The engagement party: a sense of entitlement writ large

ALLAN PREISS: The attendees have expressed their regret at what they have done. I don’t believe it for a second; they regret getting caught

AS MELBOURNIANS ENDURE their sixth lockdown and Sydneysiders are increasingly concerned about an explosion of already high numbers of community transmission, I watched with increasing anger and frustration the footage of an organised pub crawl in a Melbourne suburb, and an engagement party attended by almost 70 guests.

It was the engagement party that really upset me. It was a Jewish engagement party. This is my community and it occurred where I live. As a result, there are now 15 exposure sites in my local shopping strip, including many places that I visit regularly to buy food and other supplies. The street and the shops are almost empty as people are too nervous to venture out to even buy food.

According to media reports, the party was attended by doctors, lawyers and community leaders. The groom-to-be starts off the simcha with a joke about the engagement being a therapy session, and therefore it gets around the government’s lockdown rules. The attendees think this is hilarious. 

It beggars belief that after 18 months of Covid, with people unable to visit family members in aged care facilities, kids not being able to go to school, adults unable to be with loved ones in their last days or attend their funerals, people could think that hosting or attending an engagement party was a good idea. What were they thinking?

How do we make sense of their behaviour?

Paul Piff is a professor of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California. His research examines the origins of human kindness and cooperation and the social consequences of economic inequality. 

His research began when he was a graduate student running an experiment called the “dictator test”. He expected to find a correlation between personality traits like emotional intelligence, religiosity or empathy and altruism and the behaviour of his subjects. 

Instead, what he found was that as a person’s income went up their propensity to help others went down. Having money tended to make people less concerned about the condition of their neighbours.  

Later he conducted an experiment where his researchers positioned themselves at intersections. They watched out for aggressive, selfish behaviour among drivers and recorded the make and model of the car.

They found drivers of expensive, high-status vehicles behaved worse than those driving older, much less expensive vehicles.

They were four times more likely to cut off people driving what he termed lower status vehicles.

As a pedestrian looking carefully left and right before using a crossing, you should pay attention to the kind of car bearing down on you. Drivers of high-status vehicles were three times more likely to fail to give way at pedestrian crossings. By contrast, all the drivers of the least expensive type of car gave way to pedestrians.

Piff dubbed this the arsehole effect.  Not a particularly academic description but an apt one nevertheless. 

So it appears that those with greater wealth experience a sense of entitlement. The rules that apply to others don’t apply to them.  

I don’t know who attended the engagement party or what kind of people they are. But given the reports state there were doctors, lawyers and community leaders in attendance they are unlikely to be drivers of low status cars.

The results of Piff’s experiments since 2006 show a similar pattern: a sense of entitlement over others seems to be associated with a reduced capacity for empathy.

The feeling of entitlement is amplified when people stay in their own, socio-economic, ethnic and religious groups where the behaviour becomes self-reinforcing. 

It is the sense of entitlement that we saw writ large at the engagement party.

As the inequality divide grows ever larger - more privileged kids at expensive private schools, a retreat behind the walls of gated communities - we can expect to see a greater focus on what I want as opposed to what our society needs. But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Piff also ran experiments that found that wealthy participants can reduce their levels of indifference to the plight of others. In one of the experiments participants were shown a 46-second video about child poverty. What emerged was that viewing the video made wealthy participants just as compassionate as their blue-collar counterparts. 

No wonder our government never wanted us exposed to the cruelties being visited on asylum seekers on Manus Island. If we could see what was happening, an explosion of compassion might challenge, or even overwhelm our asylum seeker policies. 

This pandemic has shone a bright light on the divide between those who are struggling to make ends meet and those for whom these times are more an inconvenience than a total disruption of their lives. It has amplified the growing inequality in our communities and is threatening lives. 

Now back to the engagement party attendees. Even in more normal times, their behaviour would be considered selfish and inappropriate. In these times, it is inexcusable and potentially lethal. The condemnation from Jewish community leaders has been swift and unequivocal. Angry responses from many Jews on social media sites indicates how unhappy many are. 

As for the antisemitic rants, no comment is needed. Haters don’t need a reason to hate. 

The attendees at the engagement party have now expressed their regret at what they have done. I don’t believe it for a second. They regret getting caught.

If you ask them if they are decent people, I suspect they would say they are and perhaps even take umbrage at the question. 

But then again, they would probably also tell you they don’t drive through pedestrian crossings when people are on them. 

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