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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.
... News at 11.
No, but the intent of the article and this 'research' is clear: to imply that being rich somehow implies less humanity.
Or maybe it's neither. A third possibility is that as rich people generally enjoy more insulation from physical hazards and risks in social situations, their biological instinct to assess random strangers for threat potential is duller than in poor people.
Anyone want to guess a fourth?
No, your bias isn't on the right track.
Bias is irrelevant. The methodology is either valid or invalid in relation to the hypothesis and the results. Are the findings supported by the evidence?
These are the only things that matter. The hypothesis is relevant only in relation to these concerns. What you're doing is something along the lines of poisoning the well or relying on ad hominem attacks. If there is bias, you can have a valid point if you show evidence for that bias in the study. And I'm very much open to the idea that there could be methodological flaws.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
I don't know about all of the US but in my neck of the woods funding is not a problem with public schools. Spending per student is far above what it was decades ago even adjusted for inflation. I remember going to school to discuss problems with my daughter when she was in the 5th grade. After the meeting my daughter's teacher thanked me profusely for coming. It kind of surprised me and I asked her why in the world wouldn't I have come. She told me she had 7 meetings scheduled that week and I was the only parent to show up. It had never occurred to me that anyone wouldn't be interested in their child's education but as I started looking around I noticed more and more over the years that students that did well had parents that were involved and a lot of parents were not involved at all. A friend of mine's wife is a teacher and he has told me many horror stories about children who basically are raising themselves. This is not in the ghetto but a generally working class environment. In my almost 6 decades I've seen a lot of changes, some for the better but the breakdown of the US family structure is not a positive thing and it's accelerating.