11 ms·

How can you tell if someone is kind? Ask how rich they are

104 points by davesque 10y ago

oldmanjay 10y ago
I'm not sure I believe any politically convenient social science anymore.
- adiabatty 10y ago
  I'd wait for a bunch of other studies that back this up, or fail to. The trouble is that there may be loads of studies that find the opposite, but they are more likely to be stuffed in a file drawer somewhere because they contradict what we'd like to believe is true.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    Yeah, the media always passes on opportunities to lionize the rich and powerful. /s
davesque 10y ago
tl;dr Wealth has a measurable effect on empathy. Individual stories and exposure to lower-income people can still compel wealthy people to be more generous in spite of this effect.
gjolund 10y ago
This article doesn't make any novel claims and is just a rehash of the "rich = psycho" belief.
dkarl 10y ago
Empathy does not seem to be an involuntary ability like eyesight or smell. We smell regardless of the circumstances, but empathy can be keen or absent. Empathy for someone seems to come naturally to the extent that they can be helpful or loyal to us, and it requires discipline to extend our empathy to those who are useless or opposed to us. It is interesting that the ability for someone to be a powerful force in our lives does not naturally elicit empathy for them. It suggests that we suppress empathy when we anticipate the need to act aggressively towards someone. Empathy for our enemies could be very valuable except that it might make us hesitate to hurt or kill them. We can see this in the U.S. elections right now, when both sides encourage us to believe that the motivations of the other side's voters are either inscrutable or malevolent.
- bubo_bubo 10y ago
  >Empathy does not seem to be an involuntary ability like eyesight or smell. But my wife has accused me of selective hearing... /rimshot I'm here all week. Try the veal.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Empathy isn't a sense, it's derivative from the senses and works by analogy with one's self. When what you sense from others seems similar to what you imagine others sense from you, by analogy you imagine that they have a similar inner life to you. The more difference from how you imagine that others would sense you, the more different you imagine their inner life to be from yours. When you see them to be similar to you, but more perfect in your opinion, you imagine that their inner life is more perfected than yours. If you see them as less contrived; less put together, you see their thought process as more honest, or more grounded than yours. If you see them as dirty or sloppy, you imagine their thoughts to be more perverse or more slipshod. If their movements or speech are slower than yours, you imagine them to be more stupid or more careful than you are. It's the search for souls in other people, required to decide whether they feel pain in the same way that you do. You can never confirm that other people have souls and feel pain, it's a leap of faith that you have to make - what Hobbes would call a covenant - a unilateral agreement that you make with others without their participation in the hope that your good faith will lead them to reciprocate. It's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Empathy is a catch-all phrase describing two separate concepts, and the psychological literature is careful to distinguish them: Cognitive empathy is the ability to know what others are feeling. Affective empathy is when cognitive empathy causes you to have similar feelings to others. It's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise. No, this is the typical mind fallacy, where we assume our mind is typical. It'll fail you wildly if you leave your local culture.
ars 10y ago
This is hardly surprising. The rich person: "What's $5 for a tip? It's nothing, so why bother." The poor person: "$5? That's a lot, and I can afford it, so let me give it." Basically rich people value money less, and it doesn't occur to them that giving small amounts can still help people. And obviously it's not the custom to give large amounts as a tip.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  A bone to the dog is not charity. ... Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. -- Jack London
  - scottjad 10y ago
    Luke 21:4 All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.
- projektir 10y ago
  Rich people value money more, and compared to them, depending on how rich they are, effectively everyone needs it more. And they know if they start giving money away to everyone that needs it more they'll run out of it pretty quickly. Poor people don't realize the predicament they're in and give away their money because they think someone needs it more, yet they're at a very high risk of becoming someone who cannot live independently and then needs to go find another source of charity to support them. This does not scale well. I understand why it happens but it's not something we should be raising to a level of sainthood. The need for charity is a symptom of a dysfunctional social system and people falling through the cracks. There shouldn't be any mothers earning 19k in the first place. Giving them $5 doesn't fix anything, because you know there are a few million more of them and when you really want to change things it's really not enough and you need to attack it at the higher level.
  - _0ffh 10y ago
    How does that apply to tipping? You eating out at millions of places every week? Also, tipping is not charity, it is recognition of work well done.
hsitz 10y ago
The title of this piece seems misleading to me, and an example of how many people misunderstand statistics. I haven't seen any of the studies referred to, but I'm sure they don't establish a connection between wealth and empathy as strong as the one suggested. More likely, they show that rich people, on average, tend to have less empathy than less-rich people. But surely some very rich people have great empathy and some very poor people have very little empathy. And all combinations in between, even if, on average, greater wealth tends to correlate with less empathy. The point above, I'm sure, is obvious to most people reading HN. But certainly not to everyone, especially people with poor understanding of statistics. So it bothers me that the title seems calculated to increase the likelihood of misunderstanding. Okay, rant over.
- projektir 10y ago
  There seems to be a glaring problem in statistics in general that large scale statistics may completely hide small group effects. I.e., if there is something that really benefits from X for 5%, but doesn't benefit from X for 95%, statistics will make it look like it doesn't benefit anybody. Yet that 5% group may absolutely be relevant. This always sits in the back of my head when I read things like: "Children are not influenced by their parents but by their peers", or "twin study proves this". But I haven't seen this discussed much or brought up, even though it sounds a lot like what you're saying. Is this relevant? Is there a name for this? Is there some reason as to why I shouldn't worry about this that I'm missing?
bubo_bubo 10y ago
When you buy a BMW, you have an extra asshole installed. /snark But seriously, in my early 20s I did land surveying. I found that the richer the neighborhood, the nastier the neighbors were. I've had people be rude to me because they think "something is up" when we were simply trying to document how one neighbor can buy 6 inches from another to make a legal setback for a garage. And then I've had just random people offer me coffee on a chilly morning. I'll let you guess which was the upscale and which was the working class neighborhood.
