when it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck. This has been explored at length in a series of studies by Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people's emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal. Two of the findings were picked up by the media as irresistible: {a} wealthier people {as assessed by the cost of the car they were driving} are less likely than poor people to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks; {b} suppose there's a bowl of candy in the lab; invite test subjects, after they finish doing some task, to grab some candy on the way out, telling them that whatever's left over will be given to some kids-the wealthier take more candy.25 So do miserable, greedy, unempathic people become wealthy, or does being wealthy increase the odds of a person's becoming that way? As a cool manipulation, Keltner primed subjects to focus either on their socioeconomic success {by asking them to compare themselves with people less well off than them} or on the opposite. Make people feel wealthy, and they take more candy from children.
( Robert M. Sapolsky )
[ Behave: The Biology of Humans ]
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