Every wonder why so many wealthy people seem oblivious or even non-caring about the plight of those less fortunate? Can't they read the emotional pain? Recent research seems to indicate that the rich are less adept at reading other's emotions in comparison with uneducated and poor people.
So concludes Michael W. Kraus, a researcher at the University of California, whose study was published in the journal, Psychological Science. In one of the study's experiments the researchers used volunteers who worked at the university, some of who were college graduates and some who were not. The volunteers were tested for emotional perception by looking at pictures of faces and indicating the emotions each face displayed. The results indicated that people with more education, money and self-defined social status, performed worse at the task than people with less education, wealth and social status.
Krause concluded that people from lower economic backgrounds often have to rely on others, whereas wealthy people don't ask for help that often. Kraus argued that wealthy people maybe "less concerned and less perceptive of other people's needs and wishes. They show a deficit in empathetic accuracy."
Study co-author Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, says that "we are living in a period of historically high inequality [and] people in positions of power are not going to see [the inequality]. They're going to be blind to it and that has enormous implications for how we educate leaders, why they may not see [what's] obvious and why they may not even understand the suffering of the people below them."
This research is consistent with the studies that show that wealthy people give less to charity than poor people. In a study by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California, and reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they found that lower class individuals were prepared to devote a much greater share of their salary to support charity than wealthy people. This study is supported by the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, which shows that people at the lower end of the income scale give almost 30% more of their income in comparison with the middle class and wealthy. The surprising finding was that the middle class gave even less in proportion compared to the wealthy.
These studies are particularly significant today as the gap between the rich and the poor is the greatest in decades and increasing. Will this also herald a time of increasing insensitivity to the plight of the less fortunate?
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