- derekp7 10y ago
  There is also a big difference between old money and new money. And hard-earned money vs. inherited money. My dad used to deliver furniture as a side job for a local upholstery shop. Most of the clients had money, but some were rude while others (esp. the "old hard earned money" types) were extremely friendly.
  - Mz 10y ago
    I am sure it doesn't help that plenty of people say ugly things like "eat the rich." Plenty of rich folks "have dozens of friends and the fun never ends -- that is, as long as they're buying." If you know all the people around you would not hesitate to sell you out and only have any so-called respect whatsoever because you have money and power, it isn't like you are getting any empathy. That shit cuts both ways.
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      My sense is the kind of people who say "eat the rich" actually are rich, they're just cash poor and pretending that's the same as real poor. In my experience actually poor people want to be rich and would rather they not be eaten when that happens. It's the kids from privileged backgrounds with self-loathing and anger issues who embrace "black bloc" politics most warmly. I am probably biased coming from mostly urban environments lately.
      - 10y ago
imgabe 10y ago
Alternate theory: being less empathetic makes it more likely you'll get rich
- gjolund 10y ago
  You must work in finance.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    I don't work in finance but it's a common enough conclusion to draw. It's not hard to agree with your parent comment.
  - Mz 10y ago
    I said essentially the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12771478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12771478 I most assuredly do not work in finance.
    - sit12 10y ago
      Which industries do nice people get promoted in?
      - Mz 10y ago
        Reread what I wrote. But, this time, stop at the comma: You do not have to be a callous jackass...
      - gjolund 10y ago
        Medicine.
        quantumhobbit 10y ago
        Not really. You'll find plenty of nice doctors and nurses but hospital administration is the same political jerkfest as anywhere else. Maybe worse because the "nice guy" doctors and nurses are less likely to fight back. Also the doctors and nurses who want to get things done learn pretty quick to stop being so "nice". Same happens with education.
Mz 10y ago
AKA you don't have to be a callous jackass to get rich and stay rich, but it probably helps.
mgleason_3 10y ago
Has "Rich" become the new quasi-racial slur - with studies to show that the Rich are genetically stupid, greedy and now mean. Does the story really not link to even one "Study"? If the studies exists, are they pier reviewed? What happened to the Washington post? Didn't they report news at one point?
- cokernel 10y ago
  The article links to multiple studies, for example: * Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716 * Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full * The Psychological Consequences of Money: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154 * Social status modulates neural activity in the mentalizing network: https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatell_2012_neuroimage.pdf https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatel... (from NeuroImage) * Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085293 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... * Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior: http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf (from J. Pers. Soc. Psych.) * Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU/view?pref=2&pli=1 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU... (from Emotion) I omitted the study in the Chronicle of Philanthropy from this list because I couldn't find the actual data.
- mark_edward 10y ago
  The poor rich so maligned and oppressed by society. At least they can afford to buy the world's tiniest violin.
- Applejinx 10y ago
  Not genetically, surely. I'd think that has nothing to do with it. Stupid to the extent that they can be incurious and rely on their stored capital to avoid intellectually difficult problems, greedy as a self-selecting behavior, and mean because that appears to be an epiphenomenon: no direct mechanism by which wealth makes you a jerk, but a whole spectrum of associations and conditions which make being a rich jerk by far the most comfortable thing to be. I'm not sure if it counts as a slur. To a rich person, isn't 'poor' the real slur? Surely meanness is sort of orthoganal to what being rich is about, or even helpful? Also, I'm not sure this alone is harmful to society. If we acknowledge the very rich are evil jerks by nature, all that really means is 'maybe we shouldn't listen to them on moral topics' and 'maybe their opinions on how to run society are not trustworthy, because they're evil jerks by nature and will disproportionately favor themselves even when taking a larger view would be advantageous'. Just don't let them write the tax code, and they can be evil all they like, perhaps to their neighbors or social inferiors :)
projektir 10y ago
I would be suspicious of the correlation was really so straight. There are a lot of complicated factors around why one might be nice or not nice and in my experience it hasn't been anywhere near this simple. As an example, people who had hard lives often become hard themselves, and that may make their conduct worse. People in countries where things are not going well are not exactly super duper nice. People also tend to treat different people differently, so they may be nice to one group and not nice at all to another group. People may especially be not nice to a group if they perceive that group as a threat. A lot of the definitions here seem rather tailored. Giving large tips is not really the information I'd use to determine whether or not someone was nice, especially since this gets layered on top of social signaling in a specific culture. Generally, things like giving money, donating to charity, etc., may be viewed as shallow level contributions by the rich and they'd rather do something they perceive as more significant, such as lobbying or starting a company. Some of this reminds me a bit of accusing meat eaters of animal cruelty. Meat eaters didn't invent it, even if they're receptors of the end product. There are some meat eaters that promote animal cruelty directly, though, and there are also systems that promote it, and those should be the subject of scorn. I'm sure there are empathy gaps because people don't share experiences. But a person is not evil if they simply don't support those less fortunate, or if they don't understand them. That's just an empathy gap, and people are generally quite bad at relating to experiences they don't have in general, in both directions. A person needs to actually be doing bad things to be classified as bad.
lucio 10y ago
really? all rich people are jerks? Any article claiming all $x are (not nice|$y) will be marked as classist|sexist|racist. Let's talk about double-standards.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
I used to be a bartender and that makes me a good tipper I think knowing what they have to go through. Also I feel like giving back.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  I'm Australian, and most Aussies will tell you that Australia is a no-tipping society. But the waiters and bartenders I've known don't beleive this.
notyourwork 10y ago
