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Rich People Pay Less Attention To Other People, Says Study (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a small recent study, researchers from New York University found that those who considered themselves in higher classes looked at people who walked past them less than those who said they were in a lower class did. The results were published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science. According to Pia Dietze, a social psychology doctoral student at NYU and a lead author of the study, previous research has shown that people from different social classes vary in how they tend to behave towards other people. So, she wanted to shed some light on where such behaviors could have originated. The research was divided into three separate studies. For the first, Dietze and NYU psychology lab director Professor Eric Knowles asked 61 volunteers to walk along the street for one block while wearing Google Glass to record everything they looked at. These people were also asked to identify themselves as from a particular social class: either poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or upper class. An independent group watched the recordings and made note of the various people and things each Glass wearer looked at and for how long. The results showed that class identification, or what class each person said they belonged to, had an impact on how long they looked at the people who walked past them. During Study 2, participants viewed street scenes while the team tracked their eye movements. Again, higher class was associated with reduced attention to people in the images. For the third and final study, the results suggested that this difference could stem from the way the brain works, rather than being a deliberate decision. Close to 400 participants took part in an online test where they had to look at alternating pairs of images, each containing a different face and five objects. Whereas higher class participants took longer to notice when the face was different in the alternate image compared to lower classes, the amount of time it took to detect the change of objects did not differ between them. The team reached the conclusion that faces seem to be more effective in grabbing the attention of individuals who come from relatively lower class backgrounds.
Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new?
... News at 11.
You got a dallah you can give me? My car jus broke down and I need to get my kids some medicin from da cvs.
You think I am kidding? I have had that exact conversation with a few variations, many times with many different people.
Keep your head down. Dont make eye contact. Maybe they will not bother you.
Interesting. I had a fellow on the the train yesterday ask me for food. When I told him I didn't have any money (true), he said he didn't want money, just a loaf of bread. I had just spent nearly the last of the money in my bank account at the grocery shop (due to a banking stuff-up, payday was delayed a couple of days this month). I didn't have any bread, but I gave him one of the two bricks of cheese I'd just purchased and wished him luck in finding some bread to go with it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The majority of posts are simply going to assume that spending more time looking at someone is better than not, but case in point people look at things they are afraid of and need time to figure out, longer than things they don't.
I'd say that if you are the type of person that hasn't much concern for other humans, then perhaps that is one of the prerequisites of getting into the "upper class" category.
Just personal observation, no scientific studies here.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I hate em! I hate em! Meh, they're ok.
from the way the brain works, rather than being a deliberate decision
I hope the actual research isn't as fluffy as this summary.
You don't just ask people what class they fall in...you'll get inaccurate results. How many "rich" people volunteer in a group of 61?...or even 400.
There are regional and generational differences...the article didn't say if the experiment occurred in just one location or if they experimented in a variety. Or, did they consider the age of the participants.
Also, it's quite possible there's another explanation. There's plenty of prior work showing that more successful people are able to assess things more quickly than less successful. But no, let's jump to the SJW conclusion. Empathy has been shown to be a trait of successful people as well...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Just another day in Paradise
Is it just an American thing, the assumption that wealth and class are the same? In the UK we have working class billionaires and a lot of financially struggeling members of the middle classes
This outcome may possibly arise from a lifetime of interactions where people treat you like you owe them something. I remember I was sitting outside a church waiting for my wedding to begin when a man approached me and asked me for some money for the bus or for gas. I didn't have any cash on me, and when I told him this he became irritated and belligerently responded "can't you just walk to the gas station and use the ATM?!". I've had countless interactions with people who take eye contact as an invitation to stop you on the street to try and sell something, for a survey, to beg, or in some way impede you. If I'm out an about, its because I have places to be, so I keep my head down and keep to myself.
Waiting for the comments about Trump.
Or does this only apply to people who are rich through success rather than from their parents?
The study only had two nominally "upper class" individuals in it, meaning the study has too few samples to say anything about "upper class". The only thing you might infer is that middle class people pay less attention than lower class people.
But the class assignment is based on self-reports. A lot of rich people consider themselves middle class, and some middle class people by income consider themselves upper class. So, the study really says that people who consider themselves to be of a higher class pay less attention.
But wait, that's still not right. What they actually measured is "dwell time". The differences in dwell time are small and they recorded only 1 minute of video or used images on monitors. In addition, they didn't control for other factors that vary with socioeconomic status, such as level of education and IQ.
So, the study says nothing about "rich people" and next to nothing about "upper class people". And what it says about lower vs middle class may have nothing to do with attention or class.
I suspect this is more intelligence level or the ability to follow instructions rather than be distracted
Rich people are rich because they are more focussed at a task(probably why they're rich as they gave it more concentration). This is likely similar for intelligent people as well.
