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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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Proverbs 18:23 When the poor speak, they have to be polite, but when the rich answer, they are rude.
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
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.