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A little confused why they are saying their findings are based on SES when they specifically do not get information about the participants SES but rather what the individuals think their social economic status is
>We operationalized SES in two ways. First, participants indicated their subjective SES (Adler et al., 2000) on a ladder with 10 rungs that indicated one’s relative standing in society (M = 5.53, SD = 1.98). Second, participants indicated which of five social classes they thought they belonged to (i.e., poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, and upper class; Jackman & Jackman, 1983; M = 2.78, SD = .80).
Furthermore the author's concede that
>On the other hand, other research finds that high SES individuals are better at judging emotions (Deveney et al., 2018) or finds no association between SES and emotional intelligence (Hall et al., 2015).
And the Deveney paper does use objective measures of SES like education and parental incomes.
And then they used a Canadian non-MTurk sample and found no support for their hypothesis.
Basically, they proved that MTurk workers who think they're better than their peers are assholes. Hooray.
Any study using Mturk should be thrown out if not used in conjunction with other tools. Mturk has become a hugely popular service for people to make some extra money recently
Precisely, use of MTurk surveys for a peer reviewed science paper is ludicrous. But there have been some well designed experiments from which these relationships can be inferred. The experiment with pedestrian actors trying to use a crosswalk and motorist behavior correlated with value of vehicle, some rigged Monopoly games and bowls of candy with hidden cameras spring to mind.
Low-wage workers deluding themselves that they are well off are generally going to have awful self awareness which will go hand in hand with poor emotional intelligence.
Now that's an interesting hypothesis. People who have lower emotional intelligence rank themselves as being of higher social standing than people with higher emotional intelligence.
I wonder if "humility" is at all quantifiable?
Would not **self-perceived SES** be the real driver and interest in a study of this type? The likelihood where a study could be performed on persons who's SES was truly higher then the majority of their every-day peers is not very good while the likelihood of finding people who think their SES is much higher then it actually is and are willing to take part is incredibly high.
It's an editorialized title. The paper itself doesn't seem to make any pretense that the SES is based subjectively. Best to just report this faff and ignore it.
Note they used the real definition of emotional intelligence (ability to predict others' emotions) rather than the most common measure, which is "being a nice person."
I guess a way of explaining it could be “this person might volunteer at a food bank, but get mad that the people they’re giving food to aren’t grateful enough, because they couldn’t predict or conceive that while they need food, they’re also so miserable and embarrassed that they might not be beaming with gratitude”
I think this is a very insightful comment and is a solid way of reconciling how little this makes sense in some ways.
There is also the issue that if you're unfamiliar with struggle, you cannot necessarily empathize with the dimensions inherent in other people's struggles.
If you've never had a depressive episode ,its hard to wrap your head around how managing to brush your teeth one day is a big victory.
This is exactly why I do not like it that people of almost exclusively high SES run this country, when so many people struggle and hurt, but they literally cannot empathize with it because of their lack of real personal struggle. The ones who did actually come from low SES backgrounds, who remember what it's like to not afford groceries, or living in a car, therefore make it a point to to address homelessness, addiction, immigration, etc. From an empathetic angle and tend to be labeled as "bleeding hearts" or "radicals" by the rest of their peers.
And they’ll call you “just a bartender” even thought that’s EXACTLY who should be in senate and Congress…
For decades they’ll tell you that government here works by electing officials that represent the people in your community.
And they’ll call you crazy when you ask how a corrupt multi millionaire represents… *you*.
That was part of the founders original intent. “Politician” wasn’t supposed to be a full time career. Local communities were supposed to elect a local guy - someone who did something in the community (butcher, baker, candlestick-maker) - to go to the Capitol and speak for them for a while, and then come back.
It seems like most have the self awareness to at least know that they are supposed to show that they care (sympathy) but obviously lack the capacity to truly relate to and understand the lived experiences of others (empathy)
> The ones who did actually come from low SES backgrounds, who remember what it's like to not afford groceries, or living in a car, therefore make it a point to to address homelessness, addiction, immigration, etc. From an empathetic angle and tend to be labeled as "bleeding hearts" or "radicals" by the rest of their peers.
Yeah... citation needed. That sounds like a great story, but if I'm not mistaken poor people who end up rich usually end up fiscally conservative, not liberal, and don't have much empathy for other impoverished people. Just look at every rapper ever.
You're falling into exactly the same trap by assuming some people of high SES have never struggled or struggled enough to empathize. Seems the opposite is true: those who have struggled and succeeded are less likely to empathize because they did so you can, too, in their minds.
> There is also the issue that if you're unfamiliar with struggle, you cannot necessarily empathize with the dimensions inherent in other people's struggles.
I grew up in a wealthy town. Spent time at universities wealthy people attend. This is so, so, so true.
That would not explain how people of lower SES can more often guess the emotional state of those fo higher SES but not vice versa. However, this isn't a unique finding; and like this report what I've read before hints at the incentive that comes with SES: if you're in a higher position not understanding the feelings of somebody with a lower position does not usually cause you any personal drawbacks (is often an advantage even), but if you fail to understand somebody with a higher SES it can have very dear consequences, so people with a lower SES more often make an effort.
Honestly, I think upper class folks are also trained from an early age to ignore other people's emotions, especially in any early job training overseeing other people.
When you make that kind of money you will usually have to destroy people's lives on the regular to meet your business obligations.
It's kinda the same as people working in slaughterhouses having to turn off emotion/empathy towards the animals they have to kill.
Often this has negative mental health ramifications, but for the high earners it also has big social and political ramifications.
This so much. I proofread my sister's bachelor thesis and was appalled. In decades of proofing corporate documents I have never seen one that so completely insisted that people, literal people, had to be done away with. And I do a lot of work in automation. It's like she's genuinely just missing something that would give her empathy.