> Americans gave nearly $1 billion more to the approximately 3,000 victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks than they gave to victims of the South Asian tsunami three years later, even though the latter tragedy killed more than a quarter of a million people Does anyone else find this conclusion unfair? I am not trying to down play what happened in Asia but American's uniting for their country isn't able to be compared to American's supporting crisis in other parts of the world. I suspect their conclusion is true but suggesting American's give less because of how much they donated to 9/11 versus a storm on the other side of the world isn't a fair comparison.
- jaggederest 10y ago
  Objectively, a tragedy that killed 83 times as many people is deserving of at least the same funding as a local tragedy, I would hope. That said, locality bias is a strong thing, and to some degree what makes us human. I don't find it to be critical, merely descriptive of the way people work.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    It's not about locality but about identity. An American in San Diego is much more likely to contribute funding to aid disaster victims in New York than in Tijuana (which is only 20 miles away, but across the border).
- foofoo55 10y ago
  It's fair in the context of her statement: > We give more easily to the people and causes we see All she is saying is that the amount of giving is correlated to the proximity, which you seem to agree with. It's just a statement, not a judgement.
- briandear 10y ago
  I agree. How many rich Thais gave money to Katrina victims?
thekevan 10y ago
I really wonder about the methods of this study. In my area, in the fun, dirty and gritty part of the city is where there are dive bars, vape shops and crazy little variety stores and head shops, you have to have your head on a swivel when crossing the road to not be sideswiped by some rusted out Geo or Nissan with the tailpipe being held up by a coat hanger. On the flip side, in our most affluent immediate suburb, people give you right of way constantly. Everyone stops for pedestrians, even if they had plenty of time to go anyway. I mean they are almost religious about it.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I don't know about driving offenses, but we can quantify other harmful behaviors. The poor are far more likely than the rich to deliberately do things that harm others - rob them, engage in violence, etc. Economic motivation for crime is a possible confounder. But we can eliminate that confounder by examining crimes with no plausible economic motive: intimate partner violence, assaulting family members, rape. Poor people engage in these crimes at 4x the rates of others. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf (Another interesting fact - contra Trump - is that poor Hispanics seem far less criminal than poor whites/blacks. This also contradicts popular left wing narratives - if poverty makes poor whites/blacks beat their wives via "stressors" or other mysterious phlogiston, why are Hispanics immune?)
  - jaggederest 10y ago
    > (Another interesting fact - contra Trump - is that poor Hispanics seem far less criminal than poor whites/blacks. This also contradicts popular left wing narratives - if poverty makes poor whites/blacks beat their wives via "stressors" or other mysterious phlogiston, why are Hispanics immune?) Presumably, within immediate memory they have a comparison available with "the old country" which makes a low-end existence in the US seem positively posh.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      So poor American blacks/whites rape people and beat their wives because they don't realize how nice their lifestyle is compared to the lifestyle of Mexicans in Mexico? Personally I don't find this particularly plausible.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hossbeast 10y ago
The whole concept of tipping is broken and needs to be done away with. The restaurant in the story should be charging the customers more than $11, so that it can pay its staff properly.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  I like tipping. When I have great service, I tip 25%+. When it's terrible I have two times tipped zero. Employers must pay minimum wage. If a tipped employee isn't being made up their wages up to the minimum I will (and have) happily supported their contacting the appropriate authorities. European service, in contrast, is terrible. I've similarly found myself avoiding no-tip restaurants in New York - their service is noticeably worse. And why wouldn't it be? If you are a good server, you pull a multiple of the minimum wage. Only your inferiors would prefer a guaranteed lower tier. Hence, self selection.
  - dagw 10y ago
    European service, in contrast, is terrible. Very much disagree (with obviously lots of caveats and exceptions). European service is very reserved, minimal and spends most of the time being completely invisible, except those few moments when I actually need it. They rarely volunteer information, but are extremely knowledgeable when asked. US service is loud, annoying and in my face. They prattle on endlessly about this and that, show up constantly to try to make small talk, and never seem to be able to just leave the customer alone. Service staff in the US also feel more, if not inexperienced, then at least new to this particular job and I always get the feeling they've all just worked at the place for at most a couple of weeks. They've got scripts they've memorised, but they seem far less likely to have any deeper knowledge of what they're serving. What I will agree with is that the worst service I've had in Europe is worse than the worst service I've had in the US. Working for tips forces everyone to get to a minimum level.
- ac29 10y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted, but some states allow paying wait staff less than minimum wage. What most needs to change is not allowing sub-minimum wage jobs subsidized by tips. For people who live in California, FYI, wait staff is required to be paid minimum wage, which can not have tips counted against it.
code_sardaukar 10y ago
It's only natural to feel more empathy for people in situations we've been in, but this isn't the entirety of morality. I've never been a cow but I go out of my way to avoid causing suffering to cows and other animals. Rich people haven't necessarily experienced much hardship, so they need to have a more abstract kind of empathy, but this doesn't make them worse people. Indeed, if a rich person felt that had done enough by paying taxes, I wouldn't blame them. From a utilitarian perspective, I would rather have another person who pays $100,000 in taxes and gives $0 to charity than someone who pays $20,000 in taxes and gives $1,000 to charity.
todd8 10y ago
For an interesting contrast, see Who Really Gives? Partisanship and Charitable Giving in the United States, by two political scientists at MIT [1]. The results there surprised me, for example, there is a positive correlation between the states that voted for Bush in 2004 and charitable giving. Also from the conclusion "Although previous research indicates that conservatism is a reliable proxy for identifying potential donors or donor communities, our results suggest that organizations would be better off simply targeting wealthier donors, regardless of political beliefs." [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1100129/who-gives.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1100...
- arjie 10y ago
  As this paper and others describe, the difference is almost entirely attributable to giving to religious causes, most notably the local church. I'm not going to say it's not charity to give to a thing that's a charity, but if the cause is evangelizing Christianity, then that's not the same as giving some poor kid food and education. Of course, the whole thing is confounded by the fact that the guy evangelizing is often also providing food and education, but without knowing the percentages it's hard to see if the numbers still line up when you subtract that cost.
