Article Reflection: Rich people just care less

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Dans les films que nous avons regardé dans le cours, les réfugiés expriment souvent que les gens dans le nouvel pays sont beaucoup plus froids et individualists. A leur pays d'origine, tout est partagé et les portes sont toujours ouverts aux voisins. Ici, les gens tiennent à leur vie privée. Ce phénomène est expliqué parfaitement par la recherche fait par Mark Granovetter dans son papier "The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited", où il observe que les gens riches développent moins de liens sociaux que les gens moins riches. 

“‘Peter Blau has suggested that since the class structure of modern societies is pyramidal, and since we may expect individuals at all levels to be inclined toward homophily—the tendency to choose as friends those similar to oneself—it follows that the lower one’s class stratum, the greater the relative frequency of strong ties. This happens because homophilous ties are more likely to be strong and low-status individuals are so numerous that it is easier for them to pick and choose as friends others similar to themselves.’ A literal interpretation of this comment would lead us to expect upper-status individuals to have large numbers of weak ties, since there are so few others of high status; it would further follow that many of these weak ties would then be to others of lower status, since the latter would be so numerous. This conclusion does not accord with ethnographic accounts of upper-class life that stress the importance of strong ties to other members of the upper class. But it does suggest why the upper class must invest so much in institutions such as private clubs, special schools, and social registers; the effort to maintain a network of homophilous strong ties is more difficult here than for lower strata.”

Les riches, qui ont des ressources suffisantes, ont les moyens d'être individualités, tandis que les pauvres ont besoins des ressources collectives. Par conséquent, les riches sont souvent constatés plus seuls que leurs homologues. On peut conclut alors que la richesse contribue à une culture individualiste. D'un façon intéressant, les économies développés soutiennent que la politique collectiviste (le communisme) marche directement contre le développement économique. Le capitalisme insiste sur l'efficacité d'avoir chaque individu pursuit leur propre intérêt pour créer la richesse collective. Effectivement, la culture collectiviste est à la fois la cause et le résultat du pauvreté. 

Est-ce le prix du richesse la perte du sens du communauté? La plupart des Américains vont probablement dire non, mais il est difficile de manquer ce qu'on n'a pas jamais. En traversant cette limite culturelle, j'ai fini par apprécier les bénéfices de la liberté individuelle et sa sainteté, mais il est quelquefois difficile à réconcilier mes attentes de mes relations sociaux ici avec ceux de mon pays d'origine. C'est peut-être pourquoi les réfugiés ne sont pas nécessairement plus contente bien qu'ils vivent une vie en sécurité ici; ils ne sont pas ingrats, mais la bonheur ne conforme pas toujours aux théories économiques.