For years, the conventional academic wisdom said that the richer a person is, the more likely he is to be selfish, inconsiderate and dishonest.

A series of studies showed that wealthier people were essentially selfish jerks, who are more deceitful and less pro-social than poor people: They take twice as much candy from a jar labeled “Just for Children” than poorer people, they’re more likely than poor people to lie during negotiations, and they are four times more likely to cheat to get ahead than people of modest income.

Most of these studies were headed up by Paul Piff, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California–Berkeley. And the research made headlines in publications across the world. The implications were clear: Rich people are rich because they behave selfishly. If the rest of us lived dishonestly and selfishly, we could be rich too—but at what cost to society? Therefore, the rich don’t really deserve their wealth.

The research seemed to confirm many long-held suspicions about income inequality. It injected new urgency into calls for wealth redistribution.

But there was a problem: That scientific evidence came from lab experiments and surveys conducted in ways that may not reflect reality.

In a May 24 interview with Freakonomics, behavioral economist Jan Stoop explained one of the potential pitfalls: “[M]any of the studies … use student subjects, and they then use a trick where they prime these subjects to either think that they are poor or to think that they’re rich,” he said. “They do that by having them compare themselves to the richest or the poorest people in the country, something like that. But from an objective standpoint, they’re a homogenous group, right? They’re about the same age, and about the same wealth.”

Also, important is that Piff’s subjects were overwhelmingly students at the famously liberal University of California–Berkeley.

Stoop, along with economists Nikos Nikiforakis and Jim Andreoni, discussed several other potential problems with the studies that Pitt’s conclusions had been drawn from, including selection bias, failure to account for real-world employee vetting, and the experimenter demand effect, which describes the change in behavior that often results from a subject’s knowledge that he is participating in an experiment.

“No matter what experimental method you use,” Stoop said, “there is a problem.”

Seeing all these problems with the lab experiments, Stoop, Nikiforakis and Andreoni set out to run a field experiment to see if rich people truly are more selfish than the poor.

“If we can put something in the field,” Andreoni said, “we can do it in a way where people don’t actually know they’re being studied. That’s the best, because that’s the actual behavior that we’re trying to study.”

They selected 360 households in the Netherlands: 180 rich and 180 poor. The rich households had an average annual income of €2.5 million (us$2.8 million). The poor were public-assistance houses with an average annual income of €25,000 ($28,000).

From October to December of 2013, the team intentionally “mis-delivered” an envelope to each house. Each envelope contained either €20 or €5, and a note that seemed to be written from a grandfather to his grandson: “Dear Joost, Here is €20 for you. Grandfather.”

In a percentage of the envelopes, they substituted the cash for a bank transfer card. These cards are like checks in the sense that they can only be cashed by the person they are made out to.

Each envelope listed “Joost’s” real street address, so that the person to whom the gift was “mis-delivered” could easily forward it to the intended recipient. Each envelope was also photoshopped with an authentic-looking stamp, complete with post-mark. There was just one unusual feature: the envelopes were semi-transparent, which meant each “erroneous recipient” could easily read the card and see the enclosed money, or bank transfer card—without having to open the envelope.

After mis-delivering all the envelopes, the team had only to wait to see how many of them were forwarded along to the correct address.

The findings were astounding.

“Given the research that we had been reading from Paul Piff and others like that, we expected the rich people to be less likely to return these envelopes,” Andreoni said. “What we found was, in fact, the opposite.”

Overall, roughly 80 percent of the rich houses forwarded the envelop on the correct address. Only 40 percent of the poor houses forwarded them on.

With the cash specifically, the gap was even wider: 75 percent of the rich forwarded the envelope on versus 25 percent of the poor.

Stoop said the main surprise to him was about the bank transfer cards, which were worthless to anyone but the intended recipient. “[T]he biggest shock was in observing that the non-cash envelopes were also not returned by the poor families,” he said.

This showed that even when the poor had nothing to gain by keeping the envelope, they were significantly less likely to take the brief amount of time required to slip it back into the mail.

The team factored education level and age of the members of the household into their regression analysis, but found that they had no effect. They believe income was the only factor that mattered.

Of course, this field study by Stoop, Nikiforakis and Andreoni is not all-encompassing or definitive. Many aspects of this multifaceted question remain unanswered, and it is not difficult to find rich people who behave selfishly, or poor people who are generous. But the team’s findings elucidate a general principle, and it is one that the Bible confirms.

Proverbs 11:24-25 (New Living Translation) say:

Give freely and become more wealthy; be stingy and lose everything. The generous will prosper; those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed.

This shows that in many cases, individuals become rich not because they are miserly with their wealth but because they are generous with it.

The Apostle Paul confirmed this truth: “[H]e which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully” (2 Corinthians 9:6).

You can also take a look at Deuteronomy 15:7-8, Proverbs 19:17, Proverbs 28:27, Matthew 5:7, Acts 20:35 and Hebrews 13:16.

This is counterintuitive because we think that if we want to have money, we need to keep our wealth all for ourselves. But the truth is the opposite: A selfish person typically ends up with little. In order to have much, a person must give.