The (Frustrating) Affluenza Kid Story and Debunking Rooted Myths on Entitlement
Do you remember the affluenza kid? He was a 16-year-old who killed four people and injured nine when he went for a joyride in 2013. Ethan Couch was drunk, high, and was driving with a restricted license. In addition, he had just stolen two cases of beer from Walmart and sped away with seven other kids in his dad’s red Ford F-150. Ethan crashed doing 70 miles per hour in a 40 mile per hour neighborhood. He slammed into four people:
o A woman whose SUV installed;
o A youth minister who had come to help her; and
o A woman and her daughter who had also decided to lend a hand.
Ethan swerved his dad’s F-150 into the SUV, which hit so hard that the SUV crashed into a parked car while Ethan's F-150 flipped and injured all seven of his teen passengers - permanently paralyzing one of them. Three hours after the crash, Ethan was blood tested. At 16, he had three times the legal blood alcohol level for an adult, and he tested positive for weed and valium. He was arrested, tried, and charged with four counts of manslaughter, which could have landed him 20 years in big boy prison if we lived in a just world. But if you heard our classism episode a few months back, you know where this is going.
Ethan was too wealthy to where he didn’t have to do hard time for the manslaughters. His lawyers plead that Ethan didn't have morals because he'd been raised affluent. Affluenza was a defense they used, saying that prison punishment wouldn't make sense to poor Ethan and that Ethan couldn't have known what he was doing was wrong. They claimed that he was spoiled by his parents and that morality itself was a foreign notion to him. The worst part is that this defense kind of worked. While the jury found Ethan guilty, the judge decided to be lenient with his sentencing. Instead of giving him 20 years in prison, they gave him 10 years of probation, which meant 10 years of playing PlayStation at home, attending therapy, and going to addiction sessions, which his father would be ordered to pay for. Now, it wasn't long before the news/media picked up on the story and created an outrage on Twitter. The concept of historic wealth inequality began to boil over until Ethan was ingrained in our minds as a King Joffrey of the upper-middle class.
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We have covered episodes about wealth insulation, American wages, and classism. So as an extension for today, we want to ask what entitlement from birth does to a kid and explore the negative side effects of growing up super well off in a world of broke bitches, failing covid businesses, and student loans. Now we’re not going to try to justify Ethan Couch’s behavior. The official stance of our view is that the affluenza kid should have served back-to-back sentences locked inside that red Ford F-150. We may dislike someone very much, but we can still try to understand them. To do that, we have three myths to bust about entitled children and entitlement in general.
Myth One: Do entitled children actually have a disadvantage mentally? Are they less creative? Can entitled children empathize as well, or is there only life skill spending dollar bills?
Todd: Okay, you heard what I said about gnomes or mental gnomes, right?
Joe: Yeah, they're super cheap and you can buy them at the hardware store in the garden section.
Todd: So, those plastic things that we stick in our lawn and pressure wash once in a while actually have a rich history. In the early 18th century, rich people in England and some other countries would find real people and make them live on their lawns. They would build them little huts, and they would be live in those.
Joe: You ever see that kid show called David The Gnome? I used to think garden gnomes were based on a mythical creature, like an Irish fairy. I had no idea they were based on just putting homeless people in your garden when you're super-rich.
Todd: That was the thing; they were dressed to look druid. The mega-rich would get these people, make them grow their hair long, and have them not wash it for years. They didn't do lawn work or be used for security. All they were for was to be lawn ornaments for when the rich had parties and to show off. Imagine how rich you must be for this to be some sort of weird entertainment for you.
So, today's episode is all about affluenza, and we really want to figure out if affluenza is actually real or a bunch of defense BS. For a rich kid who killed a bunch of people with a Ford F-150, we want to know if affluenza could actually play a part in something like that. Want to know someone richer than Ethan? This comes from the Rich Kids of Instagram, and if you want to feel slightly ill about wealth, just go to this Instagram account and scroll down until you see the luxury car with the cheetah on top. If anyone's unaware, this account is derived from Saudi Arabian kids with crazy amounts of wealth, and they regularly post what their lifestyle looks like.