  - akvadrako 10y ago
    According to a well-researched article [1], in 2010 Catholic Chartities USA spent about 85% of it's $170 billion budget on health care and colleges. Based on what I've seen in poorer countries, my personal take is they do provide high quality education and care without much overhead. The evangelising is mostly implicit and doesn't take many resources. More than anything, it provides a soft filter for who gets those services. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/21560536 http://www.economist.com/node/21560536
    - arjie 10y ago
      Ah, and local churches (the majority of the difference between red/blue states) transfer donations to CC USA? If so, that's pretty damned good.
partycoder 10y ago
This video presents a study on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc
tajen 10y ago
I've tried being generous (and still donate, probably more than all my coworkers together), and I still get pissed upon by leftists. Talk about empathy. I live in France, my parents weren't even that rich, but we strive to work hard. Being motivated by good marks at school makes you bullied because you're a krelboyne. At work, as soon as colleagues learn you've been to a private high school and top college (both of which cost <$100/month and have active policies for lower income families), people come up to you and explain all the reasons why students from good schools aren't so good at work ("They don't have the grit", they say, "They aren't street-smart" – Happened to me 4 days ago again). A lot of citizen in France think it's fine to be jealous to someone because he was good at school, comes from a good background or is Christian. It would be ok if there weren't actual discrimination from people who want to offset the supposedly "easy life" you've had: The boss who bullied me in plain sight of everyone also was the only boss who had a shorter degree than I had. I've donated thousands to charities. I've volunteered for immigrants, kids of immigrants, I've volunteered in detention centers, I've volunteered in free events aimed at lower-income families, and with a team we went to help an orphanage abroad. I've given more than a thousand hours of volunteering in 5 years, in parallel to my studies and work. I never expected a "thank you". But a little consideration and respect from the leftists would do. But my life is still considered like a result of sheer luck, not a result of my hard work. The problem isn't the poor: They do need help. The problem is the leftists who give lessons. There's a non-stop cliche that, since you're rich, you're an asshole. Even if you are generous and litteraly more generous than them, they won't stop the hate. This article is one of them, generalizing about "riches are assholes". All in all, living in France, taxes are supposed to provide support for the poor. I'm tempted to leave it at that and stop donating, because I need to focus on my life now (no gf, no kids yet). But somehow I keep donating.
- briandear 10y ago
  I also live in France and I couldn't agree more. There's an implicit (and often explicit) hatred (on the left) of those that are more financially successful. There is also a social distrust of entrepreneurship and any activities that are higher risk, higher reward. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered."
nitwit005 10y ago
Some of the examples made me wonder if only the most empathetic poor would agree to participate in a study.
cperciva 10y ago
Talk about stereotyping! This headline is no better than "how can you tell if someone is a criminal? Look at their skin colour". Correlations in large populations do not mean that every individual shares the identified characteristics. I find it absolutely shocking that a paper at the level of the Washington Post would publish such drivel.
- rhaps0dy 10y ago
  It's exactly a stereotype. AKA weak bayesian evidence for a characteristic based on other, easier to measure, characteristics. EDIT: I thought the result was going to be exactly the opposite before I made this comment. My first impulse was to go and delete it. I'll leave figuring out implications of such biases in reasoning as an exercise to the reader :(
- uola 10y ago
  Socioeconomic status is an important factor in how we behave. The argument here is that people with more money are less kind because having more money makes them less kind. Unless you're making a specific argument were someones skin color is the prime factor in making someone more criminal that statement isn't factually correct. So no, it's not the same thing, but your frequent rhetorical outrage is noted.
  - kahirsch 10y ago
    Rich people are also taller than poor people, on average, but how silly would it be to write "How can you tell if someone is tall? Ask how rich they are." The research is about average differences in people's empathy correlated with their education and socioeconomic status. The headline is talking about judging individuals based on their socioeconomic status.
- musha68k 10y ago
  Have you read the whole article?
galfarragem 10y ago
I think it goes both sides: the richest and the poorest neighborhoods are the nastier. They will segregate/bully who doesn't match their lifestyle.
- briandear 10y ago
  I might anecdotally argue that the upper-middle 'near-rich' neighborhoods are 'nastier' than the more upper class 'rich' neighborhoods-- perhaps the 'almost rich' have more insecurity than the comfortably rich. Just an observation from personal experience.
user5994461 10y ago
What is poor? What is rich? Is being poor when you can only get one iPhone per children... but cannot replace one when it accidentally falls down and break after 6 months?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Tomte 10y ago
I think another aspect might play a role: when you're well-off, but not obscenely rich, you're probably risk-averse. You don't want to end up in the lower-class, dependent on other peoples' charity, so you're holding your money together. When you're already within reach of that you're more likely top end up there, but the difference isn't as stark.
bachmeier 10y ago
Does anyone have a two sentence summary? I am not a subscriber so I'm blocked from reading the story, and clicking the "web" link doesn't help.
- rosstex 10y ago
  I was having this problem, but it turns out my ad blocker (uBlock Origin) had the "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek‎" filter disabled. Turning that on fixed the problem! tldr; studies show that when presented with images of money, people were less likely to pick up pens or donate to a hypothetical charity.
- tajen 10y ago
  The article provides ~12 examples of how rich people are less generous. It proxies "rich people" with parameters such as nicer neighbourhoods. It shows that proximity to the victims creates more empathy (e.g. 9\11 victims vs Tsunami victims, or experience being a waiter, etc) and gives it as a reason for the rich people being less empathetic towards poor.
throw2016 10y ago
Breezing through life without life changing adversity gives little opportunity for self reflection and contemplation unless one happens to be interested in problems beyond one's own. And if the thinking of 'us and them' takes hold whether in the rich, poor or other groupings there is always dehumanization, reductionism, blame and sociopathy. Those in adversity or have faced adversity will identify with others and may need or have received the help of other people leading to some kind of mutual empathy.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