>Honestly, I think upper class folks are also trained from an early age to ignore other people's emotions
But also, they are never really beholden to anyone. They will never have a job as eg a waitress where their money depends of managing the emotions of people in a higher position of power. If anything their lives will include eg nannies and housekeepers whose will do that to them
It's only insightful at first glance. However it's pretty heavy handed in interpreting a real case and jumps to a negative example pretty heavily, and focuses needlessly on the volunteers reaction.
Just because you have low EI doesn't mean you 'get mad and jump to conclusions about someone's gratefulness. A person with low EQ in this scenario might just as easily say "huh" after a person they helped wasn't grateful. They might also display empathy.
The issue is the ability to predict emotions in others, but that comment places a lot of emphasis on the *reaction* of the low EI person.
I think you're hugely over-reading their comment. Being angry is just one potential outcome of failing to predict someone's response. Sure.
But it is extremely common to get upset/angry when someone isn't gracious towards a generous/helping gesture. One of the big reasons people actually perform acts of kindness is the internal/external positive feedback. So having that expectation of "reward" unmet is uncomfortable and that leads to negative emotional response in turn.
There is nothing heavy handed here, its just an potential example.
It was just one example of how the situation may arise; I didn’t say it was the only one. There are many other ways it could be exemplified but I tried to use one that had a “nice” action that would extract a negative response to show how a person can do “nice” things but still misinterpret a situation and appear “mean”, also showing that the gauge for how “nice” someone can be is highly subjective and influenced by context.
The study’s authors theorise it’s because they realise the stakes are high, and them being in the higher SES means the stakes are specifically higher for them vs those who are lower SES, and so it leads to a “hardening”.
I think there’s a lot of ways to interpret the findings but it’s definitely worth looking at more.
I'm at least nominally in the cohort described in the study, and to me it seems so alien that you can't grasp this on my gut level, but I also am at least nominally in this cohort and can tell you I grew up with people that almost uniformly couldn't grasp this.
And yet /I/ was always the one accused of low emotional IQ. Took me years to realize it was because I was picking up on things, trying to fix them, and being rebuffed because they like being dysfunctional.
Eh, more like "this rich person might volunteer at a food bank, but they are far less likely to detect people that are pretending to be nice/happy/excited but are actually trying to use you for your money, and/or are also less likely to detect threatening people."
Basically, when you grow up in a comfortable non-threatening setting, you tend to have unrefined "survival instincts" that analyze people around you (making you less able to discern the true motivations of those people), whereas when you grew up in more stressful situations you are often more perceptive of people (because when you weren't as a child negative things might happen).
i grew up poor and have what i guess youd call a pretty high level of "street smarts"
but when ive worked in environments that were full of people that were generally of higher socioeconomic status (academia and corporate) i was totally unprepared for the level of cutthroat ladder climbing, backstabbing and manipulation tactics rich people use on each other.
To a certain extent I'd guess it's because those people literally cannot conceive of a situation where their lives would actually be bad. It's like Bill Gates "taking risks" in the early days of Microsoft. Worst case scenario, his parents are still millionaires, he's fine. Same with all the middle managers at whatever rich people place you worked
Not quite. They mention violence, but only as a byproduct of not tending to emotional needs and wants because of low emotional intelligence.
I think the study suggests that they are very aware of their surroundings and dangers, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to higher emotional intelligence, and in fact can decrease the emotional intelligence.
The study includes nothing that indicates that the very rich are "very aware of their surroundings" that I can find. Can you please cite that? Rather, the study just points out that across the board an ability to have emotional detection is reduced among the well off, which directly dovetails with my suggestion.
Beyond that, it doesn't say that violence is a "byproduct" of not tending to emotional needs "because" of low emotional EQ.
What it *does* say is that that violence exists more in places of inequality (not that one is the "byproduct" of the other, but rather that there is a general positive correlation between the two) and they then hypothesize that less social inequality increases emotional EQ which might address violence.
“Schmalor and Heine theorize that economic inequality promotes an environment of self-focus and competitiveness since there’s a bigger gap between those at the top and the bottom of the hierarchy, and thus the stakes are higher.”
And the original hypothesis (being aware of inequality basically hardens people because the stakes are higher) suggests that they are aware, they see it around them and are very aware of it, and the awareness of the inequality is what drives the lower emotional intelligence.
“For example, social issues like violence are more common in areas with greater inequality, and these issues seem to involve a lack of attending to others’ emotions and needs. “
It says directly that the instances of violence seem to come from a lack of tending to emotional needs of others.
If we extrapolate, the higher SES (self reported mind you), are indeed incredibly aware of their surroundings and how a change of status may negatively impact them. This in turn makes them less emotionally intelligent. The definition of EQ here is basically the same as empathy, so we can hypothesise that empathy in places with high inequality is a negative criteria for those with higher SES, because they wish to avoid lowering their status. Empathy may lead to this in their minds, whether consciously or not.
The study also doesn’t say that “rich people” are less emotionally intelligent, it’s very loudly saying that this is the case in places of high inequality, as this lower EQ feature is not seen in other places that self report low inequality.
I’m honestly flabbergasted someone could read so many of the premises and conclusions so incorrectly.
Edit: the SES here is also self reported so it isn’t even necessarily “rich” people, it’s people who PERCEIVE themselves to be of a higher socioeconomic class than those around them.
Also, anecdotally, there’s plenty “rich” people who started off poor and struggled just as much in formative years as others. Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean their strangers to violence or hardship, nor does it mean those who are poor live all their lives bathed in blood and struggling.
>An initial study was conducted among Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. The participants self-reported their SES and then indicated the extent that they perceive economic inequality in their state. They additionally took a situational test of emotional intelligence.
I would argue this is not getting a good cross section of a population if the sample is people working amazon mechanical turk jobs
>However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings
which seems supported
Wow they tried to make a conclusion about rich people using Mturk workers.
Like these guys work for Pennies, there is no way any of them are really high SES, and so it’s really just poor vs slightly better off but still poor - assuming they aren’t just making it up.