With that being said, do you think that the affluenza kid or these kids actually have a disadvantage? I can't imagine so, but there is insight about how getting too much wealth too quickly can dull your ability to empathize with others. Do you remember the Monopoly experiment? If you and I played Monopoly and you started with double the money and were able to move a couple of times extra per turn, it could spark the notion that you are simply the better player instead of the one with the advantage. If you watch the TED Talk, the players played more noisily, physically acted more aggressively as they won, and ate more pretzels. When asked how they won, a lot of them would talk about how well they played. They would completely forget that they had started with three times the amount of money and turns.
Now, this is not a new phenomenon. If you look back to Greek stories or Chinese myths, there are always stories about young Princes to avoid because they never had the process of getting wealthy; they only had the narrative they got at birth to justify why they are lucky. Kids with rich parents also tend not to get in trouble as much at home and at school. They seem to operate using a different set of rules than the rest of us. In addition, when you are born wealthy, you are more likely to be trained to ask questions with the authorities. It's not just misbehaving; if you are in a higher socioeconomic bracket, you are taught by your parents that you're allowed to question authority like doctors and teachers. You're brought up to know that you are allowed to ask, "Is this really for my own good?" which isn't as prevalent in the lower class. These rich kids are more outspoken, riskier, and feel freer to offer up their opinion.
Next, does being wealthy at birth make you less creative? Do you think that those kids who get everything handed to them have to be creative in the first place and be resourceful? Well, we've talked about a Smithsonian article before, but we found another one on APS about how the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology took college students and gave them one of two writing prompts. Some students were asked to write three reasons why they should demand the best in life first and then do the paperclip exercise (aka verbal priming). Not only did they list more uses for the paperclip than people who weren't entitled, but their ideas were also rated as more novel and interesting. The kids who did not feel entitled prior to the study felt more realistic and felt like they had more of a ceiling, effectively hindering their creativity. In short, if you come from money, you can afford to take risks and think outside the box.
Myth Two: Does being entitled make you untrustworthy? In past episodes, we talked about how trustworthiness is a key component of business. So how much can you trust someone who never had a lawn mowing job as a kid?
Can we trust affluent people? If affluent people, aka the Monopoly players with extra rolls, feel entitled and are more creative, can we trust them? Overall, we looked for articles that would help us determine whether or not the super-wealthy were honest because we want to know if we could trust rich people. Furthermore, would they be more likely to lie to me or to be a jerk instead?
We're going to start with you dropping your wallet in front of a really wealthy house during Halloween. Do you think you would get it back? I would think they would want to be a good person. For this, we are going to link to a Netherlands study. They didn't exactly drop wallets in front of people's houses, but they "misdelivered" cards with various amounts of money to them. They delivered about 20 Euros and found that the upper-middle class was more likely to return money than the poor, which shouldn't be a big shock. However, if we're just talking pure return, there was actually no difference across wealth classes. Effectively, we're saying that you can trust rich people just as much as you can trust anyone else - it's the same level of chance across the board.
I just want to point out we all trust rich people and people who are born into wealth. We trust them more than we trust others because they have nicer stuff dressed nice. Forbes has an article that points this out named Our Brain Tricks Us Into Trusting Rich People. They talk about the halo effect, which is if you encounter somebody who has a lot of wealth, you encounter the best things they present. First, they talk about the mere exposure effect, which means if we see them in the news repeatedly, we will trust them more because we have been exposed to them multiple times. We will almost feel like we know them. Lastly, they discuss the fundamental attribution error, which is we think they're successful so they must know something we don't. All in all, people tend to have a predisposition to trust wealthy people, regardless if they are or not.
Myth Three: How do we prevent entitlement in our children? Where is the line between giving your entitled kid a mild case of spoiled or full-blown affluenza?
Who doesn't want to do better for their kids, right? Just about anyone who has any kid wishes to give them the best in life. Now, we want to point out a way to undo affluenza or cure entitlement for anyone facing it – not just the upper class. So, in that TED Talk about that Monopoly study, it points out something very important. The researcher took wealthy people and wanted to find out if you could undo or briefly undo entitlement. They actually found an answer, which is yes. If you were entitled, I could show you 45 seconds of a video and it would make you a better person.
