Unethical Behavior and Social Class

Within the past five years many newspaper articles, documentaries and published books written by academics have accused ‘the rich’ to have become unethical and immoral beings, that the current financial crisis has been cause by ‘the upper-class’ and declare top managers to be greedy and heartless towards others socio-economic classes. Academic literature from the field of Economics supports these statements, but fails to provide a theoretical base for these claims. This study will attempt to fill this lack of theory by looking towards the Psychological literature and will investigate if these strong statements are justified by answering the following research question: ‘Do individuals of different social classes exert different amounts of unethical behavior?’ In the literature review some general theories about human behavior are discussed. It continues by outlining reasons for individuals to behave unethically and in which scenarios this would be most likely to happen. Special attention is given to organizational settings, where unethical behavior is often, unintentionally, promoted. A last section is devoted to the small amount of papers focused on the relationship between social class and unethical behavior and its significance. The findings in the literature contradict the strong statement described above and show that many situational factors and also the dynamics between the parties involved are also important factors in predicting unethical behavior. By means of a questionnaire, a study was conducted in order to find empirical support for this theory. Even though there are some limitations to the study, the overall findings are that the relation between social class and unethical behavior might not be as strong and robust as has been claimed before. The results lack the power to confirm the theory, but enough evidence is found to call for more in-depth studies on this topic before any reliable statements can be made.