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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.
Well done. My friend and I (we're both 'old') have constant debates about this. We live in London, where there's (obviously) quite a lot of begging. Both our families have also been affected by addiction problems. So we tend to give/buy food rather than give cash, when we do. One regular likes sausage rolls, really unhealthy, but on the street one needs carbs etc. Very often, people also just like to be acknowledged as fellow human beings, eye-contact, good morning.
But, of course, there are also scammers and begging 'organisations', so the only guide is intuition. Better to be sometimes wrong than do nothing though.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
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.
It certainly wasn't the researchers who jumped to any SJW conclusions. The researchers found self-described rich people took less attention to random strangers. That's all. Attention is not the same as empathy.