. That’s not to say that every wealthy person is automatically a monster, but the sheer power of having “enough” can slowly eat away at the social glue that keeps most people honest. Before you start dreaming of that lottery win, it’s important to understand what that kind of cash actually does to your conscience.
One study out of UC Berkeley study started a lot of arguments.
One of the most talked-about pieces of research on this topic came from UC Berkeley, where psychologists observed that drivers of expensive cars were far less likely to stop at pedestrian crossings than drivers of cheaper ones, and more likely to cut other drivers off in traffic.
The same team ran a series of follow-up experiments and found that wealthier participants were more likely to cheat in games, take sweets from a bowl labelled as being for children, and admit they’d behave dishonestly in various scenarios. The findings made headlines and sparked a lot of debate, not least because they went against the assumption that it’s people with less money who are more likely to cut corners.
Simply thinking about money can change your behaviour.
A separate study from Harvard and the University of Utah found that people who were exposed to money-related words before a task were more likely to lie and behave unethically than those who weren’t. They hadn’t become wealthier. They’d just had money on their mind.
That finding points to something interesting: it might not be wealth itself that changes people, but the mindset that comes with focusing on it. When financial gain is the thing your brain is oriented toward, other considerations can quietly shrink around it.
Wealth can make you feel like the rules apply less to you.
Psychologists describe something called entitlement creep, where the experience of having more resources gradually changes how you see yourself in relation to other people and to social rules. When you can pay your way out of most problems, when your time feels genuinely more valuable because so many people treat it that way.
Not only that, but when the consequences of minor rule-breaking rarely land on you the way they do on others, the rules start to feel optional in a way they don’t for people with less cushion. It’s not a conscious decision. It’s a slow recalibration of what feels normal.
The picture isn’t entirely one-sided.
It’s worth being honest about the fact that the research here is genuinely contested. When other scientists tried to replicate the luxury car crosswalk study in European cities, they couldn’t find the same effect. A Dutch study that looked at millionaires directly found that they actually shared more money with other people in economic games than average participants did, including more with people who had less.
Some researchers have argued that the original findings reflected something specific to American culture and inequality levels rather than a universal truth about wealth and morality. The honest summary is that money doesn’t automatically make people worse, but certain things that tend to come with money, distance from consequences, entitlement, a focus on accumulation, can.
Chasing money might matter more than having it.
Source: Unsplash A 2025 study published by researchers at De Montfort University in the UK looked at what they called extrinsic values, the prioritising of wealth, status, and appearance as measures of personal worth. They found that people who strongly held these values were much more likely to make unethical decisions and to lie for financial gain.
Crucially, this held across different cultures, suggesting it wasn’t a Western quirk. The implication is that it’s not necessarily the money that erodes moral behaviour but the belief that money is what you’re fundamentally for, that acquiring more of it is the main point, that tips things in a problematic direction.
Inequality in the wider environment plays a role too.
Research published in 2024 found that people who perceived high levels of economic inequality around them were more likely to say they’d engage in unethical behaviour themselves, regardless of their own income. When the gap between rich and poor feels very wide and very visible, something changes in how people justify their own choices.
If the system looks rigged or unfair, cutting corners feels less like a moral failure and more like a reasonable response to a game that was already being played dishonestly at the top. Inequality doesn’t just affect people who have less. It changes the moral atmosphere for everyone living inside it.
Empathy tends to narrow as wealth increases.
Source: Unsplash Several studies have found that wealthier people are generally less accurate at reading other people’s emotions and less attuned to what others around them are feeling. One explanation is practical: when you have more resources, you’re less dependent on other people, so you’ve had less need to develop that sensitivity over time.
Another is that wealth tends to reduce the amount of time you spend in genuinely mixed environments, where you encounter people whose lives look very different to yours. The narrower the social world, the narrower the perspective, and empathy has always been easier to practise toward people whose experience you can actually imagine.
None of this means wealthy people are simply bad.
The more useful takeaway from all of this research isn’t that rich people are worse humans. It’s that certain conditions that wealth creates, insulation from consequences, a culture that measures worth in financial terms, distance from people with less, can gradually make it easier to behave in ways that wouldn’t have felt acceptable before.
That process isn’t unique to the very wealthy, either. It can happen at any income level where someone starts to feel meaningfully above the rules that apply to everyone else. The money is less the cause and more the accelerant, and what it accelerates depends heavily on the values and self-awareness the person brought with them before the money arrived.
