Economic inequality in the US has drawn attention to the attitudes and behaviors of the elite, as those who are educated in the top universities are both likely to start out wealthy and disproportionately likely to have an impact on the future of this country. To examine how this elite class would manage societal resources, the authors of a paper published in Science studied a group of Yale Law School students.

The findings indicate that they’re more likely to make economic choices based on increasing the overall wealth of the nation rather than on increasing income equality within a nation. Thus, there’s a chance we’re selecting policymakers who are unlikely to address this issue.

For the study, the researchers recruited a sample of 208 Yale Law School students as well as a diverse but “comparatively less elite” (in the authors’ words) sector of the population. The subjects were recruited in spring of 2007, 2010, and 2013—the gaps meant that each experiment would draw from a completely new Yale Law School student population.

The authors selected Yale Law School students as a proxy for social and political elites because of its status as a graduate institution. YLS admits only 11.3 percent of its college-educated applicants, and the student body tends to consist of people from relatively well-off households. Almost half the study participants reported having two parents with graduate degrees, and over half of the participants were raised in ZIP codes with an above-average household income. Typically, graduates of a law school of this caliber enter the job market earning $160,000 a year.

The law students were compared to an Internet sample of 309 adult Americans with a wide representation of demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic characteristics. The majority of these subjects had received less education than the law students. A second control groups included non-Yale elites, defined as participants from the Internet sample who had a graduate degree and household incomes over $100,000. The final control group was UC Berkeley undergraduates—a top university, but it draws students from more diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.

The participants played decision-based games in which each choice had a consequence for the participants themselves and an anonymous player. In these games, the subjects were playing for in-game wealth. Some options they were given promoted equality and consequently reduced the wealth disparity between themselves and other anonymous player. Others promoted efficiency and consequently increased the wealth of both players without rebalancing relative wealth.

The data from these experiments shows that the participants from Yale Law School were significantly more likely than any other group to select efficiency, electing to raise the overall wealth of all players, but they also disregarded the relative disparity that may exist between themselves and others. Elites who were not students at Yale Law School were slightly less fair-minded than the non-elite controls, but this difference was statistically insignificant.

It wasn’t just Yale, though; the students from UC Berkeley were more likely to select efficiency than the non-elite controls, but they were less likely than the Yale Law School students to do so. Of all populations studied, the non-elite controls were the most likely to make choices that would promote equality, decreasing the wealth disparity between themselves and the other player.

The authors think that these results are important because they offer potential insight as to why the US has only made incremental policy steps to reduce income inequality. The findings suggest that, perhaps due to their training or their disposition, the people most likely to end up making policy are less inclined than the general population to sacrifice efficiency for the sake of increased equality. This study adds a meaningful piece of data to the public discussion regarding income inequality and the factors that perpetuate it.

Science, 2015. DOI: 10.1126/science.aab0096 (About DOIs).