THE STUDY FEBRUARY 9, 2012
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Mitt Romney is not what you could call a man of the people—that is, if by “the people” you mean the voters he meets on the campaign trail. (The one-percent types he rubs shoulders with at dinner parties are a different story.) Much has been made of how out-of-touch Romney is with the middle-class Americans he is trying to win over. For some reason, we can’t help but recall that he’s the son of a governor, that he went to Harvard, and that he is fantastically rich. But his social troubles go beyond making gaffes in public: His attempts at small talk come off no less alien. “He is not fed by, and does not crave, casual social interaction,” Vanity Fair reports. “He has that invisible wall between ‘me’ and ‘you.’” No wonder that when he’s out shaking hands and kissing babies, he has trouble coming up with the right response to voters’ questions and comments. Was Mitt just born with a silver foot in his mouth, or have his class credentials stunted his social skills?
Studies from a 2010 paper published in Psychological Science suggest that it could be the latter. When asked to identify human emotion, study participants with lower socioeconomic status (SES) scored better on measures of emotional empathy than those with higher status. This held true regardless of whether the participant’s SES was measured by educational attainment or whether it was subjectively self-reported. Even when researchers randomly assigned participants an SES, those given a lower status demonstrated greater empathy. (Empathy was evaluated based on the participants’ responses to photographs of human faces or eye-muscle configurations displaying different emotions, or through responses after live interaction with a stranger.) The paper’s authors found that individuals who were ranked in lower classes within each study “scored higher on a measure of empathic accuracy, judged the emotions of a stranger more accurately and inferred emotions more accurately from subtle expressions in the eyes” relative to their upper-class counterparts. So next time you notice Romney’s awkward attempts to connect with a voter, don’t blame him—blame his millions.
5 comments
This helps explain why a poor person who receives an unexpected bequest, wins the lottery, or has a good day at the race track often will give much of it away to friends and family with greater need. It's often attributed to lack of discipline and inability to manage money, but it's actually an example of empathy. Poor people are dependent on one another to a much greater degree than rich people and, therefore, are more likely to share what little they have, including their emotions. Indeed, Matthew includes the parable of a poor person giving all she had to Jesus, who assigns to the gift much greater meaning and value than a more valuable gift from a rich person.
- rayward
February 9, 2012 at 11:53am
Talk about people having trouble emoting; I wonder what kind of net worth Mr. Spock on Start Trek had? Besides, he was always walking around telling people to "live long and prosper."
- Nusholtz
February 9, 2012 at 12:18pm
In the days of rampant class structure dramatized in "Upstairs, Downstairs," the servant class had to be very alert to the cues and signals sent by their "masters" because errors by servants might mean dismissal or other unhappy consequences. If the masters were clueless about the emotions and problems of the servants, generally there were few consequences (except for the occasional class wars and revolutions, but as with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the chances of losing that bad news lottery were fairly small).
- skahn
February 9, 2012 at 2:41pm
"Even when researchers randomly assigned participants an SES, those given a lower status demonstrated greater empathy." That stopped me. Reading in the link, the participants were directed to think and write about how they are different from people in higher or lower groups. "Thus, the manipulation shifted participants’ perceptions of their subjective SES." Then they were tested. Does Mitt just need more visualization exercises?
- blairxy
February 10, 2012 at 11:49am
There is an obvious Republican codification of this (very plausible to me) wisdom: If you're high status, everyone wants something from you, so you have to be on guard. If you're low status, you envy everyone else and want what they had, so you ingratiate yourself with them. Now, I think that's pretty sick, but it's how my upper middle class Republican acquaintances, including those who have risen significantly in class from their beginnings, think, even to the point of thinking that about their own family.
- IowaBeauty
February 10, 2012 at 12:15pm