Looks like it's been updated now, but I can't edit my comment, alas. As a topical comment, the research on this subject is still pretty uncertain, though with

Looks like it's been updated now, but I can't edit my comment, alas. As a topical comment, the research on this subject is still pretty uncertain, though with some interesting studies. A somewhat-contrary finding is that one proxy measure of altruism, probability of a dropped letter being returned, was found to be lower in poorer neighborhoods of the UK: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043294 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... The authors of that study have a brief discussion of possible differences in the scenarios: Our overall findings replicate and expand on previous studies using similar methodology [9], [10] but are in contrast with the findings of Piff et al [11] who find that wealthy individuals in Berkeley, U.S.A. are more likely to not give way to other cars or pedestrians, and are more likely to behave selfishly or unethically in economic games. One possible explanation for these contradictory results is that Piff et al [11] findings are likely due to individual level differences, whilst our findings may stem mainly from contextual neighbourhood effects. Therefore our results may not be in conflict, if good socio-economic conditions in an area lead to increased trust and long-term thinking, even though, within any one neighbourhood, wealthier individuals are less altruistic than poorer people. If this is the case, we would predict that the lost letters in our experiment were more likely to be returned by the poorer individuals in the area, and that the wealthy residents of Berkeley would behave even less altruistic when in a poorer neighbourhoods. These latter hypotheses have yet to be tested. Alternatively, these contradictory results may be highlighting domain specific differences of altruistic behaviour between rich and poor people; for example anti-social behaviours involving competition (such as aggressive driving or cheating in an economic game) may be more common amongst the wealthy, whereas in a non-competitive task (such as returning a lost letter) wealthy individuals behave more altruistically than poor individuals. In this study, we have shown that individuals living in poor neighbourhoods are less altruistic than individuals living in wealthier neighbourhoods. However, we have not been able to identify the specific neighbourhood characteristic behind this, due to income being strongly correlated with other factors, such as crime. Further research should focus on attempting to disentangle these two factors, possibly by comparing equally deprived neighbourhoods with different levels of crime.