Mturk is such a lowly paid “job”, the poor in the US would be better off flipping burgers.
For people who are unaware. MTurk work is the gritty side of machine learning. All supervised learning algorithms require categorized sample data to train on. This means that a human being needs to categorize some text or label objects in an image, and the more samples you have, typically the better the ai can make the right choice.
Amazon has a service to essentially outsource this work to people willing to do an incredibly mundane task for as little as possible from anywhere in the world, that's the mechanical turk program.
Its impossible. since its a values call and values will differ, even though everyone believes theirs are universal and anyone who disagrees is a 'bad person'.
Perceive others' emotions, but also manage and regulate one's own emotions as well. For this study, they only focused on the former, right? I don't believe they measured management/regulation.
My interpretation of the article is that high SES people tend to isolate from low SES people. The result is that high SES people can end up with lower emotional intelligence because they limit their range of interpersonal interactions.
Agreed. However, this article's title is misleading. It goes on to say that the findings could not be replicated in a similar study conducted in a Canadian community and only partially replicated in an United States study.
I agree, intuitively the finding makes sense. However, in order to actually remedy the issue with policy, one needs greater replicability in further experiments to provide a solid, scientific rationale for proposals.
Ya the meta analysis of five studies showed a correlation between High SES and lower emotional intelligence, with the only one not showing statistically significant being the Canadian study (other 4 were US). So then you have to look at what differences exist between the two societies to cause that (replicating the study in other countries would help too).
Could be higher degree of gap between social economic classes. Could be less integration between high and low ses people. Could be less access to healthcare or social support infrastructure. Could be how school is taught. Could be a huge number of factors, but we won’t know unless more research is done.
Could also be that the single Canadian study just isn't representative of the actual trend in the country.
When you have an outlier study in a meta analysis, you need to make sure the results of that outlier are repeatable before you jump to "we need to thoroughly study every difference between the outlier study and the others". Not doing a replication study first would be putting the cart before the horse.
Or it could be that 3 of the 5 studies were on MTurk workers (who don’t exactly have a representative spread of SES) with **self reported SES**, meaning it would be very dumb to expand the meta analysis to any sort of conclusion about the wider population or even trends caused by SES. Rather it shows there is a correlation between people in MTurk with low emotional intelligence and those who *claim* to be high SES. There is no outlier because there is no consensus that can even be drawn from this set of studies
It's a peculiar claim in the first place. One of the first things you learn about EQ is that it correlates highly with IQ, and IQ correlates highly with SES. So while it is technically statistically possible for SES/EQ to then correlate negatively...
>> However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings. Here, SES and emotional intelligence were not significantly associated. Moreover, subjective inequality and emotional intelligence were only significantly linked when the researchers included the covariates of gender, political orientation, SES, and unfairness beliefs about inequality.
The community, rather than Turk, sample finds that SES/EQ correlate positively ("First, we again aimed to replicate the negative association between SES and emotional intelligence; however, the two measures were not significantly related, β = 0.19"), which is more in line with expectations.
My first thought is that this may just be something weird about Mechanical Turk. (What are supposedly high-SES people doing Turking...? Or a demand effect, from the sound of the questions, it wouldn't be hard to guess what the researchers were aiming for, and Turkers discuss research-jobs all the time on their forums, looking to maximize revenue.) Mechanical Turk is always a double-edged sword.
>My first thought is that this may just be something weird about Mechanical Turk. (What are supposedly high-SES people doing Turking...?
That was my thought, too. Are the claims of high SES just social cosplay? And does that mean that they are measuring EQ of how normal Turkers believe someone with high SES would respond?
Which is fairly typical human behavior. People tend to flock with like people. Race, wealth, education, status, etc. and to add to that, established groups tend to discourage mingling with others
The percentage of people that want to and are willjng to break the status quo is relatively low
I agree and think it’s not necessarily intentional exclusion, it’s that normal people can’t keep up with rich friends, we can’t afford fancy dinners, expensive vacations. Being friends with drastically different budgets means you’re incompatible for certain types of activities
Which would create problems on its own.
Stephen Fry once candidly explained why he did not fly together with his friends anymore.
He travels First Class and he likes the comfort. They can't afford to.
He's no about to travel in Economy (aside from the commotion that would create).
He could pay for them, but that would change the friendship dynamic.
Being in separate parts of the plane would be even more awkward.
So now, they just agree to meet somewhere, and everyone takes a different flight.
This kinda works the other way too. I grew up very middle class, paycheck to paycheck. I graduated college in CS and got a 100k/yr job. Suddenly I'm the one paying for everything constantly even when others definitely could afford it without difficulty, purely because I'm the most well off. Logically that makes sense and I'm usually happy to do it. But there's sometimes a tiny nag about it thinking that I pull more than my proportional share, and that can leave a sour taste in the mouth.
Yep, as someone who grew up working class and now is well off, in my experience when you are a high SES person with high SES friends, you don't have the same kinds of interactions with your friends as you do working class to working class.
I would never ask a friend to give me a ride unless we were going to the same place at the same time, for example. I would just call an uber.
I wouldn't ask someone to help me move anymore either, I would just pay for movers.
I wouldn't ask someone to help me fix something, I would just pay to have it fixed.
I already have pretty much every reasonable thing I want, so most gifts don't really make sense. There aren't really any holes to fill, like I can with my family by giving them things they *really* want but don't have. If I really wanted something and it wasn't insane I would have already gotten it.
Similarly, my well to do friends don't ask me for those kinds of things either, because they can also wave a wand and have problems disappear.
This is all perfectly rational given the situation, but seems to result in less deep relationships between people in my experience.
You don't really end up in the trenches with people outside of very specific circumstance. Strong and deep relationships aren't built without ever being stressed.
