New Study Finds Rich People Lack Empathy

Originally posted by DetectiveT
So how come crime rates go up in areas that have a lot of poverty? According to this study shouldn't the inverse be true? If people who aren't rich have more empathy then why do they resort to murder, theft and other various deeds to get money or just to vent their "anger"?

Perhaps different mindset may be a better phrase but to make such a broad statement isn't all that fair. People can lack empathy no matter the amount in their bank account. Rich people are often made into villains,some justly, like it is some kind of scarlet letter. What better way to keep people poor than to make them resent the rich. What better way to destroy capitalists then to isolate them, make them greedier, and turn the public against them.

edit on 9-8-2011 by DetectiveT because: (no reason given)

Define crime, sir. Do the wealthy not commit crimes EVERYDAY, but get away with it because they can buy themselves out of it? Building 7 contained alot of damning information for Worldcom and Enron.

The wealthy commit the most henious crimes.

Originally posted by Deebo

Originally posted by ldyserenity
reply to post by v1rtu0s0

 

I don't need a study to tell me this. However, I have to say they have more class and never treat the cashiers or waiters/waitresses rotten, only lowlife cheap poor people act rude to their servers/cashiers...that much I will give the rich. They may lack empathy, however they know how to "portray" empathy.

That I will say is flat wrong.. I have worked many customer service jobs. Ever see how pissed the rich get when you screw up their order or are not quick enough? They are rich therefore they demand the best service right now. I can't begin to tell you jobs where you get tips. I valet parked at a fancy 5 star hotel in the past. If you see a mercedes pull up, and then a beat up pickup, grab that pickup if you can, that is where your tip is coming from. Every time.


Deebo

edit on 9-8-2011 by Deebo because: fix

Well I never dealt with the wealthy wealthy I mainly spoke to the middle class the very rich rich I never had any interaction with on a service basis, but the ones I have met could "PLAY" kind even though you could tell it was phony.

Originally posted by v1rtu0s0
Those are not the same authors. You are mistaken.

It doesn't matter if they're the same authors, any journal that publishes that crap is not a valid source.

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


You are correct and my story was highly unusual and involved a number of coincidences. That is why I would never claim that just because I did something it wouldbe possible for everyone. It wouldn't. Moreover it's easy to forget I spent a lot of time poor and miserable and had to take a bullet in the leg along the way to make it happen. Statistically speaking it's freakish tha I'm even alive, nevermind comfortable. While this is the life I chose for myself and I have no regrets, I'm not foolish enough to think you could run a whole society of people like that.

Originally posted by Nosred

Originally posted by v1rtu0s0
Those are not the same authors. You are mistaken.

It doesn't matter if they're the same authors, any journal that publishes that crap is not a valid source.

edit on 9-8-2011 by Nosred because: (no reason given)

By that logic, you are on the same level as anyone else who posts content on ATS, right? Like Loughner for instance?

I am shocked!


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

I haven't found any "free" copies of the study. I may have to email the individual to see if they will send me the study. Otherwise it's 35$ to gain access to the site and DL the full study.


So, any rich people feel like contributing?


Remember, if you don't contribute you're just proving the study correct.












LOL, just kidding.

reply to post by Nosred


What does your profile image mean?? Visual metaphors are always good brain trainers.

Originally posted by v1rtu0s0By that logic, you are on the same level as anyone else who posts content on ATS, right? Like Loughner for instance?

ATS is a board made up entirely of anonymous users, this is a website claiming to be a scientific journal. By your logic even if this journal started publishing stuff such as "OMG REPTILIANS INVADIN' EARTH TOMORROW!!!!11!!1" it would still be a valid source as long as those studies were performed by someone else.

Originally posted by Nosred

Originally posted by v1rtu0s0By that logic, you are on the same level as anyone else who posts content on ATS, right? Like Loughner for instance?

ATS is a board made up entirely of anonymous users, this is a website claiming to be a scientific journal. By your logic even if this journal started publishing stuff such as "OMG REPTILIANS INVADIN' EARTH TOMORROW!!!!11!!1" it would still be a valid source as long as those studies were performed by someone else.

How do you know the specifics of the study? It sounds like it could have been a pyschological exersize.


