Association between Social Class, Greed, and Unethical Behaviour: A Replication Study

Clerke, A. S., Brown, M., Forchuk, C., & Campbell, L. (2018). Association between Social Class, Greed, and Unethical Behaviour: A Replication Study. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 35. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.166

Abstract: Recent research has focused on the potential negative consequences of belonging to the upper class. The present study attempted to directly replicate previous research examining whether upper-class individuals had more positive attitudes toward greed than lower-class individuals, and whether these attitudes mediated the negative association between social class and unethical behaviour. The current research includes two studies with 317 and 320 participants, from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic, respectively. We used the same measures and procedures of the original research. The resulting dataset, and analytic code, are hosted on the Open Science Framework (Clerke et al., 2017). Collectively these datasets provide access to data from over 600 participants pertaining to social class, ethical behaviour, and sociodemographic information, such as obtained education and religious and political orientation. As in the original, we found a significant positive correlation between SES and greed in one of two studies, however the size of the effect was smaller. Contrary to the original, we did not find a significant association between SES and the propensity to lie in a hypothetical salary negotiation.

Keywords: social class ,   unethical behaviour ,   attitudes towards greed ,   replication ,   MTurk ,   Prolific Academic