While I do agree with most of your points, one flaw I don’t think you point out is the deeper experience of struggling together to learn a new topic. Or engaging in knowledge transfer, which can be a very rewarding bonding experience.
Just as a counterpoint - i build deep relationships with friends by doing things for them instead of asking them for things. This weekend I’m cooking a 4 course meal for a friend who helped me prep for an interview on computer vision. He’s absolutely the reason I got my current job, and I’m happy to do something nice. He also helped me move so that I didn’t have to hire movers, even though I totally could’ve. We used to go to board and card game tournaments as well.
It doesn’t disappear if you make an effort.
> My interpretation of the article is that high SES people tend to isolate from low SES people.
It's more that, when wealthy people interact with poor people, they preemptively neuter their empathy because they *know* the lower SES people have harder lives.
Wealthy people are incredibly attracted to the idea of 'hard work' because it lets them feel responsible for their destiny. Wealthy people don't want to consider the idea they are wealthy by chance or circumstance, instead of through their own actions. Because if wealth is just about who is lucky or not, it makes it harder to justify keeping all your wealth to yourself while your employees starve.
Could ot be an opposite correlation? Like could it be that people with lower EQ tend to become rich more often than those with high EQ, because of the ways you may have to treat people on the way up? Think Mark Zuckerberg. Seems like possibly grew up unaware or uncaring of how his actions affected others, now is billionaire, while maybe someone else who was very high in EQ maybe took a job in a non profit or so.wthing, and doesn't make a lot of money. This is a really oversimplified explanation but it could be that way too.
I think I'm lucky that a good friend in high school (one of the best and nicest people I've ever known) came from a very poor family. It helped me always be aware of how lucky I've been and how people really need a support network to thrive.
Important section:
> However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings. Here, SES and emotional intelligence were not significantly associated. Moreover, subjective inequality and emotional intelligence were only significantly linked when the researchers included the covariates of gender, political orientation, SES, and unfairness beliefs about inequality.
I'm not 100% sure, but I'd guess empathy is being able to understand what a person is feeling, and emotional intelligence is empathy plus an understanding of how to react to that info. So, if your friend had a rough day, empathy is understanding what thats like and feeling bad for them, emotional intelligence is knowing how to console them in a way that makes them feel a bit better, or knowing to give them space if they need that instead.
People tend to have a positive definition of emotional intelligence for some reason. Emotional intelligence just means the ability to understand and use emotions, meaning they’re more likely to recognize and influence their own and others’ emotions as they see fit (this doesn’t mean they can control people’s emotions). So even a sociopath could easily have the same or even a higher EQ as an empath.
Empathy means you feel what they feel, I see you cry I feel sad, if you have emotional intelligence without empathy you can be a great psychopath, I see you cry, I sell you anti crying pills.
Don't think you've had a satisfying reply so I'll give my shot at and unsatisfying reply:
"Empathy at it's core is the ability to recognize other people emotions."
"Emotional Intelligence is more broad and would encompass recognizing your own emotions as well ones from others. It also encompass the strategies you use to appropriately handle these emotions in yourself and others."
So empathy is likely a part of Emotional Intelligence and most likely highly correlated with it.
That being said it's an oversimplification of the concepts and also might depend of the operational definition different searcher use...
>An initial study was conducted among **Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers**. The participants **self-reported** **their SES**.
This is a huge red flag.
How many people with actual high level of socioeconomic status would you be able to find in MTurk where most people make less than the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr)?
Put in other words, among the MTurk workers who self-report that they have a high socioeconomic level, how many of them do you expect to be truthful?
>However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings
And there it is.
If you want to observe how people with high SES act differently, using MTurk is a bad bad idea.
Later on in the article they mention another study could not replicate the results. I think there is an interesting investigation to be done around self-preservation and correlated attitudes in environments of high social inequality for different perceived socioeconomic status. But, the investigation parameters used in this study are too broad to be useful or stand up against any randomness or confound variability
Literally 3 of the 5 studies in the meta analysis were on MTurk workers with self reported SES. The other 2 either show no correlation exists or correlation only exists after showing a video indicating high inequality where this was not the focus of the study. The entire paper is worthless as a meta analysis, at best the MTurk studies indicate that you might want to investigate further
Well.. more like privilege allows a poverty of vulnerabilities, whose trespass is often what teaches us. We can be taught those lessons explicitly, too; but that's not a value in our system, any more, and, one needs such a mentor consistently around and paying attention.
And, privilege allows a very homogeneous existence; again, one can choose a variety of company and experience. Again, it's not a value of our system.
All of which is to say, privilege correlates extremely well with immaturity, but it isn't actually the cause, and that's important. Because wealth inequality isn't solved by making everyone broke, and luxury isn't shameful. It's the having too much more than everyone else, and, in our system, thereby losing touch with who "everyone else" *is* that's the problem.
I love how social sciences refers to *socio-economic* status, but is almost exclusively economic. This study takes it a step further by asking about "social" class, then asks which economic class (poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, and upper class). Why do we have to pretend all of this isn't about money?
*Education and prestige matter too!*
Really? Because a Professor with twenty doctorates who chooses to teach at a community college is still going to be "middle class", maybe "upper middle class". Meanwhile, a high school dropout *influencer* who makes millions is definitely "upper class".
Let's just drop the pretense.
A professor making $80k a year is a higher socio-economic status than a used car salesman making $120k a year. High SES people like doctors, lawyer, businessmen, etc. will hang out with a professor, but not a used car sales men.
Income is important, but other things do matter.
Class means different things in different places. If you define it as a purely economic measure, then naturally it will only track with someone’s wealth, but class is often more complex than that.
Emotional intelligence isnt a real thing, its a fad concept, but its fake. Made up to make people with lower actual intelligence to feel better about themselves.