104 points by davesque 10y ago

oldmanjay 10y ago

I'm not sure I believe any politically convenient social science anymore.

adiabatty 10y ago
I'd wait for a bunch of other studies that back this up, or fail to. The trouble is that there may be loads of studies that find the opposite, but they are more likely to be stuffed in a file drawer somewhere because they contradict what we'd like to believe is true.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  Yeah, the media always passes on opportunities to lionize the rich and powerful. /s

davesque 10y ago

tl;dr Wealth has a measurable effect on empathy. Individual stories and exposure to lower-income people can still compel wealthy people to be more generous in spite of this effect.

gjolund 10y ago

This article doesn't make any novel claims and is just a rehash of the "rich = psycho" belief.

dkarl 10y ago

Empathy does not seem to be an involuntary ability like eyesight or smell. We smell regardless of the circumstances, but empathy can be keen or absent. Empathy for someone seems to come naturally to the extent that they can be helpful or loyal to us, and it requires discipline to extend our empathy to those who are useless or opposed to us. It is interesting that the ability for someone to be a powerful force in our lives does not naturally elicit empathy for them. It suggests that we suppress empathy when we anticipate the need to act aggressively towards someone. Empathy for our enemies could be very valuable except that it might make us hesitate to hurt or kill them. We can see this in the U.S. elections right now, when both sides encourage us to believe that the motivations of the other side's voters are either inscrutable or malevolent.

bubo_bubo 10y ago
>Empathy does not seem to be an involuntary ability like eyesight or smell. But my wife has accused me of selective hearing... /rimshot I'm here all week. Try the veal.
pessimizer 10y ago
Empathy isn't a sense, it's derivative from the senses and works by analogy with one's self. When what you sense from others seems similar to what you imagine others sense from you, by analogy you imagine that they have a similar inner life to you. The more difference from how you imagine that others would sense you, the more different you imagine their inner life to be from yours. When you see them to be similar to you, but more perfect in your opinion, you imagine that their inner life is more perfected than yours. If you see them as less contrived; less put together, you see their thought process as more honest, or more grounded than yours. If you see them as dirty or sloppy, you imagine their thoughts to be more perverse or more slipshod. If their movements or speech are slower than yours, you imagine them to be more stupid or more careful than you are. It's the search for souls in other people, required to decide whether they feel pain in the same way that you do. You can never confirm that other people have souls and feel pain, it's a leap of faith that you have to make - what Hobbes would call a covenant - a unilateral agreement that you make with others without their participation in the hope that your good faith will lead them to reciprocate. It's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Empathy is a catch-all phrase describing two separate concepts, and the psychological literature is careful to distinguish them: Cognitive empathy is the ability to know what others are feeling. Affective empathy is when cognitive empathy causes you to have similar feelings to others. It's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise. No, this is the typical mind fallacy, where we assume our mind is typical. It'll fail you wildly if you leave your local culture.

ars 10y ago

This is hardly surprising. The rich person: "What's $5 for a tip? It's nothing, so why bother." The poor person: "$5? That's a lot, and I can afford it, so let me give it." Basically rich people value money less, and it doesn't occur to them that giving small amounts can still help people. And obviously it's not the custom to give large amounts as a tip.

pmoriarty 10y ago
A bone to the dog is not charity. ... Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. -- Jack London
- scottjad 10y ago
  Luke 21:4 All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.
projektir 10y ago
Rich people value money more, and compared to them, depending on how rich they are, effectively everyone needs it more. And they know if they start giving money away to everyone that needs it more they'll run out of it pretty quickly. Poor people don't realize the predicament they're in and give away their money because they think someone needs it more, yet they're at a very high risk of becoming someone who cannot live independently and then needs to go find another source of charity to support them. This does not scale well. I understand why it happens but it's not something we should be raising to a level of sainthood. The need for charity is a symptom of a dysfunctional social system and people falling through the cracks. There shouldn't be any mothers earning 19k in the first place. Giving them $5 doesn't fix anything, because you know there are a few million more of them and when you really want to change things it's really not enough and you need to attack it at the higher level.
- _0ffh 10y ago
  How does that apply to tipping? You eating out at millions of places every week? Also, tipping is not charity, it is recognition of work well done.

hsitz 10y ago

The title of this piece seems misleading to me, and an example of how many people misunderstand statistics. I haven't seen any of the studies referred to, but I'm sure they don't establish a connection between wealth and empathy as strong as the one suggested. More likely, they show that rich people, on average, tend to have less empathy than less-rich people. But surely some very rich people have great empathy and some very poor people have very little empathy. And all combinations in between, even if, on average, greater wealth tends to correlate with less empathy. The point above, I'm sure, is obvious to most people reading HN. But certainly not to everyone, especially people with poor understanding of statistics. So it bothers me that the title seems calculated to increase the likelihood of misunderstanding. Okay, rant over.

projektir 10y ago
There seems to be a glaring problem in statistics in general that large scale statistics may completely hide small group effects. I.e., if there is something that really benefits from X for 5%, but doesn't benefit from X for 95%, statistics will make it look like it doesn't benefit anybody. Yet that 5% group may absolutely be relevant. This always sits in the back of my head when I read things like: "Children are not influenced by their parents but by their peers", or "twin study proves this". But I haven't seen this discussed much or brought up, even though it sounds a lot like what you're saying. Is this relevant? Is there a name for this? Is there some reason as to why I shouldn't worry about this that I'm missing?

bubo_bubo 10y ago

When you buy a BMW, you have an extra asshole installed. /snark But seriously, in my early 20s I did land surveying. I found that the richer the neighborhood, the nastier the neighbors were. I've had people be rude to me because they think "something is up" when we were simply trying to document how one neighbor can buy 6 inches from another to make a legal setback for a garage. And then I've had just random people offer me coffee on a chilly morning. I'll let you guess which was the upscale and which was the working class neighborhood.

