***
Rich People Just Care Less
by DANIEL GOLEMAN
Oct. 5, 2013
Turning a blind eye. Giving
someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.
These metaphors for
condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They
suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those
with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm
of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.
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.
Bringing the micropolitics of
interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are
suggesting, has implications for public policy.
Of course, in any society,
social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given
interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more
powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we
are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay
less attention to those a rung or two down.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply
paying attention to the person in pain. 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. [emphasis added]
Dacher
Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael
W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and
the attention deficit.
Mr. Keltner suggests that, in
general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire
help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social
assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she
gets home from school until the time you get home from work. 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.
While Mr. Keltner’s research
finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned
interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most
power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the
least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank —
but not as well as those low of status do.
This has profound
implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the
needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in
turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right,
compassionate action.
In politics, readily dismissing
inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about
them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing
for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow
patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and
pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap. As political
scientists have noted, redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the
creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even
have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with
them. [emphasis added]
Social distance makes it all
the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative
spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.
Freud called this “the
narcissism of minor differences,” a theme repeated by Vamik D. Volkan, an
emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who was born in
Cyprus to Turkish parents. Dr. Volkan remembers hearing as a small boy awful
things about the hated Greek Cypriots — who, he points out, actually share many
similarities with Turkish Cypriots. Yet for decades their modest-size island
has been politically divided, which exacerbates the problem by letting
prejudicial myths flourish.
In contrast, extensive
interpersonal contact counteracts biases by letting people from hostile groups
get to know one another as individuals and even friends. Thomas F.
Pettigrew, a research professor of social psychology at the University of California,
Santa Cruz,
analyzed more than 500 studies on intergroup contact. Mr. Pettigrew, who was
born in Virginia in 1931 and lived there until going to Harvard for graduate
school, told me in an e-mail that it was the “the rampant racism in the
Virginia of my childhood” that led him to study prejudice.
In his research, he found that even in
areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and viewed one another through
lenses of negative stereotypes, individuals who had close friends within the
other group exhibited little or no such prejudice. They seemed to realize the
many ways those demonized “others” were “just like me.” Whether such friendly
social contact would overcome the divide between those with more and less
social and economic power was not studied, but I suspect it would help. [emphasis added]
Since the 1970s, the gap
between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its
highest level in a century. This widening gulf between the haves and have-less
troubles me, but not for the obvious reasons. Apart from the financial
inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the
inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing the
economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.
Daniel Goleman, a
psychologist, is the author of “Emotional Intelligence” and, most recently,
“Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.”
***
No comments:
Post a Comment