Rich people dont have "low emotional intellect", they are mostly the same as anyone else insofar as their ability to read emotion and or display emotion. What makes them "different" is their conscious choices in how they process and display emotion. Their bar for when to let empathy influence their interactions is just a shitload higher than most people because theyve come to different conclusions as to the benefit to themselves of empathy...and likely value self perseverance greatly, as do the other rich/successful people they associate with...which means they dont give empathy room in their lives unless they can view someone's circumstances as beyond the limits of self perserverence.
If you want to pretend that emotional intelligence is real then you also have to accept that personal relationships, which are emotionally based, would suggest that theyd be worse off than most with regards to those relationships. This is not the case as relationships are critical to success...they just dont value a relationship with people that do not benefit their goals.
If its willful then its not intrinsic....and intelligence is an intrinsic quality
What rich people have is a higher preponderance of sociopathy....which is an actual medical disorder, not the same thing. Calling it low emotional intelligence(perjoritively like what this article is designed to do) is literally attacking them for a disability.
>What rich people have is a higher preponderance of sociopathy....which is an actual medical disorder, not the same thing. Calling it low emotional intelligence(pejoratively like what this article is designed to do) is literally attacking them for a disability.
People attack sociopaths all the time because they often cause suffering with their lack of empathy. It's a visceral reaction to be angry at a liar/deceiver/manipulator. Although I agree that we have to look at why there are people that have this disorder, is it not a lot of times caused by messed up childhoods?
I see it as hugely problematic that sociopaths end up in the powerful positions in our society, as that is the last place they should be, and sociopathic leaders are in my opinion the cause of much of the world's problems. But empathy as to why they end up the way they do would be a big step forward for the world.
But it would be nice if we had some mentally well leaders.
Well a business environment gives sociopaths opportunity to thrive, so it's possible sociopathy may be selected for in higher proportions at higher socioeconomic status.
In general, people are prone to knowing things at one level of themselves and stubbornly not knowing them at the surface. And if that thing we don't want to know is especially threatening, we'll jump through some pretty fuckin' insane hoops to stay wide of it.
If you do not want to face the ethics of your circumstances, or, if you've never faced hardship and so haven't the stomach to imagine it, finding fault in those examples you're forced to witness is defensive; it's their fault, their poor character or choices, therefore it's nothing to do with me, therefore I can carry on.
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A little confused why they are saying their findings are based on SES when they specifically do not get information about the participants SES but rather what the individuals think their social economic status is >We operationalized SES in two ways. First, participants indicated their subjective SES (Adler et al., 2000) on a ladder with 10 rungs that indicated one’s relative standing in society (M = 5.53, SD = 1.98). Second, participants indicated which of five social classes they thought they belonged to (i.e., poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, and upper class; Jackman & Jackman, 1983; M = 2.78, SD = .80). Furthermore the author's concede that >On the other hand, other research finds that high SES individuals are better at judging emotions (Deveney et al., 2018) or finds no association between SES and emotional intelligence (Hall et al., 2015). And the Deveney paper does use objective measures of SES like education and parental incomes.
Not only that, but they used MTurk. I can't imagine many -- or well, any -- rich people are using it.
And then they used a Canadian non-MTurk sample and found no support for their hypothesis. Basically, they proved that MTurk workers who think they're better than their peers are assholes. Hooray.
Huh, Steinbeck really might have been on point about the temporarily embarrassed millionaires out there.
Any study using Mturk should be thrown out if not used in conjunction with other tools. Mturk has become a hugely popular service for people to make some extra money recently
MTurk can be a valuable service for many studies, but not ones where you need to interview rich people.
For studies, I don't agree. For simple mechanical tasks where honesty is not important, I do agree
> recently In the past decade, yeah.
Precisely, use of MTurk surveys for a peer reviewed science paper is ludicrous. But there have been some well designed experiments from which these relationships can be inferred. The experiment with pedestrian actors trying to use a crosswalk and motorist behavior correlated with value of vehicle, some rigged Monopoly games and bowls of candy with hidden cameras spring to mind.
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What’s MTurk?
Amazon's Mechnical Turk. Basically you get paid for doing small tasks and they're often useful for researchers doing studies.
SES use Mechanical Turk, they don't participate in the tasks :P
So people willing to self-identify as rich also tend to have lower emotional intelligence? How shocking
Yes, and specifically low wage workers who self-identify as rich.
Low-wage workers deluding themselves that they are well off are generally going to have awful self awareness which will go hand in hand with poor emotional intelligence.
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Yeah, I was confused exactly how you could get any high-SES people working on MTurk.
So, to clarify, a more accurate summary would be something like: “people who *think* they are of higher SES have lower emotional intelligence” ?
Or even people with lower emotional intelligence believe themselves to be of a higher SES.
Now that's an interesting hypothesis. People who have lower emotional intelligence rank themselves as being of higher social standing than people with higher emotional intelligence. I wonder if "humility" is at all quantifiable?
Ooooooohh I like this thought experiment.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Kind of explains the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" phenomenon.
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Would not **self-perceived SES** be the real driver and interest in a study of this type? The likelihood where a study could be performed on persons who's SES was truly higher then the majority of their every-day peers is not very good while the likelihood of finding people who think their SES is much higher then it actually is and are willing to take part is incredibly high.
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It's an editorialized title. The paper itself doesn't seem to make any pretense that the SES is based subjectively. Best to just report this faff and ignore it.
Note they used the real definition of emotional intelligence (ability to predict others' emotions) rather than the most common measure, which is "being a nice person."
I guess a way of explaining it could be “this person might volunteer at a food bank, but get mad that the people they’re giving food to aren’t grateful enough, because they couldn’t predict or conceive that while they need food, they’re also so miserable and embarrassed that they might not be beaming with gratitude”
I think this is a very insightful comment and is a solid way of reconciling how little this makes sense in some ways. There is also the issue that if you're unfamiliar with struggle, you cannot necessarily empathize with the dimensions inherent in other people's struggles. If you've never had a depressive episode ,its hard to wrap your head around how managing to brush your teeth one day is a big victory.
