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You've probably experienced it at least once. Rudeness from a wealthy customer, arrogance from a twenty-something millionaire who owns a Porsche, shameless cockiness from your Poker 'buddies' while they clean you out. It's everywhere, and many of us find ourselves thinking the same thing. Rich people can be really mean. But that's not merely an unfounded thought, conceived while you grumpily empty your pockets and hand over your Poker chips to your gleeful friends. You might actually be onto something. A recent study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley Campus has found a clear connection between wealth and a disregard for a fellow person's feelings. The Berkeley research team is lead by Paul Piff, a psychologist with an avid interest in the power of money over human interaction. The Berkeley research team conducted a series of tests to determine how wealth affects certain 'rich' people's behaviour towards other, less wealthy human beings. In one test Piff's research team set up games of Monopoly between more than 100 pairs of strangers. A coin was flipped and randomly determined which person out of the pair would be the 'rich' player in the game. The game was clearly rigged in favour of the 'rich' player, with fascinating results. The rich player was given twice as much money as their poorer competitor, and when they passed 'GO' they collected twice the salary they were entitled to. They also got to roll two dice on their turn instead of one, and thus moved around the board quicker. Over the course of the game, hidden cameras monitored what happened. The videos showed that the language and comments of the richer players became more confident as the game progressed. They began to move their piece around the board much louder, at times smacking it down. "We were more likely to see signs of dominance and non-verbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players," said Piff. They also placed a bowl of pretzels on the table, and watched as the players speculated whether the bowl of pretzels was placed there as a trick. It was. But that didn't stop the 'rich' players who started to eat more pretzels. As the game went on, dramatic and telling patterns began to emerge. "The rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor ... players," said Piff. They became "more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they were doing." Comments the rich players said to their poor opponents included "I have money for everything", "you're going to lose all your money soon," and "I have so much money ... I'm pretty much untouchable at this point." Ouch. But the most interesting observation Piff made was the players' reactions after the game was finished. "At the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly, they talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game, and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation, including that flip of a coin that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place. And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage." This could be written off as the result of heightened emotions during a game, but Piff believes that Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society's hierarchical structure, where some people are 'given' a lot of wealth and status, while others are not. This study isn't the only one that Piff's team have conducted into the hierarchical nature of relationships between people within society. Numerous surveys and studies made over seven years found that wealthier individuals are more likely to moralise greed as being good, and the pursuit of self-interest as being acceptable. The Berkeley research team tested a random sample of subjects for prosocial or 'helping others' behaviour. They wanted to see who was more likely to offer help to a stranger, someone who is rich or someone who is poor. This time the members of the community involved in the test were actually rich or poor in real life. Each person was given 10 dollars. "We told the participants that they could keep these 10 dollar [notes] for themselves, or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to, with a stranger who is totally anonymous," Piff recounted. "They'll never meet that stranger and the stranger will never meet them." The amount that each person gave was carefully monitored and the results were analysed. Individuals who made between $15,000 and $25,000 a year gave on average 44 per cent more of their money to the stranger than the individuals who earned between $150,000 and $200,000 a year. They even tested hundreds of vehicles and found that drivers of expensive cars were more inclined to break the law, failing to stop at a pedestrian crossing when there was someone waiting to cross. Nearly 50 per cent of drivers of expensive range cars cut off pedestrians, while none of the drivers of the least expensive cars did. As the price of the car increased, the driver's tendencies to break the law increased too. Other studies have tested whether richer individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes or lying to customers. But Piff is quick to assure us that it's not only wealthy people who show these behavioural patterns. "All people struggle with these competing motivations of when, or if, to put our own interests above the interests of other people," says Piff. What these studies have found is that, "the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you."