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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.
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.
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
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.