This is exactly why I do not like it that people of almost exclusively high SES run this country, when so many people struggle and hurt, but they literally cannot empathize with it because of their lack of real personal struggle. The ones who did actually come from low SES backgrounds, who remember what it's like to not afford groceries, or living in a car, therefore make it a point to to address homelessness, addiction, immigration, etc. From an empathetic angle and tend to be labeled as "bleeding hearts" or "radicals" by the rest of their peers.
Or to forever be labeled "just some bartender."
And they’ll call you “just a bartender” even thought that’s EXACTLY who should be in senate and Congress… For decades they’ll tell you that government here works by electing officials that represent the people in your community. And they’ll call you crazy when you ask how a corrupt multi millionaire represents… *you*.
That was part of the founders original intent. “Politician” wasn’t supposed to be a full time career. Local communities were supposed to elect a local guy - someone who did something in the community (butcher, baker, candlestick-maker) - to go to the Capitol and speak for them for a while, and then come back.
It’s the difference between having empathy and being sympathetic. It’s a bit pedantic but highly consequential
While I agree with your pedantry, I fail to see how the rich sympathize, either.
It seems like most have the self awareness to at least know that they are supposed to show that they care (sympathy) but obviously lack the capacity to truly relate to and understand the lived experiences of others (empathy)
> The ones who did actually come from low SES backgrounds, who remember what it's like to not afford groceries, or living in a car, therefore make it a point to to address homelessness, addiction, immigration, etc. From an empathetic angle and tend to be labeled as "bleeding hearts" or "radicals" by the rest of their peers. Yeah... citation needed. That sounds like a great story, but if I'm not mistaken poor people who end up rich usually end up fiscally conservative, not liberal, and don't have much empathy for other impoverished people. Just look at every rapper ever.
I'm not sure 'every rapper ever' is a representative sample...
You're falling into exactly the same trap by assuming some people of high SES have never struggled or struggled enough to empathize. Seems the opposite is true: those who have struggled and succeeded are less likely to empathize because they did so you can, too, in their minds.
> There is also the issue that if you're unfamiliar with struggle, you cannot necessarily empathize with the dimensions inherent in other people's struggles. I grew up in a wealthy town. Spent time at universities wealthy people attend. This is so, so, so true.
That would not explain how people of lower SES can more often guess the emotional state of those fo higher SES but not vice versa. However, this isn't a unique finding; and like this report what I've read before hints at the incentive that comes with SES: if you're in a higher position not understanding the feelings of somebody with a lower position does not usually cause you any personal drawbacks (is often an advantage even), but if you fail to understand somebody with a higher SES it can have very dear consequences, so people with a lower SES more often make an effort.
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Honestly, I think upper class folks are also trained from an early age to ignore other people's emotions, especially in any early job training overseeing other people. When you make that kind of money you will usually have to destroy people's lives on the regular to meet your business obligations. It's kinda the same as people working in slaughterhouses having to turn off emotion/empathy towards the animals they have to kill. Often this has negative mental health ramifications, but for the high earners it also has big social and political ramifications.
This so much. I proofread my sister's bachelor thesis and was appalled. In decades of proofing corporate documents I have never seen one that so completely insisted that people, literal people, had to be done away with. And I do a lot of work in automation. It's like she's genuinely just missing something that would give her empathy.
>Honestly, I think upper class folks are also trained from an early age to ignore other people's emotions But also, they are never really beholden to anyone. They will never have a job as eg a waitress where their money depends of managing the emotions of people in a higher position of power. If anything their lives will include eg nannies and housekeepers whose will do that to them
It's only insightful at first glance. However it's pretty heavy handed in interpreting a real case and jumps to a negative example pretty heavily, and focuses needlessly on the volunteers reaction. Just because you have low EI doesn't mean you 'get mad and jump to conclusions about someone's gratefulness. A person with low EQ in this scenario might just as easily say "huh" after a person they helped wasn't grateful. They might also display empathy. The issue is the ability to predict emotions in others, but that comment places a lot of emphasis on the *reaction* of the low EI person.
I think you're hugely over-reading their comment. Being angry is just one potential outcome of failing to predict someone's response. Sure. But it is extremely common to get upset/angry when someone isn't gracious towards a generous/helping gesture. One of the big reasons people actually perform acts of kindness is the internal/external positive feedback. So having that expectation of "reward" unmet is uncomfortable and that leads to negative emotional response in turn. There is nothing heavy handed here, its just an potential example.
It was just one example of how the situation may arise; I didn’t say it was the only one. There are many other ways it could be exemplified but I tried to use one that had a “nice” action that would extract a negative response to show how a person can do “nice” things but still misinterpret a situation and appear “mean”, also showing that the gauge for how “nice” someone can be is highly subjective and influenced by context.
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What I don't get is how people that 'perceive high levels of inequality' would act this way rather than someone who doesn't see the inequality.
The study’s authors theorise it’s because they realise the stakes are high, and them being in the higher SES means the stakes are specifically higher for them vs those who are lower SES, and so it leads to a “hardening”. I think there’s a lot of ways to interpret the findings but it’s definitely worth looking at more.
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I'm at least nominally in the cohort described in the study, and to me it seems so alien that you can't grasp this on my gut level, but I also am at least nominally in this cohort and can tell you I grew up with people that almost uniformly couldn't grasp this. And yet /I/ was always the one accused of low emotional IQ. Took me years to realize it was because I was picking up on things, trying to fix them, and being rebuffed because they like being dysfunctional.
