A useful perspective on the psychology and politics of inequality. By the time I had read Dan Goleman's thoughtful article, another psychologist, Kathleen Geier, had written a valuable reply to Goleman's piece for The Washington Monthly, drawing upon her own personal experience on the streets of Hyde Park in Chicago, and leading me to go in search of a Chekov story called "Misery." Sometimes the dance of the web is genuinely and astonishingly graceful. I include Geier's remarks below after Goleman's essay. Since these essays deal essentially with the presence and absence of empathy, I should add that I shared some of my own and Rebecca Solnit's reflections on empathy last June. The link to them is here.
Rich People Just Care Less
New York Times, October 5, 2013
Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.
These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.
A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.
Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.
Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.
While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.
This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.
In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap. As political scientists have noted, redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.
Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.
Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,” a theme repeated by Vamik D. Volkan, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who was born in Cyprus to Turkish parents. Dr. Volkan remembers hearing as a small boy awful things about the hated Greek Cypriots — who, he points out, actually share many similarities with Turkish Cypriots. Yet for decades their modest-size island has been politically divided, which exacerbates the problem by letting prejudicial myths flourish.
In contrast, extensive interpersonal contact counteracts biases by letting people from hostile groups get to know one another as individuals and even friends. Thomas F. Pettigrew, a research professor of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzed more than 500 studies on intergroup contact. Mr. Pettigrew, who was born in Virginia in 1931 and lived there until going to Harvard for graduate school, told me in an e-mail that it was the “the rampant racism in the Virginia of my childhood” that led him to study prejudice.
In his research, he found that even in areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and viewed one another through lenses of negative stereotypes, individuals who had close friends within the other group exhibited little or no such prejudice. They seemed to realize the many ways those demonized “others” were “just like me.” Whether such friendly social contact would overcome the divide between those with more and less social and economic power was not studied, but I suspect it would help.
Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century. This widening gulf between the haves and have-less troubles me, but not for the obvious reasons. Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.
Daniel Goleman, a psychologist, is the author of “Emotional Intelligence” and, most recently, “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.”
The Washington Monthly / by Kathleen Geier [1]
Why the Rich and Powerful Have Less Empathy
October 7, 2013 |
Psychologist Daniel Goleman has written a fascinating piece [2] for today’s New York Times about social status and empathy. It seems that the richer and more powerful a person is, the less empathy he or she is likely to have for people who are lower in status:
A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
It’s not that rich people are natural-born sociopaths — although some of them certainly give that impression. Rather, says Goleman, while rich people can buy all the help they need, people of modest means “are more likely to value their social assets”:
The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.
I see this in my own life all the time. I live in Hyde Park in Chicago, a neighborhood with a great deal of racial and economic diversity. It includes undergraduates wealthy enough to attend the University of Chicago, professors who live in homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright … and also a large population of working class African-Americans. I don’t own a car, and sometimes I carry heavy shopping bags home from the grocery store.
Every time I’ve schlepped along with heavy packages, someone has offered to help, a fact that never fails to move me. In every single instance, the people who offered to help have been African-American men and women. To my more affluent neighbors, in those moments, I became invisible — just as I, in turn, have no doubt failed to “see” other people in distress, as I make the neighborhood rounds. Because they’ve been in my shoes in that particular situation — carrying heavy packages, with no one to help — my African-American neighbors have empathy for me. But because they haven’t had that experience, my white neighbors don’t.
Goleman says that growing inequality and the social distance it creates may be responsible for a “empathy gap” that has led to the Republican party’s Scrooge-like politics: cutting food stamps, denying health care, etc. I don’t doubt there’s something to that, but political ideology is far more complicated than that. I have relatives whose politics are awful but whose personal behavior could hardly be more generous and empathetic. And I’ve also known people with great politics who behave like cold-hearted bastards, particularly towards their social inferiors.
But I do agree that in societies where there is more equality and less social distance, there does tend to be more empathy. That was one of the points I was making in this post [3]. As I wrote, “[d]eeply unequal societies like ours are … breeding grounds for a host of simmering resentments, petty tyrannies and everyday sadism.” That’s because, on the one hand, you have so many heartless power plays and unthinking acts of cruelty on the part of the powerful. And on the other hand, the experience of constantly being dehumanized and robbed of one’s dignity doesn’t exactly improve one’s character. What it’s likely to do, instead, is to cause you, in turn, to dehumanize others. It is not an edifying spectacle. But it is inevitable when you create an economic system that allows people to use human beings like objects.
Social democracy, which creates more social and economic equality, can help minimize social pathologies, and maximize empathy. Another recent New York Times article suggests another route to increasing empathy: reading literary fiction [4]. A study found that after reading literary fiction, “people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.”
I am always somewhat wary of these arguments about the morally improving qualities of literature. I’m wary because literature is far more than its moral content, or lack thereof. Literature is to be cherished for its aesthetic value as well — art for art’s sake, etc. If you don’t see that, you’re missing something important.
Not to mention the fact that reading the classics clearly has not done a bloody thing to improve the character of any number of people I can think of.
And yet, as I say, I am only “somewhat wary” of those moral arguments for literature, because I think those arguments basically are kind of true. One of the most basic reasons we read literature is to get a better understanding of human nature and human experience, and often but not always, more understanding results in more empathy. Educated people who don’t read literature probably are less empathetic and more socially clueless than their better-read counterparts, all other things equal. The fact that Larry Summers reportedly never heard of One Hundred Years of Solitude [5] tells you quite a lot about the man, don’t you think?
The Times article specifically mentions Alice Munro and Chekhov as two writers who will improve your empathy. I can’t vouch for that claim, but I couldn’t agree more that everybody should read Alice Munro and Chekhov. Especially Chekhov, who I am sometimes think is my all-time favorite writer. These days, people seem to be far more familiar with his plays than his short stories, but as much as I love his plays, the short stories are his most important achievement, in my view. He wrote many volumes of them, and they are amazing.
One of the Chekhov stories I love most, “Misery,” beautifully illustrates Goleman’s point about empathy and social distance. It concerns the driver of a horse and cab, whose little boy has died. He has been driven almost mad with grief. As he drives his passengers, he keeps trying to find someone who will listen to his pain. All of the passengers are his clear social superiors — college students, army officers, and so on. None of them pay him the least bit of attention as he desperately tries to tell his tragic story. Finally, having found no human being willing to lend a sympathetic ear, he pours out his grief to his horse.
The story is very short, and absolutely devastating. It could be updated today with few changes. Chekhov was descended from serfs and became a doctor. As a doctor working in Russia just before the revolution, he saw the whole of Russian society, from the aristocrats to the poorest peasants. He wasn’t a political writer, per se, but he showed great empathy for the suffering of the poor, and was unflinching in his depiction of the cruelties and hypocrisies of the powerful. He’s a writer for all time, but he also speaks to our time in very interesting and specific ways. Many of his stories can be found here [6], if you’re looking for a place to start.