This is the website:

Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, publishes cutting-edge research articles, short reports, and research reports spanning the entire spectrum of the science of psychology. Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology.

www.psychologicalscience.org...


It looks very legitimate to me.

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


Wow there is a surprise. Most are personality disordered and sociopathic. The question is whether that is something in their genes?

Originally posted by Egyptia
reply to post by v1rtu0s0

 

Wow there is a surprise. Most are personality disordered and sociopathic. The question is whether that is something in their genes?

I doubt it's in the genes. I think it goes along with the nature/nuture duality. In this case it's 'nuture,' or their experience with society that teaches them to act a certain way.


Then again, generations of wealth could potentially change the genetics as well, altering certain brain structures or hormone production.

After the military I went into high end manufacturing. Worked for very famous people and corporate executives that had a great deal of money.

Truly, my easiest clients were the very wealthy. It was the climbers that were the worst evil vile people to work for. The people stabbing their way up to the top are absolutely the worst.

I'll work for a rich famous person any day. Also the everyday middle class folks. I'm not sure about this study said forth.

The wealthy that gained it on their own know how hard it is to make someone's self.

The "Nouveau Riche" are the most awful black marks on humanity.

Originally posted by ldyserenity
reply to post by v1rtu0s0

 

I don't need a study to tell me this. However, I have to say they have more class and never treat the cashiers or waiters/waitresses rotten, only lowlife cheap poor people act rude to their servers/cashiers...that much I will give the rich. They may lack empathy, however they know how to "portray" empathy.

Having been a server in a fancy restaurant I am calling BS on you.
The rich folks usually were beyond arrogant and snooty. I don't know how I put up with that crap for a whole year in college. The no empathy is insane as when times get hard they are all trying to screw everyone in any way possible. When the economy crashed they all kept going out they just stopped tipping. # them lol

Originally posted by MasterGemini
...When the economy crashed they all kept going out they just stopped tipping. # them lol

Are you saying all Canadians and Brits are rich?

Reminded me of a joke though...You know the difference between a canoe and a canuck?

Sometimes a canoe will tip! lmao....

Originally posted by dolphinfan
reply to post by v1rtu0s0

 

Where is the science? No description of the methodology, how the results were obtained, what subjective criteria used, sample size and how they were selected.

Nothing but a bunch of bs

As v1rtu0s0 pointed out, the linked article was a media release, not the journal article itself. Being as I have free access to both of those articles linked in the paper, I took the liberty of reading them for you (since you would have to pay $35 for a 48hr access).

I will summarize the main, relevant points of the initial paper (ref: Kraus, M. W.; Piff, P. K.; Keltner, D. Current Directions in Psychological Science 2011, 20, 246.), which is a theoretical study (In other words, any conclusions made were drawn from data published by other authors, or by themselves in previous works) of how social rank (both objective and subjective) influences the ability for an individual to perceive and decode emotions, etc. The second paper listed is encompassed within this, so I won't divulge into that.

They firstly define social class is the culmination of a person's individual wealth, education and occupational prestige. Ultimately this forms a social class complex, which results in a series of behavioural and material distinctions between social ranks (see the figure taken from their paper).




Specifically in reference to the OP is their findings on the difference in nonverbal behaviour between people of different class. Their claim was as follows:

Social class is also signaled in specific repertoires of subtle nonverbal behavior that derive from the greater resources upper-class individuals enjoy vis-à-vis their lower-class coun- terparts (e.g., Kraus & Keltner, 2009). Specifically, upper- class individuals live lives of abundant resources and less dependency on others and should signal this resource indepen- dence with nonverbal disengagement (e.g., less responsive head nods, less eye contact). By contrast, lower-class individ- uals are more dependent upon others’ resources, which they should signal with nonverbal social engagement (e.g., head nods, eye contact).

And:

Many observable aspects of social life differentiate the lives of upper- and lower-class individuals and should serve as signals of social class. Exactly which signals are most diagnostic of social class and how these signals vary across cultures and sociopolitical contexts (e.g., capitalist, socialist), are important areas of inquiry (see Fig. 1). So, too, are the
processes of self- and other-categorization that these class- based signals trigger. We are proposing that individuals use class-related signals to display their objective resources and to infer the objective resources of others. Through signaling, individuals provide the information necessary to compare their own wealth, education, occupation, aesthetic prefer- ences, and behavior to those of other individuals. This social- signaling process separates people into different social-class categories and is the basis for the individual’s subjective understanding of his or her social-class rank (see Markus & Kitayama, 2010, for a review of how the self is constituted in similar kinds of social comparisons).