The video he showed was of child poverty, and it wasn't designed to make them feel bad or to give money. It was designed to remind participants of the three C's, which are cooperation, community, and compassion. The study host would make his wealthier participants watch this video, and after seeing it, they would then stage somebody needing help. Since they were reminded of the three C's, people statistically would jump up and help more often than if they hadn't seen the video. We've done episodes that talk about how necessary it is to be human. Survival depended on having a tribe to bond with. So, it makes sense that reminding someone wealthy that they have a community around them makes them more likely to contribute.
The most recent and compelling studies I can find talk about how extreme wealth makes you recognize and understand that some of your friends are only friends because you have money. Some of the people you encounter and talk to only do it because they think you have connections, which is a very isolating thing. This can tie into affluenza being a real thing after all. With that being said, do you want to know the steps to back off entitlement and be humbler? If so, these steps come from Psychology Today. They talk about how to overcome entitlement, and one way was to practice perspective. That's the number one step on their list that helps you overcome entitlement as an adult. Something that Todd does frequently that is also on their list is promoting other people's successes. Somebody will tell him good news, and then he will spread that in front of them like he's rolling out a red social carpet. Being genuine and promoting success other than your own can lead to curing instilled entitlement, all while making others feel good along the way.
There are a couple of other things on their list, but the next piece that I want to talk about is moral licensing. When we talk about the Monopoly game and how you try to justify why you have extra moves and extra money, this is something we do in real life all the time. The studies where they talk about wealthy people are more willing to take extra candy from a free jar or eat more pretzels when playing the Monopoly game. In addition, people who drive wealthier cars don't stop as much for other people trying to cross the street. It all boils down to the moral licensing trap. You gave yourself a moral license to do awful things or just non-good things due to your entitlement. If you can try to recognize and catch yourself when you are telling yourself that you deserve something, you may be able to counter that and reverse that adverse mindset. In short, we encourage people to look up this link and moral licensing because that seems to be one of the big moves for cutting down your own entitlement.
Finally, if you are raising an affluenza kid, what would you do to correct their behavior? Full-blown punishment mode? This comes from a Forbes article on how to not raise spoiled children. We're going to go through this kind of quickly, but it's a good article.
This article isn’t geared toward people who make X amount of money, meaning it is good for everyone. One of the tips they listed was to instill an allowance tool. This will make your kids work for their money instead of being handed it. It will help them learn the value of a dollar and develop a stronger work ethic. Another one was to let them make their own spending decisions. I know as a parent it's hard not to take a kid who just got his allowance and tell them the best way to use it. But try to refrain from that and let them learn their own lessons. In general, make them work for their money and learn the value of managing it properly without intervening (aka giving them more if they spent it unwisely). You can find more points on the link, but the last one they listed was practicing gratitude. This goes for both you and your kid(s). Practicing gratitude and being appreciative for what you have is a powerful perspective shifter and one that can lead to more grateful habits well into the future.
Final Thoughts
You don't have to run over a group of innocent bystanders in a 5,000-pound truck before you recognize an entitlement problem. If you're living in America and you’re listening to my voice through an iPhone or car speakers, then you know what entitlement feels like, even if you have the same mild case of affluenza that all of us have.
Here are a few things to consider if you're battling entitlement or if you're worried about the entitlement of the people in your life. Entitlement makes you invent a narrative to justify your good fortune. If you start out the game of Monopoly with extra money, dice rolls, and free pretzels, you don't want to feel awful when you win. So, along the way, you started justifying why you deserve your hot streak. That's not a flaw, and it's not self-delusion; It's how humans are built to rationalize our good fortune. It's why I can enjoy an $8 specialty latte while I surf through my $800 iPhone and still complain about a rich kid who got away with murder.
But entitlement isn't all bad. Entitlement, in measured doses, can make a person more creative and can make them appear more trustworthy once they've honed a public persona. Furthermore, with some purposeful mindfulness and social conscientiousness, entitlement and maybe even affluenza can be completely cured.
Joe: Wait, we can cure it, but the affluenza kid still has a super punch-able face.
Todd: If I were in jail with him, I would have taken all of his parent’s money and kicked his ass.