So if you're told to walk down a street, you're going to tend to do it with less distraction if you are more focussed.
I would say that people that are more easily distracted will tend to do less well in life, and this will result in being less 'rich/having nice things'.
But I realized I just don't give a shit.
What? Did you say something?
Hey! that's maybe the way to become rich!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Has this "study" been replicated? Where? What's the replication rate in psychology? 30%? Lower? Will this "effect" decline over time (Decline Effect), reflecting the biases of the researchers?
Steve Jobs once remarked that mediocre people focus on other people, while smart people focus on ideas.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
They failed to double-blind the experiment.
They also failed to have a set of test subjects which they tested, and *post hoc* asked them to self-identify their social class.
It would also be interesting to scale "self identified social class" vs. "actual social class", across the results vectors.
Pretty crappy experiment. Sorry.
How can they tell what people are looking at with Google Glass? Head position is only one factor and probably the less significant one. Doesn't it need another camera pointing back at the eyeball?
Saw a TV program a couple of years ago where they were tracking people's gaze while they walked around a supermarket, for shelf layout purposes and the gear they used for that definitely had another camera looking at the eyeball and tracking the sclera/iris boundary to calculate what they were looking at.
This is just more proof that The Donald is broke and running for president just for the salary and perks.
The dude is so thin skinned he can't help but respond and give attention to anyone who says *anything* about him, no matter how true.
I find it odd that I'm in a community with a very high rate of self-diagnosed Asperger neckbeards that are now screaming that not interacting or making eye contact (a form of interaction by my reckoning) is a sign of being all high and mighty...
I don't make a lot of eye contact with people. I find no real reason to. I don't see the virtue in it and as an introvert I find it's simply better to not interact with others. What's the harm in keeping to yourself? I don't have anything to offer them and I'd rather not deal with what they have in store for me.
But I must be a sociopath or self absorbed like the upmodded posts claim, right? Thanks for the diagnosis, doc. Put that in your pipe and smoke it tonight.
And since you are all such keen sociologists now, I classify myself as middle class from a lower-middle class family.
Excellent story by him makes this point (it's short, brilliantly written and just plain good - it's worth reading)
https://www.thefreelibrary.com...
---
"How do you tell the difference between them?' I asked. "How can you judge which is honest, which isn't?'
"The fact is,' said the manager quietly, "you can't. There's no difference between them. Some have been at it longer than others and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago. On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn't. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of a place called the Royal Hibernian Hotel. They couldn't tell you what happened or why. One thing's sure, though: they're hanging to the cliff by their fingernails. Poor fellow, someone must've stomped on that man's hands on O'Connell Bridge and he just gave up the ghost and went over.
---
I've never had to beg, or get close, but living close to the edge is no fun, but I could cope, but I know a guy who was a millionaire and ended up sleeping on the streets. He's now an alcoholic.
(I'm also a londoner)
Proverbs 18:23 When the poor speak, they have to be polite, but when the rich answer, they are rude.
News at 11. Water is wet...
You think they got rich by actually giving a damn about other people?
And here's another hint, how do you know they weren't lying? Did they have to provide evidence that they're the class they claim to be?
Here's a hint, if you're making 250K/year you aren't really upper class, the 250K number was more than a decade ago, you now have to be making $434,682.
You're still working class at 150K now baby.
Makes sense. Most people aspire to be better off. (yes, Anonymous Coward, I know, you're the exception)
There have been studies done that suggest that people tend to "dress up". What I mean by that is, if someone moves into an area where dress codes are more formal, or more affluent looking, people in those areas tend to adapt to that dress code.
If someone moves to an area where people dress more slovenly than they are accustomed to, they tend to not change their clothing- they would rather stand out as the well-dressed individual.
Obviously over the last several decades there has been an overall move to less formal clothing, but we tend to emulate those who look more well off than us rather than the other way around. It may be subconscious and Anonymous Coward will deny it, but that's how it is.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Step 1: get car
Step 2: drive the 101 from say hopland to san francisco
Step 3: notice that the cock behavior crescendos around Marin, and is mostly attributable to autos at or near the six figure mark
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Studies show rich people have it going for themselves. They don't need to look at or rely on others to get shit done. They just throw money around and things happen. Unlike poor people who have to talk to their peers to get anything done. Well shit. Who knew?
...so of course certain things get lost in the details. When you've got an extremely refined eye for quality, you realize just how truly mundane and generic most people are. /signed someone who grew up among the very well off but chose to walk my own path.
All of the test subjects were instructed to pretend to be part of various classes of society. How is pretending to be rich, poor or middle class while walking down a street supposed to discover how people that are actually rich, poor or otherwise truly behave? Everyone has preconceived notions of how people in other classes behave. If you think that rich people walk with a swagger, you're going to walk with a swagger when instructed to pretend to be rich.