derekp7 10y ago
There is also a big difference between old money and new money. And hard-earned money vs. inherited money. My dad used to deliver furniture as a side job for a local upholstery shop. Most of the clients had money, but some were rude while others (esp. the "old hard earned money" types) were extremely friendly.
- Mz 10y ago
  I am sure it doesn't help that plenty of people say ugly things like "eat the rich." Plenty of rich folks "have dozens of friends and the fun never ends -- that is, as long as they're buying." If you know all the people around you would not hesitate to sell you out and only have any so-called respect whatsoever because you have money and power, it isn't like you are getting any empathy. That shit cuts both ways.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    My sense is the kind of people who say "eat the rich" actually are rich, they're just cash poor and pretending that's the same as real poor. In my experience actually poor people want to be rich and would rather they not be eaten when that happens. It's the kids from privileged backgrounds with self-loathing and anger issues who embrace "black bloc" politics most warmly. I am probably biased coming from mostly urban environments lately.
    - 10y ago

imgabe 10y ago

Alternate theory: being less empathetic makes it more likely you'll get rich

gjolund 10y ago
You must work in finance.
- logicallee 10y ago
  I don't work in finance but it's a common enough conclusion to draw. It's not hard to agree with your parent comment.
- Mz 10y ago
  I said essentially the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12771478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12771478 I most assuredly do not work in finance.
  - sit12 10y ago
    Which industries do nice people get promoted in?
    - Mz 10y ago
      Reread what I wrote. But, this time, stop at the comma: You do not have to be a callous jackass...
    - gjolund 10y ago
      Medicine.
      - quantumhobbit 10y ago
        Not really. You'll find plenty of nice doctors and nurses but hospital administration is the same political jerkfest as anywhere else. Maybe worse because the "nice guy" doctors and nurses are less likely to fight back. Also the doctors and nurses who want to get things done learn pretty quick to stop being so "nice". Same happens with education.

Mz 10y ago

AKA you don't have to be a callous jackass to get rich and stay rich, but it probably helps.

mgleason_3 10y ago

Has "Rich" become the new quasi-racial slur - with studies to show that the Rich are genetically stupid, greedy and now mean. Does the story really not link to even one "Study"? If the studies exists, are they pier reviewed? What happened to the Washington post? Didn't they report news at one point?

cokernel 10y ago
The article links to multiple studies, for example: * Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716 * Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full * The Psychological Consequences of Money: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154 * Social status modulates neural activity in the mentalizing network: https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatell_2012_neuroimage.pdf https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatel... (from NeuroImage) * Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085293 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... * Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior: http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf (from J. Pers. Soc. Psych.) * Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU/view?pref=2&pli=1 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU... (from Emotion) I omitted the study in the Chronicle of Philanthropy from this list because I couldn't find the actual data.
mark_edward 10y ago
The poor rich so maligned and oppressed by society. At least they can afford to buy the world's tiniest violin.
Applejinx 10y ago
Not genetically, surely. I'd think that has nothing to do with it. Stupid to the extent that they can be incurious and rely on their stored capital to avoid intellectually difficult problems, greedy as a self-selecting behavior, and mean because that appears to be an epiphenomenon: no direct mechanism by which wealth makes you a jerk, but a whole spectrum of associations and conditions which make being a rich jerk by far the most comfortable thing to be. I'm not sure if it counts as a slur. To a rich person, isn't 'poor' the real slur? Surely meanness is sort of orthoganal to what being rich is about, or even helpful? Also, I'm not sure this alone is harmful to society. If we acknowledge the very rich are evil jerks by nature, all that really means is 'maybe we shouldn't listen to them on moral topics' and 'maybe their opinions on how to run society are not trustworthy, because they're evil jerks by nature and will disproportionately favor themselves even when taking a larger view would be advantageous'. Just don't let them write the tax code, and they can be evil all they like, perhaps to their neighbors or social inferiors :)

projektir 10y ago

I would be suspicious of the correlation was really so straight. There are a lot of complicated factors around why one might be nice or not nice and in my experience it hasn't been anywhere near this simple. As an example, people who had hard lives often become hard themselves, and that may make their conduct worse. People in countries where things are not going well are not exactly super duper nice. People also tend to treat different people differently, so they may be nice to one group and not nice at all to another group. People may especially be not nice to a group if they perceive that group as a threat. A lot of the definitions here seem rather tailored. Giving large tips is not really the information I'd use to determine whether or not someone was nice, especially since this gets layered on top of social signaling in a specific culture. Generally, things like giving money, donating to charity, etc., may be viewed as shallow level contributions by the rich and they'd rather do something they perceive as more significant, such as lobbying or starting a company. Some of this reminds me a bit of accusing meat eaters of animal cruelty. Meat eaters didn't invent it, even if they're receptors of the end product. There are some meat eaters that promote animal cruelty directly, though, and there are also systems that promote it, and those should be the subject of scorn. I'm sure there are empathy gaps because people don't share experiences. But a person is not evil if they simply don't support those less fortunate, or if they don't understand them. That's just an empathy gap, and people are generally quite bad at relating to experiences they don't have in general, in both directions. A person needs to actually be doing bad things to be classified as bad.

lucio 10y ago

really? all rich people are jerks? Any article claiming all $x are (not nice|$y) will be marked as classist|sexist|racist. Let's talk about double-standards.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

I used to be a bartender and that makes me a good tipper I think knowing what they have to go through. Also I feel like giving back.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
I'm Australian, and most Aussies will tell you that Australia is a no-tipping society. But the waiters and bartenders I've known don't beleive this.

notyourwork 10y ago

> Americans gave nearly $1 billion more to the approximately 3,000 victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks than they gave to victims of the South Asian tsunami three years later, even though the latter tragedy killed more than a quarter of a million people Does anyone else find this conclusion unfair? I am not trying to down play what happened in Asia but American's uniting for their country isn't able to be compared to American's supporting crisis in other parts of the world. I suspect their conclusion is true but suggesting American's give less because of how much they donated to 9/11 versus a storm on the other side of the world isn't a fair comparison.

