Psychologist Daniel Goleman has written a fascinating piece for today’s New York Times about social status and empathy. It seems that the richer and more powerful a person is, the less empathy he or she is likely to have for people who are lower in status:
A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
It’s not that rich people are natural-born sociopaths — although some of them certainly give that impression. Rather, says Goleman, while rich people can buy all the help they need, people of modest means “are more likely to value their social assets”:
The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.
I see this in my own life all the time. I live in Hyde Park in Chicago, a neighborhood with a great deal of racial and economic diversity. It includes undergraduates wealthy enough to attend the University of Chicago, professors who live in homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright … and also a large population of working class African-Americans. I don’t own a car, and sometimes I carry heavy shopping bags home from the grocery store.