I get that the researchers were attempting to isolate behavioral changes based on differences in environmental circumstances but I would have been more impressed if they had actually recruited real wealthy people to put on the glasses and do the walk. Seems to me that by not doing that, they artificially influenced the actual test subjects by allowing for those subjects to exercise their own bias.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
It could be that the mental model that the rich person used to make themselves that way requires a certain amount of energy and concentration to maintain.
Perhaps they are poor because they are bad at abstraction and prediction, and are thus distrustful of people they meet because they are always worried about what people might do next. The rich simply have, in general, more natural talent at these analytical skills. I have been wondering for decades when we will wake up to that fact as a society - some people are simply born Trumps.
I don't want to hang around with the riff-raff.
The same can be seen in almost every business plan and employee evaluation.
BULLSHIT, please cite references
It seems to me that the primary reason to look at strangers you pass is if you feel insecure and scared of assault of theft from them.
Their is probably also a large correlation to mating behavior.
Most likely this just shows that Rich people are more likely happily in a relationship and trusting of strangers.
Anyone trying to correlate staring at strangers you pass in the street with caring about these strangers is doing so with no evidence or theory.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Perhaps those that are on the right half of the curve just simply recognize that more often than not, that other people bring them down and have nothing to offer. Those on the left side of the curve see almost anyone as someone who can help them.
Besides the trust-funded 1% who suck at life but live in the ultra-upper class, most successful people are just more capable.
Sorry, I wasn't listening.
... the poor people were sizing up who to rob.
I see this all the time. But one should consider differences in skin color, age, and style of dress. I get what I call "phone palming" a lot from white and professional women. They bring their cellphone up to look at nothing, so that they don't have to make eye contact and to make me less wanting to get their attention, or even, try to talk to them. Some are more than aloof and even supercilious, the same happens even at work.
I return the favor of ignoring them when I am out an about on my $4k carbon bike all Lycra'ed up and looking strong and fit. I pick some women, sometimes of higher status, to flirt with if they seem responsive to flirting 8/10 times I guess right.
been happening for ages in a microcosm scale.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Rich people have higher potential to be stuck up...SCIENCE!
Whats with all the us vs the mean evil rich people stories lately. What a bunch of crap.
In NYC you're generally on your way to somewhere, so anyone that stops for a study is going to be kind of weird.
It's been 8+ hours since this story appeared on Slashdot and I'm going to claim a "First" and ask why this story is on Slashdot and not Salon.
Thanks, this lovely song sums it up: https://youtu.be/26Iibcz2lE0 Kirsty McColl in 1991. It's not that far. Maybe the guy who 'leaves it everyone else' needs to think about that?
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Just how much attention to the thing you are trying to steer do you think it takes? And more importantly why do you think that?
People from neighborhoods where not paying attention to other people can get you attacked, are more likely to pay attention to other people, than folk from neighborhoods where this doesn't happen.
Shocking! I am so totally shocked. Who would have guessed that prey pays more attention to their environment, than predators do*?
My new study.
People with smart phones pay less attention to other people than people who don't have smart phones!
*yeah, I went there.
Most super wealthy are like that. They are surrounded by yes people, enablers and what not. They end up with a superior attitude, even if they are the biggest morons in the world. The news media, entertainment media, social media just fawn all over them, which makes it even worse. Personally, if anyone treats an underling bad, I don't want to have anything to do with them.
A social psychology doctoral student was found to be an idiot. More at 11.
Help! I am a self-aware entity trapped in an abstract function!
You guys were saying?
Pretty generally, among the social primates, individuals pay attention to higher status individuals.
High status individuals are the ones who might have something to offer you.
Alternately, they are the ones with the resources to attack you.
You need to keep track of where they are; what they are doing; what they are interested in; who *they* are looking at.
Just walking down the street, a rich person sees fewer richer people around him than a poor person, and thus, fewer people that he needs to pay attention to. Transport some of those rich people to, say, North by North West, or a political party convention, and you will probably see them paying close attention to those around them.
At many points in my life, I've worked with all classes of people from the poor to executives. The following are absolute facts:
1. Anyone in the "very rich" class, consciously or subconsciously, does pay less attention to "normal people" -- they don't have to in their minds.
2. Anyone with any hope of becoming very rich (think upper middle class SV startup execs, etc,) will mirror-match the behavior of the target class.
The other pieces of (anecdotal) evidence I'd cite in this case would be the California executive who ranted online about people hanging out in his neighborhood (Sorry I don't have time to look it up; it was some exec of a marketing company in Santa Barbara or some such place.) There was also a story this year of a tech executive who bitterly complained about the homeless people living near his building in San Francisco and posted online about a plan to make them disappear from the city. In this case, yes, they were obviously paying a lot of attention to the problem at hand, but you can argue that they didn't really care about the people; they just wanted them gone and wanted the world to know how upset they were about it. The fact that they had time to rant so passionately about it tells you they don't really have much else to worry about.