jaggederest 10y ago
Objectively, a tragedy that killed 83 times as many people is deserving of at least the same funding as a local tragedy, I would hope. That said, locality bias is a strong thing, and to some degree what makes us human. I don't find it to be critical, merely descriptive of the way people work.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  It's not about locality but about identity. An American in San Diego is much more likely to contribute funding to aid disaster victims in New York than in Tijuana (which is only 20 miles away, but across the border).
foofoo55 10y ago
It's fair in the context of her statement: > We give more easily to the people and causes we see All she is saying is that the amount of giving is correlated to the proximity, which you seem to agree with. It's just a statement, not a judgement.
briandear 10y ago
I agree. How many rich Thais gave money to Katrina victims?

thekevan 10y ago

I really wonder about the methods of this study. In my area, in the fun, dirty and gritty part of the city is where there are dive bars, vape shops and crazy little variety stores and head shops, you have to have your head on a swivel when crossing the road to not be sideswiped by some rusted out Geo or Nissan with the tailpipe being held up by a coat hanger. On the flip side, in our most affluent immediate suburb, people give you right of way constantly. Everyone stops for pedestrians, even if they had plenty of time to go anyway. I mean they are almost religious about it.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
I don't know about driving offenses, but we can quantify other harmful behaviors. The poor are far more likely than the rich to deliberately do things that harm others - rob them, engage in violence, etc. Economic motivation for crime is a possible confounder. But we can eliminate that confounder by examining crimes with no plausible economic motive: intimate partner violence, assaulting family members, rape. Poor people engage in these crimes at 4x the rates of others. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf (Another interesting fact - contra Trump - is that poor Hispanics seem far less criminal than poor whites/blacks. This also contradicts popular left wing narratives - if poverty makes poor whites/blacks beat their wives via "stressors" or other mysterious phlogiston, why are Hispanics immune?)
- jaggederest 10y ago
  > (Another interesting fact - contra Trump - is that poor Hispanics seem far less criminal than poor whites/blacks. This also contradicts popular left wing narratives - if poverty makes poor whites/blacks beat their wives via "stressors" or other mysterious phlogiston, why are Hispanics immune?) Presumably, within immediate memory they have a comparison available with "the old country" which makes a low-end existence in the US seem positively posh.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    So poor American blacks/whites rape people and beat their wives because they don't realize how nice their lifestyle is compared to the lifestyle of Mexicans in Mexico? Personally I don't find this particularly plausible.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hossbeast 10y ago

The whole concept of tipping is broken and needs to be done away with. The restaurant in the story should be charging the customers more than $11, so that it can pay its staff properly.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
I like tipping. When I have great service, I tip 25%+. When it's terrible I have two times tipped zero. Employers must pay minimum wage. If a tipped employee isn't being made up their wages up to the minimum I will (and have) happily supported their contacting the appropriate authorities. European service, in contrast, is terrible. I've similarly found myself avoiding no-tip restaurants in New York - their service is noticeably worse. And why wouldn't it be? If you are a good server, you pull a multiple of the minimum wage. Only your inferiors would prefer a guaranteed lower tier. Hence, self selection.
- dagw 10y ago
  European service, in contrast, is terrible. Very much disagree (with obviously lots of caveats and exceptions). European service is very reserved, minimal and spends most of the time being completely invisible, except those few moments when I actually need it. They rarely volunteer information, but are extremely knowledgeable when asked. US service is loud, annoying and in my face. They prattle on endlessly about this and that, show up constantly to try to make small talk, and never seem to be able to just leave the customer alone. Service staff in the US also feel more, if not inexperienced, then at least new to this particular job and I always get the feeling they've all just worked at the place for at most a couple of weeks. They've got scripts they've memorised, but they seem far less likely to have any deeper knowledge of what they're serving. What I will agree with is that the worst service I've had in Europe is worse than the worst service I've had in the US. Working for tips forces everyone to get to a minimum level.
ac29 10y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted, but some states allow paying wait staff less than minimum wage. What most needs to change is not allowing sub-minimum wage jobs subsidized by tips. For people who live in California, FYI, wait staff is required to be paid minimum wage, which can not have tips counted against it.

code_sardaukar 10y ago

It's only natural to feel more empathy for people in situations we've been in, but this isn't the entirety of morality. I've never been a cow but I go out of my way to avoid causing suffering to cows and other animals. Rich people haven't necessarily experienced much hardship, so they need to have a more abstract kind of empathy, but this doesn't make them worse people. Indeed, if a rich person felt that had done enough by paying taxes, I wouldn't blame them. From a utilitarian perspective, I would rather have another person who pays $100,000 in taxes and gives $0 to charity than someone who pays $20,000 in taxes and gives $1,000 to charity.

todd8 10y ago

For an interesting contrast, see Who Really Gives? Partisanship and Charitable Giving in the United States, by two political scientists at MIT [1]. The results there surprised me, for example, there is a positive correlation between the states that voted for Bush in 2004 and charitable giving. Also from the conclusion "Although previous research indicates that conservatism is a reliable proxy for identifying potential donors or donor communities, our results suggest that organizations would be better off simply targeting wealthier donors, regardless of political beliefs." [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1100129/who-gives.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1100...