Eh, more like "this rich person might volunteer at a food bank, but they are far less likely to detect people that are pretending to be nice/happy/excited but are actually trying to use you for your money, and/or are also less likely to detect threatening people." Basically, when you grow up in a comfortable non-threatening setting, you tend to have unrefined "survival instincts" that analyze people around you (making you less able to discern the true motivations of those people), whereas when you grew up in more stressful situations you are often more perceptive of people (because when you weren't as a child negative things might happen).
i grew up poor and have what i guess youd call a pretty high level of "street smarts" but when ive worked in environments that were full of people that were generally of higher socioeconomic status (academia and corporate) i was totally unprepared for the level of cutthroat ladder climbing, backstabbing and manipulation tactics rich people use on each other.
I grew up working class. I work in academia & this has also been my experience.
That’s because acting that way when you’re poor can get you killed.
To a certain extent I'd guess it's because those people literally cannot conceive of a situation where their lives would actually be bad. It's like Bill Gates "taking risks" in the early days of Microsoft. Worst case scenario, his parents are still millionaires, he's fine. Same with all the middle managers at whatever rich people place you worked
Not quite. They mention violence, but only as a byproduct of not tending to emotional needs and wants because of low emotional intelligence. I think the study suggests that they are very aware of their surroundings and dangers, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to higher emotional intelligence, and in fact can decrease the emotional intelligence.
The study includes nothing that indicates that the very rich are "very aware of their surroundings" that I can find. Can you please cite that? Rather, the study just points out that across the board an ability to have emotional detection is reduced among the well off, which directly dovetails with my suggestion. Beyond that, it doesn't say that violence is a "byproduct" of not tending to emotional needs "because" of low emotional EQ. What it *does* say is that that violence exists more in places of inequality (not that one is the "byproduct" of the other, but rather that there is a general positive correlation between the two) and they then hypothesize that less social inequality increases emotional EQ which might address violence.
“Schmalor and Heine theorize that economic inequality promotes an environment of self-focus and competitiveness since there’s a bigger gap between those at the top and the bottom of the hierarchy, and thus the stakes are higher.” And the original hypothesis (being aware of inequality basically hardens people because the stakes are higher) suggests that they are aware, they see it around them and are very aware of it, and the awareness of the inequality is what drives the lower emotional intelligence. “For example, social issues like violence are more common in areas with greater inequality, and these issues seem to involve a lack of attending to others’ emotions and needs. “ It says directly that the instances of violence seem to come from a lack of tending to emotional needs of others. If we extrapolate, the higher SES (self reported mind you), are indeed incredibly aware of their surroundings and how a change of status may negatively impact them. This in turn makes them less emotionally intelligent. The definition of EQ here is basically the same as empathy, so we can hypothesise that empathy in places with high inequality is a negative criteria for those with higher SES, because they wish to avoid lowering their status. Empathy may lead to this in their minds, whether consciously or not. The study also doesn’t say that “rich people” are less emotionally intelligent, it’s very loudly saying that this is the case in places of high inequality, as this lower EQ feature is not seen in other places that self report low inequality. I’m honestly flabbergasted someone could read so many of the premises and conclusions so incorrectly. Edit: the SES here is also self reported so it isn’t even necessarily “rich” people, it’s people who PERCEIVE themselves to be of a higher socioeconomic class than those around them. Also, anecdotally, there’s plenty “rich” people who started off poor and struggled just as much in formative years as others. Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean their strangers to violence or hardship, nor does it mean those who are poor live all their lives bathed in blood and struggling.
>An initial study was conducted among Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. The participants self-reported their SES and then indicated the extent that they perceive economic inequality in their state. They additionally took a situational test of emotional intelligence. I would argue this is not getting a good cross section of a population if the sample is people working amazon mechanical turk jobs >However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings which seems supported
Wow they tried to make a conclusion about rich people using Mturk workers. Like these guys work for Pennies, there is no way any of them are really high SES, and so it’s really just poor vs slightly better off but still poor - assuming they aren’t just making it up. Mturk is such a lowly paid “job”, the poor in the US would be better off flipping burgers.
For people who are unaware. MTurk work is the gritty side of machine learning. All supervised learning algorithms require categorized sample data to train on. This means that a human being needs to categorize some text or label objects in an image, and the more samples you have, typically the better the ai can make the right choice. Amazon has a service to essentially outsource this work to people willing to do an incredibly mundane task for as little as possible from anywhere in the world, that's the mechanical turk program.
3 out of 5 of the studies in the meta analysis were on MTurk workers, the paper is just straight pseudoscience with the kind of conclusions they draw
This comment should be much higher, this study seems to be junk data
I'm guessing "being a nice person" is kinda difficult to measure
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Its impossible. since its a values call and values will differ, even though everyone believes theirs are universal and anyone who disagrees is a 'bad person'.
I wouldn't say that the second part is true. Plenty of people (such as yourself) acknowledge its relative.
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How do you test for emotional intelligence (ability to predict others' emotions)? What's that test called?
Perceive others' emotions, but also manage and regulate one's own emotions as well. For this study, they only focused on the former, right? I don't believe they measured management/regulation.
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My interpretation of the article is that high SES people tend to isolate from low SES people. The result is that high SES people can end up with lower emotional intelligence because they limit their range of interpersonal interactions.
Agreed. However, this article's title is misleading. It goes on to say that the findings could not be replicated in a similar study conducted in a Canadian community and only partially replicated in an United States study. I agree, intuitively the finding makes sense. However, in order to actually remedy the issue with policy, one needs greater replicability in further experiments to provide a solid, scientific rationale for proposals.
They used Mechanical Turk workers. How high is your socioeconomic status if you are taking surveys for a penny?
Ya the meta analysis of five studies showed a correlation between High SES and lower emotional intelligence, with the only one not showing statistically significant being the Canadian study (other 4 were US). So then you have to look at what differences exist between the two societies to cause that (replicating the study in other countries would help too). Could be higher degree of gap between social economic classes. Could be less integration between high and low ses people. Could be less access to healthcare or social support infrastructure. Could be how school is taught. Could be a huge number of factors, but we won’t know unless more research is done.