Having worked with executives, once you're at that level, you are no longer interacting with the world the same way lesser folks do. Executives of large corporations have everything provided for them by the company and/or their personal fortunes -- cars, driver service, houses, security, travel arrangements, personal assistants, you name it. Anything that would even be considered a distraction is dealt with quickly and harshly by a team of people designed to insulate these people from "real life." I doubt the CEO of GE doesn't do his own grocery shopping, or worry about how he's going to pay for the groceries, as an example.
At the "aspirational" level, think mid to high level corporate managers interested in ladder-climbing, people will tend to emulate people they perceive to be successful. You see this in lower and middle class groups too -- a lot of people feel like if they just support the super-rich and do everything they do, they'll be successful and allowed to enter that club.
So yes, even though it's only 400 people and based on Google Glass eye-tracking, I would say the conclusion is correct given my experience.
Rich people are more secure and focused? What a stupid observation only a poor person jealously obsessed with what they don't have would even bother to make it. How does the old saw go? Oh, I remember. Stupid people talk about other people, Average people talk about events, Intelligent people talk about ideas? So where on this list does this brilliant research belong?
What are you saying - that you want to discuss Eleanor Roosevelt, now? Or Steve Jobs?
People from upper classes learn early that the people in lower classes will persistently bother those of the upper class for help. So to avoid those confrontations upper class folks just keep looking "straight ahead" and try to avoid eye contact with the lower class. Plus the lower class usually have animosity towards upper class and that too is another thing to avoid for the upper class. So stupid study, waste of research dollars.
Too rich; Didn't read.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That's why I like to get their attention by punching them in the face.
Commenting on the social class thing - wouldn't it be interesting to also record whether or not the person was born of the same class, or had moved up/down?
In the USA, we have all kinds of "rich" people. We have old money, new money, white collar money, blue collar money, and everything in between. In fact that's the thing that makes America great: anyone from any background has the opportunity to make it big and make themselves (and their families) as rich as they can imagine.
The stereotypes you hear on Slashdot about rich and wealthy people are just that.....stereotypes. IMHO, stereotypes aren't much use in this area because of the distribution of rich and wealth people. They range from selfless altruists to psychopathic narcissists and everything in between so trying to stereotype them into one group is impossible.
Hope this helps.
Sociologists spend a lot of time paying attention to other people. Maybe that's why they're all so poor.
Or when food fails, coupons/cards that can be redeemed for free food.
McDonalds give out stickers cards which - when you get enough stickers - get you a free coffee, etc. I generally keep those around for anyone asking for "change for a coffee".
When it comes to food, it's not a big deal to buy some guy a sandwich (although the one guy I saw buying a shopping cart of beer right after kinda irked me). Often I just grab some no-face-value food cards, throw some cash on them, and hand those out. The no-face-value cards are better because they're harder to trade some for drugs/alcohol (hey buddy, I'll trade you this $40 card for $25 cash).
"Driver, drive on."
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
We tend to discuss the things that we pay attention to. So is it any surprise that people who focus on higher levels of abstraction (people/events/ideas) are smarter and make more money?
...were you addressing me?
It makes perfect sense that a lower class serf would pay attention to the faces (who could or couldn't make one's life miserable), while the upper class had little need to pay much time or attention in identifying individual serfs.
PlaynBass
Those at the to of the economic scale also tend to be older. RTFA says they're doing it via eye movement. I'm certainly not at the top of the economic scale, however I noticed that as I'm older my mind is a lot better at filtering. Recently I was in an elevator with 4 women. I knew one of them, though I don't see her very often. She's married now and isn't keeping herself up. Before, yea man! You bet I'd notice her! She was really hot. Now, I didn't even see her. She said hi to me. Same thing driving. As a young man, I'd see every little thing on the road. Today I can go the 45 minutes to work and as long as nothing's new, I don't see entire highways. Brain thought is also at a higher price. Aviation has found that as we get older, we can't handle as much as we used to. The FAA won't take new air traffic controllers for training if you're over 30. You simply won't be able to handle it. If you're already one, you generally will be fine and can continue. I've flown into airspace where those guys are rattling off commands to aircraft like a machine gun. Not even 1 second of open air is between talking.
On the street which is where they were doing their survey, I'm likewise filtering a lot of stuff out. Maybe this has more to do with older minds than with economic status.
I have noticed that in higher class universities people pay less attention to your appearance than in lower class universities.
I think it has something to do with the brain being more active in more intelligent people, and them having things that they are always actively
thinking about. An idle mind will always be distracted by small things such as another person walking past.