Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior

Let's be honest: the open source community loves to believe it's a pure meritocracy, a shining merit-based utopia where your commit history speaks louder than your bank account. But the Piff et al. study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109) pokes a hole in that fantasy. The researchers ran seven studies showing that higher social class correlates with increased unethical behavior — cutting off pedestrians, lying in negotiations, cheating at games, endorsing workplace misconduct. The mechanism isn't that rich people are born evil; it's that privilege breeds a sense of entitlement and a reduced sensitivity to the consequences of one's actions on others. Sound familiar? It should. Every open source community has its own class system, and it's not measured in dollars but in merge access, commit counts, and conference keynotes. The "benevolent dictator" model — whether it's Linus Torvalds' infamous flame mails or the core maintainer who dismisses a newcomer's patch with a terse "WONTFIX" — is a status hierarchy dressed up as technical judgment. The study suggests that the longer you sit at the top of that hierarchy, the more likely you are to rationalize treating the people below you as obstacles rather than collaborators. The entitled behavior isn't a bug in the meritocracy; it's a feature of the status it creates. Then there's the corporate layer. The open source ecosystem is now dominated by companies that hoard resources, dictate roadmaps, and extract unpaid labor from volunteers while paying six-figure salaries to the "community managers" who keep the peace. The study's finding that upper-class individuals are more likely to take valued goods from others hits uncomfortably close to home when you watch a cloud giant fork a project, rebrand it, and call it "open source." The HN comment section, predictably, is full of people arguing about sample sizes and methodology — which is itself a display