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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.
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.
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.
Hey! that's maybe the way to become rich!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
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.
Proverbs 18:23 When the poor speak, they have to be polite, but when the rich answer, they are rude.
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?
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 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 same can be seen in almost every business plan and employee evaluation.
BULLSHIT, please cite references
LOL, you don't think there is often bias in employee reviews? Have you ever had a review?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
been happening for ages in a microcosm scale.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
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?
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!
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.
Too rich; Didn't read.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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).
...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.