arjie 10y ago
As this paper and others describe, the difference is almost entirely attributable to giving to religious causes, most notably the local church. I'm not going to say it's not charity to give to a thing that's a charity, but if the cause is evangelizing Christianity, then that's not the same as giving some poor kid food and education. Of course, the whole thing is confounded by the fact that the guy evangelizing is often also providing food and education, but without knowing the percentages it's hard to see if the numbers still line up when you subtract that cost.
- akvadrako 10y ago
  According to a well-researched article [1], in 2010 Catholic Chartities USA spent about 85% of it's $170 billion budget on health care and colleges. Based on what I've seen in poorer countries, my personal take is they do provide high quality education and care without much overhead. The evangelising is mostly implicit and doesn't take many resources. More than anything, it provides a soft filter for who gets those services. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/21560536 http://www.economist.com/node/21560536
  - arjie 10y ago
    Ah, and local churches (the majority of the difference between red/blue states) transfer donations to CC USA? If so, that's pretty damned good.

partycoder 10y ago

This video presents a study on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc

tajen 10y ago

I've tried being generous (and still donate, probably more than all my coworkers together), and I still get pissed upon by leftists. Talk about empathy. I live in France, my parents weren't even that rich, but we strive to work hard. Being motivated by good marks at school makes you bullied because you're a krelboyne. At work, as soon as colleagues learn you've been to a private high school and top college (both of which cost <$100/month and have active policies for lower income families), people come up to you and explain all the reasons why students from good schools aren't so good at work ("They don't have the grit", they say, "They aren't street-smart" – Happened to me 4 days ago again). A lot of citizen in France think it's fine to be jealous to someone because he was good at school, comes from a good background or is Christian. It would be ok if there weren't actual discrimination from people who want to offset the supposedly "easy life" you've had: The boss who bullied me in plain sight of everyone also was the only boss who had a shorter degree than I had. I've donated thousands to charities. I've volunteered for immigrants, kids of immigrants, I've volunteered in detention centers, I've volunteered in free events aimed at lower-income families, and with a team we went to help an orphanage abroad. I've given more than a thousand hours of volunteering in 5 years, in parallel to my studies and work. I never expected a "thank you". But a little consideration and respect from the leftists would do. But my life is still considered like a result of sheer luck, not a result of my hard work. The problem isn't the poor: They do need help. The problem is the leftists who give lessons. There's a non-stop cliche that, since you're rich, you're an asshole. Even if you are generous and litteraly more generous than them, they won't stop the hate. This article is one of them, generalizing about "riches are assholes". All in all, living in France, taxes are supposed to provide support for the poor. I'm tempted to leave it at that and stop donating, because I need to focus on my life now (no gf, no kids yet). But somehow I keep donating.

briandear 10y ago
I also live in France and I couldn't agree more. There's an implicit (and often explicit) hatred (on the left) of those that are more financially successful. There is also a social distrust of entrepreneurship and any activities that are higher risk, higher reward. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered."

nitwit005 10y ago

Some of the examples made me wonder if only the most empathetic poor would agree to participate in a study.

cperciva 10y ago

Talk about stereotyping! This headline is no better than "how can you tell if someone is a criminal? Look at their skin colour". Correlations in large populations do not mean that every individual shares the identified characteristics. I find it absolutely shocking that a paper at the level of the Washington Post would publish such drivel.

rhaps0dy 10y ago
It's exactly a stereotype. AKA weak bayesian evidence for a characteristic based on other, easier to measure, characteristics. EDIT: I thought the result was going to be exactly the opposite before I made this comment. My first impulse was to go and delete it. I'll leave figuring out implications of such biases in reasoning as an exercise to the reader :(
uola 10y ago
Socioeconomic status is an important factor in how we behave. The argument here is that people with more money are less kind because having more money makes them less kind. Unless you're making a specific argument were someones skin color is the prime factor in making someone more criminal that statement isn't factually correct. So no, it's not the same thing, but your frequent rhetorical outrage is noted.
- kahirsch 10y ago
  Rich people are also taller than poor people, on average, but how silly would it be to write "How can you tell if someone is tall? Ask how rich they are." The research is about average differences in people's empathy correlated with their education and socioeconomic status. The headline is talking about judging individuals based on their socioeconomic status.
musha68k 10y ago
Have you read the whole article?

galfarragem 10y ago

I think it goes both sides: the richest and the poorest neighborhoods are the nastier. They will segregate/bully who doesn't match their lifestyle.

briandear 10y ago
I might anecdotally argue that the upper-middle 'near-rich' neighborhoods are 'nastier' than the more upper class 'rich' neighborhoods-- perhaps the 'almost rich' have more insecurity than the comfortably rich. Just an observation from personal experience.

user5994461 10y ago

What is poor? What is rich? Is being poor when you can only get one iPhone per children... but cannot replace one when it accidentally falls down and break after 6 months?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Tomte 10y ago

I think another aspect might play a role: when you're well-off, but not obscenely rich, you're probably risk-averse. You don't want to end up in the lower-class, dependent on other peoples' charity, so you're holding your money together. When you're already within reach of that you're more likely top end up there, but the difference isn't as stark.

bachmeier 10y ago

Does anyone have a two sentence summary? I am not a subscriber so I'm blocked from reading the story, and clicking the "web" link doesn't help.

rosstex 10y ago
I was having this problem, but it turns out my ad blocker (uBlock Origin) had the "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek‎" filter disabled. Turning that on fixed the problem! tldr; studies show that when presented with images of money, people were less likely to pick up pens or donate to a hypothetical charity.
tajen 10y ago
The article provides ~12 examples of how rich people are less generous. It proxies "rich people" with parameters such as nicer neighbourhoods. It shows that proximity to the victims creates more empathy (e.g. 9\11 victims vs Tsunami victims, or experience being a waiter, etc) and gives it as a reason for the rich people being less empathetic towards poor.

throw2016 10y ago

Breezing through life without life changing adversity gives little opportunity for self reflection and contemplation unless one happens to be interested in problems beyond one's own. And if the thinking of 'us and them' takes hold whether in the rich, poor or other groupings there is always dehumanization, reductionism, blame and sociopathy. Those in adversity or have faced adversity will identify with others and may need or have received the help of other people leading to some kind of mutual empathy.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]