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A lot of this seems like it could just be explained by diminishing marginal utility of money and a increased burden of the poor. If we try to isolate properties of the personalities of the kinds of people who are poor vs the kinds of people who are rich, they should be properties that don't apply to two sets of identical populations who were arbitrarily assigned to "ditch digger for 10k a year" vs "interior designer for 300k a year" category. Our ditch diggers would presumably be more fatigued, less able to volunteer, less capable of noble acts of financial self-sacrifice, and so on, even if at a personal level they were all just as nice or even nicer than our interior designers.

As a very crude level we can approximate how pro-social someone is by their propensity to trade their own standard-of-living utils for other people's standard-of-living utils (because they receive feel-good-for-helping utils in return), which is a pointlessly crass way of formalizing "willing to help others at expense of self." But for two people identically willing to make this tradeoff, and thus somehow "morally equivalent", the rich person will be far more able to buy "I was a good person today" utils at $10,000 a piece because it costs them a lot less in standard-of-living utils to do so.

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There's multiple aspects.

Higher intellect and higher openness are factorized and also lead to higher income.

Religion with high openness and intellect leads to higher tolerance and higher donations.

Higher intellect and higher openness with any set of economic liberalism beliefs leads to higher altruism like foreign aid.

Higher SES and politically oriented tends to be Machiavellian. Donations are strategic for lobbying, favours or influencing politics through NGOs with foreign aid mostly propping up executives for money laundering, local elite bribing, resource land grabs and population control policies.

Higher SES has higher insularity to outside world and class division. Higher SES also more self-confidence, less dependency on others, and more targeted for their wealth -- hence innately more selfish. Self-selection effects plus social atomization effects.

Universalism norms plus high SES can also lead to charitable efforts, so both ability and propensity; normally seen in white people.

Rich with eastern despotism, whether it be Korean, Indian or whatnot has a LOWER propensity for random redistributionist policies and overtly discriminates. It may only be to OTHER rich for class reciprocity.

Marginal utility is an aspect but the rich usually are self-selected. Anglo WASP with servants may necessarily be generous for political reasons; treating servants badly is not good. So these are self-mediated behaviors of treatment and maneuvering to ensure social slickness. Imposing, reticent and controlled, purposeful self-motivated "gifts" to keep the system going. Just randomly giving X to everyone makes no sense, so confounding fact of TOTAL dollars or property given.

Then the inverse, the poor with increased communitarian norms, with tribalism dispositions. More co-dependent, less agency. Less able to give, but if giving, gives a larger proportion of their resource base -- so mostly anglicized or religious, or high in extroversion and niceness which co-correlates with poorness because higher risk-taking, or usually lower inante IQ.

Then there is the opposite common "fold" of correlation of poor health, anti-socialism, greediness, overt darwinism for resources with poor people. Not only low intellect, but low aptitude and everything else, so less propensity to donate and less ability to donate with constant blaming of everything on circumstances.

In other words there are multi-cohort multi-segmented reasons.

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Anecdote: as part of the freshman university hazing in Brazil, I had to beg for money at a traffic light for hours. I was quite surprised to notice a strong correlation where poor cars donated more often than rich cars! Maybe it was mediated by AC on and windows closed, but at that time I was shocked. P.s. It would have been obvious I was a fresher at university rather than a common beggar.

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If one point of effort yielded two points of reward for each individual, then cooperation is perfectly logical. I am not sure if this is ''heartiness''. Strategic political alliances and transactional favours are perfectly within the realm of upper-class behavior. The lower-classes are more co-dependent and are more overtly selfish due to diminished aptitude and self-agency.

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Yes: rich people' environment is completely different from poor people's. E.g. less but bigger donation may express tribalism vs. social signals, i.e. poor people donate to their tribe, while rich peolpe signal social status.

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first off i will say, i love your works and these wordy comments

regrettably i am rarely up to effort posting so will briefly bring up two points:

1 is the tendency towards automatic cognition and action of high status dopaminergized and testosteronized individuals.

this may explain the "exuberant" driving and aggressive cutting off of the high status-among-their-peers cars.

intuitively it makes sense, and my intuition has been very good, but will the "automatic cognition" studies replicate? respectfully, i'll leave that up to you

2. the trust and trustworthiness is also naivete and a great danger once we scale it to the broader society: open borders, excessive aid, drug proliferation, etc are influenced partly by these personality traits, and given the automatic confidence of self perceived high status, they will push for it forcefully and impulsively

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"they take longer to do things we all have to do. They have no non-sociological excuse not to volunteer more."

I'm not understanding this implication (or misunderstood the premises presented). It sounds like this is saying people in this class have less free time, which would seem to imply having less time to offer to others?

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It's saying they have more free time and they waste more of their time.

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Like a door turns its hinges so does a sluggard in his bed

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Another study related to this same question: Andreoni, Nikiforakis, and Stoop 2017, "Are the rich more selfish than the poor, or do they just have more money? a natural field experiment"

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23229/w23229.pdf

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Are those corrected for tribalism? Social class is one of the triggers for tribal instinct, as 20th century mass murders have amply shown. Basically if the rich are nice to the rich and the poor to the poor, could you get those results?

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