Selfish, insensitive and incredibly greedy, the grapnel Moliere would have no problem admitting that the rich are different from the poor, and that the gulf that separates the two categories is not so much in the economic opportunities in those emotions. Hard to swallow, his theory was snubbed in favor of that of the soap opera world's most famous, the rich also cry, but after nearly four centuries to the French playwright, it's time for revenge. The psychologist and sociologist Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley argues that the rich are more selfish and less capable of empathy for the less affluent and that make them different are the very different life experiences, made of ease, comfort and friendships complacent.
To conduct the study as Social Class Cultures: The Convergence of Resources and rank in the Social Realm, Keltner has conducted 12 experiments, by measuring brain levels of empathy and social behavior of the volunteers. "The people of the lowest class - explained in Current Directions in Psychological Science - are more empathic, bring compassion and altruism. Those of higher class people think that economic success and political ideology should dictate their behavior and act ethically just for these reasons. " In one test, the psychologist, assisted by other colleagues asked 115 people to play the "dictator", an exercise commonly used to measure the economic behavior of a person and that is to entrust to an unknown partner participants and ten tokens (which correspond to real money), suggesting that they share them with others at discretion. The volunteers were shown the poorest the most generous.
For his study Keltner has also studied the mechanisms of activation of the vagus nerve, which helps the brain to remember and record the emotional input coming from the outside. At the sight of a starving child, for example, it is activated and the psychologist has found that more intense in the lower-class people. Author of the book Born To Be Good: The Science of A Meaningful Life, Keltner also argues that the poorer people are more skilled than those in affluent decipher the emotions portrayed in photographs of faces, and this precisely because they are more empathic. A theory confirmed by another study conducted on 300 employees of the University California and published earlier this year in Psychological Science, that the rich are less able to "read the emotions of others" and thus possess less "empathic accuracy". No research has yet been able to fully understand the reason for these limits. According to David Neal of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and Tanya Chartrand Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina, the culprit could be a very expensive medication Upper class, botox, which would hamper the ability to read emotions.
These differences "interior" of course, those are added in fact, exacerbated by the economic crisis. Just last week the New York Times revealed that the increase in the prices of luxury goods has no particular effect on sales: "If the cost of a pair of shoes goes from 800 to 860 U.S. dollars, who you want it notice? "said one of the leaders of the fashion boutique at Saks. And according to Gallup, the agency more than 80% of the wealth in the U.S. is controlled by 20% of the population, but Americans who earn more than 90 thousand dollars a year are refusing to contribute to overcoming the crisis by paying more taxes. The gap between rich and poor is more pronounced in Italy: according to data of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is one of our industrialized countries with the greatest disparity of income, ranked fifth among the 17 that marked a widening of the gap between 1985 and 2008, ahead of Mexico, the United States, Israel and the United Kingdom.
Source repubblica.it
Comments :
0 comments to “The research that rejects the rich "The more selfish and insensitive"”
Post a Comment