Rich People Not Feeling It (“It” Being Empathy)

The New York Times explains something that may have already occurred to a few of us:

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.

[…] 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.

Around 44% of our Congressmen are millionaires, and we got the shutdown messing with WIC and NIH trials and schools on Native American reservations and kids in Head Start and more. (Wall Street’s not worried, though.) Very cool! Of course, wealth and power are two among many factors that influence a person’s capacity to feel empathy: test your own with this Well Blog quiz, which asks you to look at pictures of eyes and pick the emotion that each subject is feeling.

[NYTimes]