Bah, humbug! Rich slower to show empathy
"It’s not that the upper classes are coldhearted," says social psychologist Jennifer Stellar. "They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives." (Credit: Alice Day, Shutterstock)
UC BERKELEY (US) — Dickens was right on the money with his depiction of Cratchit and Scrooge. Poor people are quicker to show compassion than the rich, a study shows.
A study published in the journal Emotion finds that individuals in the upper-middle and upper classes are less able to detect and respond to the distress signals of others. Overall, the results indicate that socioeconomic status correlates with the level of empathy and compassion that people show in the face of emotionally charged situations.
“It’s not that the upper classes are coldhearted,” says lead author Jennifer Stellar, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives.”
The findings challenge previous studies that have characterized lower-class people as being more prone to anxiety and hostility in the face of adversity.
“These latest results indicate that there’s a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their well-being,” Stellar says.
It has not escaped the researchers’ attention that the findings come at a time of rising class tension, expressed in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
Rather than widen the class divide, Stellar says she would like to see them promote understanding of different class cultures. For example, the findings suggest that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds may thrive better in cooperative settings than their upper-class counterparts.
“Upper-class individuals appear to be more self-focused, they’ve grown up with more freedom and autonomy,” she says. “They may do better in an individualist, competitive environment.”
More than 300 ethnically diverse young adults were recruited for the study, which was divided into three experiments that used three separate groups of participants. Because all the volunteers were college undergraduates, their class identification—lower class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, or upper class—was based on parental income and education.
In the first experiment, 148 young adults were rated on how frequently and intensely they experience such emotions as joy, contentment, pride, love, compassion, amusement, and awe.
In addition, they reported how much they agreed with such statements as “When I see someone hurt or in need, I feel a powerful urge to take care of them,” and “I often notice people who need help.” Compassion was the only positive emotion reported at greater levels by lower-class participants.
In the second experiment, a new group of 64 participants viewed two videos: an instructional video on construction and an emotionally charged video about families who are coping with the challenges of having a child with cancer.
Participants showed no differences while watching the “neutral”instructional video, and all reported feeling sad in response to the video about families of cancer patients. However, members of the lower class reported higher levels of compassion and empathy as distinct from sorrow.
The researchers also monitored the heart rates of participants as they watched the neutral and emotionally charged videos. Lower-class participants showed greater decreases in heart rate as they watched the cancer family video than upper-class participants.
“One might assume that watching someone suffering would cause stress and raise the heart rate,” Stellar says. “But we have found that, during compassion, the heart rate lowers as if the body is calming itself to take care of another person.”
For the third experiment, a new set of 106 participants was randomly divided into pairs and pitted against one another in mock interviews for a lab manager position. To further raise the stress level in interviews, those who performed best were to win a cash prize.
Post-interview reports from the participants showed that the lower-class interviewees perceived their rivals to be feeling greater amounts of stress, anxiety and embarrassment and as a result reported more compassion and sympathy for their competitors. Conversely, upper-class participants were less able to detect emotional distress signals in their rivals.
“Recognizing suffering is the first step to responding compassionately,” Stellar says. “The results suggest that it’s not that upper classes don’t care, it’s that they just aren’t as good at perceiving stress or anxiety.”
Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, San Francisco, contributed to the study that was funded by grants from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and the McNair Scholars Program.
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COMMENT: The results suggest to me that those who are successful in the context of a competitive, capitalist culture have developed or inherited the ability to ignore and/or suppress signals of pain and distress from others. They alone matter; the totally self-interested succeed best in a Darwinian, sociopathic environment.
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