Paul works in the Morality, Emotion and Social Hierarchy Laboratory at University of California, Irvine, and he is an assistant professor in UCL’s Department of Psychology and Social Behaviour. He’s semi-famous in certain circles for an experiment he ran a few years ago involving rigged two-player games of Monopoly, and how the winning players of the games invariably believed they’d won because they were better at the game than the other player. They all conveniently overlooked that they’d been allowed to roll the dice twice each turn, had started the game with twice as much money as their opponent and received twice as much each time they passed Go. And they’d been awarded those privileges based on the toss of a coin before the game, meaning their “victory” essentially came down to dumb luck – a straight 50/50 chance.

Paul is interested in how social class and economic inequality inform relationships between individuals. What he has found, and what he has to say, is often uncomfortable stuff. In another of his experiments he asked undergraduate students to stand close to a pedestrian crossing and observed the behaviour of the drivers as they approached the crossing to see if they were – to use his words – “more or less inclined to break the law”.

What he found is fascinating. In California it’s against the law not to stop for someone who is waiting at a pedestrian crossing. Paul carried out this experiment on several days and involved hundreds of cars. And his data shows clearly that as the value of the car increased, the driver’s tendency to break the law increased as well. The more expensive the car approaching the crossing, the less likely it was to stop.