New research supports the understanding that all people are born with a sense of good and bad. What does that say about altruism, community, and the capacity to kill one another?
He's here to illustrate one of his more provocative experiments - who is more likely to stop for pedestrians, the rich or the poor?
"None of the drivers of the least expensive cars broke the law, while close to 50% of our most expensive car drivers broke the law," he says.
After nearly a decade researching this field, Piff has come to the controversial conclusion that being wealthy, rather than transforming you into a benevolent benefactor, can actually be rather bad for your moral fibre.
Psychology is a discipline fraught with difficulties. In real-world studies there are always confounding factors - does the person crossing the road step out more confidently in front of a cheaper car? Is the driver really wealthy or has he borrowed his uncle's BMW? Data from population surveys is hard to decipher. There's no way to tease apart cause and effect, and subjects who turn up to take part in lab studies give responses that may or may not bear any relation to real life.
It's only when studies employing different methods repeatedly point in the same direction that the results are deemed significant.