The Lower Your Social Class, the 'Wiser' You Are, Suggests New Study (sciencemag.org)

Wisdom -- the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise -- comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study by social psychologist Igor Grossman at the University of Waterloo in Canada and his colleagues. Science Magazine reports: To conduct the study, Grossmann and his graduate student Justin Brienza embarked on a two-part experiment. First, they asked 2145 people throughout the United States to take an online survey. Participants were asked to remember a recent conflict they had with someone, such as an argument with a spouse or a fight with a friend. They then answered 20 questions applicable to that or any conflict, including: "Did you ever consider a third-party perspective?" "How much did you try to understand the other person's viewpoint?" and "Did you consider that you might be wrong?" Grossmann and Brienza crunched the data and assigned the participants both a "wise reasoning" score based on the conflict answers and a "social class" score, then plotted the two scores against one another. They found that people with the lowest social class scores -- those with less income, less education, and more worries about money -- scored about twice as high on the wise reasoning scale as those in the highest social class. The income and education levels ranged from working class to upper middle class; neither the very wealthy nor the very poor were well represented in the study.

In the second part of the experiment, the duo recruited 200 people in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan, to take a standard IQ test and read three letters to the Dear Abby advice column. One letter, for example, asked about choosing sides in an argument between mutual friends. Each participant then discussed with an interviewer how they thought the situations outlined in the letters would play out. A panel of judges scored their responses according to various measures of wise reasoning. In the example above, thinking about how an outsider might view the conflict would earn points toward wisdom, whereas relying only on one's own perspective would not. As with the first part of the experiment, those in lower social classes consistently had higher wise-reasoning scores than those in higher social classes, the researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. IQ scores, however, weren't associated one way or another with wise reasoning.

Comments

That's not wisdom

[johannesg]

Wisdom is "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise." It has nothing to do with being able to understand someone else's perspective, nor does it have anything to do with class.

I have a serious problem with this kind of article redefining what words mean, and then ascribing positive traits to lower-class people and negative traits to upper-class people. It's the same story as with "emotional intelligence": that was just a crutch to allow less intelligent people to feel good about themselves and to let them look down on smarter people, because those are _obviously_ not emotionally intelligent as well.

And this is the same: being poor does not make you wise. I've seen poor people make horrendously unwise decisions, and in some cases they are poor because of that.

Same With Monkeys

[jblues]

Group living in all species is dependent on tolerance of other group members. In crab-eating macaques, successful social group living maintains postconflict resolution must occur. Usually, less dominant individuals lose to a higher-ranking individual when conflict arises. After the conflict has taken place, lower-ranking individuals tend to fear the winner of the conflict to a greater degree. In one study, this was seen by the ability to drink water together. Postconflict observations showed a staggered time between when the dominant individual begins to drink and the subordinate. Long-term studies reveal the gap in drinking time closes as the conflict moves further into the past. -- Long-tailed Macaques

tldr; All individuals depend on the group, higher ranking individuals, whose position in the group is more secure, can afford to be assholes.

Re:Not wisdom

[sg_oneill]

white working class went and voted for Donald Trump

Despite the prevailing wisdom that its poor white hicks that vote for Republicans, the evidence is actually not like that. There's a lot of folks, small business owners, managers and the likes.

I'm going to get my head bit off this, but hear me out. One of Karl Marx's best observations is that people are basically self-interested. That isnt unique to him, most economists prior and after agreeing with him on that. What his big insight is, however, is that people form ideologies to justify or self explain their relationship to capital, or more loosely, wealth. Rich people are attracted to ideologies like Libertarianism or neo-conservatism. Poorer folks are more likely to be attracted to more socialist or even communist in extreme cases, ideologies. Conservatism and its spiral eyed crazy distant-cousin Fascism are the ideologies of the middle class. Those who think they are better than the poor folk, dont want the poor folk costing them tax, but still ultimately are just working for the man themselves. You dont have to agree with marxism, to see he made a pretty good observation there.

Racism , sociologists argue, formed as a sort of pact between the white working class and the ruling caste in society. We'll give you better pay, and we wont give any of your jobs to those black folks, if you promise not to do anything buck crazy like joining the Commies or voting out the rich guys. It provided a way to essentially tame that self-interested streak in the working class by giving them something to be resentful of that isnt their fat rich bosses. Now none of this is some grand conspiracy. Its an emergent phenomena of millions and millions of people acrting on what they believe is their own self interest.

Trump though. I half suspect the 50% of the population where having a bit of a granddad moment with that one

Re:Another "great" article

[ShanghaiBill]

The Moneylenders in the temple say screw the libtard poor

They were money CHANGERS, not money lenders.

The story of JC driving the "money lenders" from the temple is TOTALLY MISUNDERSTOOD by most people, and even many theologists. The lesson they take away is that JC wanted to "keep the temple holy", but the actual point was the exact opposite. At the time, mainstream Judaism was obsessed with "purity" rituals, and people would change their soiled and worn money for clean and polished money (paying a premium to do so) so they could make an offering with "clean" money. But JC was objecting to the "purity" rather than the "commerce", and was expressing the Essene philosophy of getting back to basics, and doing away with purity and ritual. He wanted to make the temple more accessible to the common people.

Re:Another "great" article

[dgatwood]

Not quite right. As I understand it, they were required to pay in the coinage accepted by the temple, which meant they had to give gifts in Jewish currency, not Roman or Greek currency. It had nothing to do with making the money pure, but rather with converting it to a form that the church would accept. And because they were far from home and did not have the advantage of knowing where to find good conversion rates, those money changers cheated them massively.

So it was, indeed, about making the temple pure from those who would prey upon the naïveté of foreigners, while at the same time sending their soldiers to attack other nations for theft and barbarity. The hypocrisy was what Jesus wanted to cleanse from the temple, along with the unethical commerce.