The One Percent Have Personality Deficiences Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: The evidence is they are less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish. “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.” The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm,” published this week in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, argue that “upper-class rank perceptions trigger a focus away from the context toward the self….” In other words, rich people are more likely to think about themselves. “They think that economic success and political outcomes, and personal outcomes, have to do with individual behavior, a good work ethic,” said Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. The rich gloss over the ways family connections, money and education helped; they come to denigrate the role of government and vigorously oppose taxes to fund it. Unlike the rich, lower class people have to depend on others for survival, Keltner argued. So they learn “prosocial behaviors.” They read people better, empathize more with others, and they give more to those in need. For example, lower class subjects are better at deciphering the emotions of people in photographs than are rich people. In video recordings of conversations, rich people are more likely to appear distracted, checking cell phones, doodling, avoiding eye contact, while low-income people make eye contact and nod their heads more frequently signaling engagement. Keltner has also studied vagus nerve activation. The vagus nerve helps the brain record and respond to emotional inputs. When subjects are exposed to pictures of starving children, for example, their vagus nerve typically becomes more active as measured by electrodes on their chests and a sensor band around their waists. In recent tests, yet to be published, Keltner has found that those from lower-class backgrounds have more intense activation than do the rich. In surveys of charitable giving, some show that low-income people give more, but other studies show the opposite. ‘The research regarding income helping behaviors has always been little bit mixed,’ explained Meredith McGinley, a professor of psychology at Pittsburgh’s Chatham University. There is one interesting piece of evidence showing that many rich people may also be willfully clueless, and therefore unable to make the cognitive link. Last year, research at Duke and Harvard universities showed that regardless of political affiliation or income, Americans tended to think wealth distribution ought to be more equal. However, rich people were an exception to this view. Why? Because they wrongly believed it already was more equal. HT to Keltner and ME
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 04:27:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015