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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.

2 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? by epyT-R · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You sure? Are you sure you're not also biased, then? Should we just give up and embrace whatever personality/cargo/political cult gets us off?

    A few quick searches to see if I was even close in my assumption.

    The author of the businessweek text has a degree in zoology and 'science journalism'.
    http://www.businessinsider.com... ..and her twitter suggests a distinct political bias all of its own
    https://twitter.com/linzasaur

    Pia Dietze has a major in psychology and focused on what? Yup. 'Class relations' etc.. To be fair, this looks like her phd thesis, at least based on this.. (scroll down or txt search for dietze)
    https://psych.nyu.edu/programs... (note the reference to eric knowles in her bio)

    https://psych.nyu.edu/knowles/
    I think that pretty much sums him up in terms of his bias.

    My bias was on the right track. More progressives looking to play with numbers to justfy whining about rich people

  2. Re:Another Faulty Study by reboot246 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "There are regional and generational differences"

    Exactly!!! I live in Alabama and it's considered courteous to speak to total strangers. Good morning, good evening, thank you, you're welcome, and have a nice day are ALL spoken and heard every day here. Heck, we even hold doors open for strangers. We're a friendly bunch down here. Even rich people are friendly! It's nothing unusual to see a rich person sitting next to and conversing with a poor person at a football game. Y'all just need to learn some manners.