No need to bother with facts when there is an already established opinion

From Parental Guidance Requested by James Taranto, the last section, Driving While Affluent. Another example of sociologists finding in their research the result that they had already come to believe.

"Pity the rich," ABC News "reports":

They drive their expensive cars with little respect for the law, they break the rules thinking they won't have to face the consequences, and they even take candy from children.

Their unethical behavior, according to new research, is driven by the fact that they see nothing wrong with greed.

Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, have conducted seven studies involving nearly a thousand participants from college students to senior citizens indicating that the rich are, indeed, different from the rest of us. . . .

In one creative study, [the researchers] and several of their students positioned themselves at four-way-stop intersections in the San Francisco Bay area to see which cars ignored state law to yield to the first vehicle to reach the stop sign. The drivers could not see them as the participants ranked the vehicles on the basis of their value.

Drivers of expensive cars were four times more likely to cut off another vehicle and ignore the right-of-way than drivers of cheaper cars, the researchers found. The most flagrant offenders: Mercedes drivers.

In another experiment, 26 drivers of deluxe cars blasted through an intersection while ignoring a pedestrian who had entered the crosswalk, another violation of state law. No one driving a cheap car failed to yield. Some 426 cars were involuntary participants in these two experiments, and it's worth noting that although prosperous drivers were more willing to break the law than working class drivers, about half the fancy cars yielded. So not all rich folks are jerks.

Based on these descriptions, the researchers knew nothing about the drivers other than the make of car they were driving, including even whether the driver was the owner of the car, much less anything about their motives. When cops engage in this sort of guesswork, it's called "profiling."

In fact, the ABC report notes that one of the researchers, Dacher Keltner, is a counterexample of his own stereotype: "He is a super-achiever in two areas reflecting status: He is highly educated and holds a prestigious job. And he's hardly poor, but when it comes to vehicular status, he flunks. He drives a 13-year-old Subaru, and his wife drives a 17-year-old Honda Civic."

Taranto's observation is correct but the error on the part of the researcher, Dacher Keltner, is pretty egregious. It is clear, from a simple logic position that all that can be said from the study is that people who drive expensive cars were more likely to fail to comply with rules of the road.

There are two straight forward and seemingly naive errors that the researcher apparently glossed over. 1) The assumption that those who drive expensive looking cars are necessarily rich, and 2) The assumption that those who are rich are therefore motivated by greed. You could only make these sorts of naive mistakes if you are sheltered by powerful biases and neglect of general knowledge.

Do the rich drive expensive cars? Well, it is complicated. Do we mean rich as in income or rich as in wealthy? What we do know from Thomas J. Stanley's research is that the wealthy, who may or may not have high incomes, on average strongly favor lower cost cars and keep them longer than the average citizen. They also tend to live low consumption lives. Who buys expensive model cars? It tends to be some portion of the wealthy, but in general it is the aspiring but not yet wealthy who have high incomes.

And are the wealthy greedy? Again, based on philanthropy (time and money), the evidence is ambiguous to negative.

What Keltner is more likely revealing is that those who are status motivated, high consumption individuals are less attuned to the law and their fellow citizen than those of a more humble frame of mind (which includes many millionaires next door). But finding that status seeking aspirationals are contemptuous of others is not quite as sexy a finding as that rich people are greedy. Don't let facts get in the way of pre-established opinions.