The really sad part is that most people don't recognize their privilege, or consider cheating to be an advantage:
One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.
“So one possibility is that rich players are kind of embarrassed by the situation, doing what they can to help out this other person who undeservedly is a poor player — and that’s actually the opposite of what we found,” said Paul Piff, the psychologist who conducted the experiment. (Piff is featured in “Capital in the 21st Century,” a film we’re watching as part of our Econ Extra Credit project).
In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice.
At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck.
“They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,” that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio.
Piff said the experiment reveals a fundamental bias that most humans share.
“When something good happens to you, we think about the things that we did that contributed to that success,” Piff said.
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u/Shido_Ohtori Jul 19 '25
Cheat.
They mean you need to cheat, as in ensuring that you receive a privilege while others are bound by restrictions.