In order to test first of these, they recorded the interactions between two people in a controlled environment, one of high class and one of lower class. In this, they observed that their theory was indeed correct in this instance. The upper class subject spent most of their time playing with their phone or drawing on a questionnaire and appeared overly disengaged, where as the lower class person appeared more engaged, giving emphatic head nods, laughter, etc. In addition to this, they also found that 'naive' observers were able to correctly predict the education and income background for each subject after being shown a 60 second clip of their interactions, which agrees with the findings of previous literature.

More poignant was their bit on "Empathic Accuracy". Referring back to figure 1 (copied in above), they postulated that social class will affect the way by which an individual perceives and interprets the emotions of others:

As Figure 1 illustrates, we propose that social class shapes individuals’ perceptions of others’ emotions. Given that lower- class individuals are more engaged with others (Kraus & Keltner, 2009), and guided by research suggesting that lower- ranking individuals are more reliant on others’ emotions (e.g., Guinote & Vescio, 2010), we tested whether lower-class indi- viduals would be more accurate than upper-class individuals at perceiving the emotions that others experience.

In their initial studies from a previous work, they found that high school-educated subjects were able to decipher the emotions of a static facial expression more accurately than college-educated participants. Second to this, they also tested whether a person's perception of their social rank (subjective social rank) would induce empathic accuracy (i.e. would be able to interpret emotions correctly). To do this, they asked participants to envisage interacting with a higher ranking person, with the theory in mind that doing so would cause them to perceive themselves as having a lower social rank than normal and induce greater accuracy in perceiving emotions of static expressions. It was found that people did indeed report a 'lower subjective social-class rank" when imagining interacting with a higher ranking individual and furthermore, that lower ranking subjects had a greater empathic accuracy.

In response to these results, the authors state this:

That an objective resource measure (educational attain- ment) and a subjective rank-based manipulation of social class similarly predicted empathic accuracy suggests that objective social class and subjective social-class rank uniquely influ- ence class-based psychological experiences. Furthermore, as social-class measures are often intertwined with other vari- ables (e.g., neighborhood or ethnicity), the manipulation of subjective social-class rank provides the first evidence that the construct can cause empathic accuracy. More broadly, these results highlight the importance of the social context in shift- ing the experience of subjective social-class rank and class- based patterns of emotion perception. Extending this work, we would expect perceptions of social-class rank to influence accuracy in judgments of others’ attitudes and personality traits—domains relevant to empathic accuracy.

Another interesting finding that was eluded to in the article linked by v1rtu0s0, was that lower income individuals tended to give away a high proportion of their salary to charity than did higher income individuals. They further tested these statistics in the following assay:

In one study, we asked individuals to divide 10 points (which would later be exchanged for money) between themselves and an anonymous partner. We found that individuals reporting lower subjective socioeconomic status gave more to their part- ner than did upper-socioeconomic-status participants. In another study, we found parallel effects with objective social class: Lower-income participants helped a distressed confed- erate more than did their upper-income peers.

A third and final test was similar to that used to test empathic accuracy. They first manipulated subjective social class of participants by asking them to imagine interacting with a higher or lower class individual before stating how much of people's income should go towards charity. They found that a lower subjective social-class rank resulted in a higher amount than those of a higher subjective social-class rank. In addition, lower income individuals in the study were more charitable than those of higher income.

I suppose in the end, the rich didn't get rich by donating large portions of money to charity. That being said, I think this disparity is more or less an expected stereotype and I don't think this is anything more than evidence of a common perception. It would still be a handy piece of information in terms of policy making, but as with the concept of constructivism, it's likely not as black and white as our collective policy makers would like.

Did they really need to do a study on that? I thought that was a given obvious...

reply to post by hypervalentiodine


Thanks for posting this summary hypervalentiodine.

Originally posted by Grey Magic
reply to post by hypervalentiodine

 

Thanks for posting this summary hypervalentiodine.

No problemos.

I wonder if they'll do a study and find that poor people have envy. Oh wait, that's not politically correct.