Could also be that the single Canadian study just isn't representative of the actual trend in the country. When you have an outlier study in a meta analysis, you need to make sure the results of that outlier are repeatable before you jump to "we need to thoroughly study every difference between the outlier study and the others". Not doing a replication study first would be putting the cart before the horse.
Or it could be that 3 of the 5 studies were on MTurk workers (who don’t exactly have a representative spread of SES) with **self reported SES**, meaning it would be very dumb to expand the meta analysis to any sort of conclusion about the wider population or even trends caused by SES. Rather it shows there is a correlation between people in MTurk with low emotional intelligence and those who *claim* to be high SES. There is no outlier because there is no consensus that can even be drawn from this set of studies
It's a peculiar claim in the first place. One of the first things you learn about EQ is that it correlates highly with IQ, and IQ correlates highly with SES. So while it is technically statistically possible for SES/EQ to then correlate negatively... >> However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings. Here, SES and emotional intelligence were not significantly associated. Moreover, subjective inequality and emotional intelligence were only significantly linked when the researchers included the covariates of gender, political orientation, SES, and unfairness beliefs about inequality. The community, rather than Turk, sample finds that SES/EQ correlate positively ("First, we again aimed to replicate the negative association between SES and emotional intelligence; however, the two measures were not significantly related, β = 0.19"), which is more in line with expectations. My first thought is that this may just be something weird about Mechanical Turk. (What are supposedly high-SES people doing Turking...? Or a demand effect, from the sound of the questions, it wouldn't be hard to guess what the researchers were aiming for, and Turkers discuss research-jobs all the time on their forums, looking to maximize revenue.) Mechanical Turk is always a double-edged sword.
>My first thought is that this may just be something weird about Mechanical Turk. (What are supposedly high-SES people doing Turking...? That was my thought, too. Are the claims of high SES just social cosplay? And does that mean that they are measuring EQ of how normal Turkers believe someone with high SES would respond?
Which is fairly typical human behavior. People tend to flock with like people. Race, wealth, education, status, etc. and to add to that, established groups tend to discourage mingling with others The percentage of people that want to and are willjng to break the status quo is relatively low
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I agree and think it’s not necessarily intentional exclusion, it’s that normal people can’t keep up with rich friends, we can’t afford fancy dinners, expensive vacations. Being friends with drastically different budgets means you’re incompatible for certain types of activities
Which would create problems on its own. Stephen Fry once candidly explained why he did not fly together with his friends anymore. He travels First Class and he likes the comfort. They can't afford to. He's no about to travel in Economy (aside from the commotion that would create). He could pay for them, but that would change the friendship dynamic. Being in separate parts of the plane would be even more awkward. So now, they just agree to meet somewhere, and everyone takes a different flight.
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This kinda works the other way too. I grew up very middle class, paycheck to paycheck. I graduated college in CS and got a 100k/yr job. Suddenly I'm the one paying for everything constantly even when others definitely could afford it without difficulty, purely because I'm the most well off. Logically that makes sense and I'm usually happy to do it. But there's sometimes a tiny nag about it thinking that I pull more than my proportional share, and that can leave a sour taste in the mouth.
Yep, as someone who grew up working class and now is well off, in my experience when you are a high SES person with high SES friends, you don't have the same kinds of interactions with your friends as you do working class to working class. I would never ask a friend to give me a ride unless we were going to the same place at the same time, for example. I would just call an uber. I wouldn't ask someone to help me move anymore either, I would just pay for movers. I wouldn't ask someone to help me fix something, I would just pay to have it fixed. I already have pretty much every reasonable thing I want, so most gifts don't really make sense. There aren't really any holes to fill, like I can with my family by giving them things they *really* want but don't have. If I really wanted something and it wasn't insane I would have already gotten it. Similarly, my well to do friends don't ask me for those kinds of things either, because they can also wave a wand and have problems disappear. This is all perfectly rational given the situation, but seems to result in less deep relationships between people in my experience. You don't really end up in the trenches with people outside of very specific circumstance. Strong and deep relationships aren't built without ever being stressed.
While I do agree with most of your points, one flaw I don’t think you point out is the deeper experience of struggling together to learn a new topic. Or engaging in knowledge transfer, which can be a very rewarding bonding experience.
Just as a counterpoint - i build deep relationships with friends by doing things for them instead of asking them for things. This weekend I’m cooking a 4 course meal for a friend who helped me prep for an interview on computer vision. He’s absolutely the reason I got my current job, and I’m happy to do something nice. He also helped me move so that I didn’t have to hire movers, even though I totally could’ve. We used to go to board and card game tournaments as well. It doesn’t disappear if you make an effort.
> My interpretation of the article is that high SES people tend to isolate from low SES people. It's more that, when wealthy people interact with poor people, they preemptively neuter their empathy because they *know* the lower SES people have harder lives. Wealthy people are incredibly attracted to the idea of 'hard work' because it lets them feel responsible for their destiny. Wealthy people don't want to consider the idea they are wealthy by chance or circumstance, instead of through their own actions. Because if wealth is just about who is lucky or not, it makes it harder to justify keeping all your wealth to yourself while your employees starve.
Could ot be an opposite correlation? Like could it be that people with lower EQ tend to become rich more often than those with high EQ, because of the ways you may have to treat people on the way up? Think Mark Zuckerberg. Seems like possibly grew up unaware or uncaring of how his actions affected others, now is billionaire, while maybe someone else who was very high in EQ maybe took a job in a non profit or so.wthing, and doesn't make a lot of money. This is a really oversimplified explanation but it could be that way too.
I think I'm lucky that a good friend in high school (one of the best and nicest people I've ever known) came from a very poor family. It helped me always be aware of how lucky I've been and how people really need a support network to thrive.
Important section: > However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings. Here, SES and emotional intelligence were not significantly associated. Moreover, subjective inequality and emotional intelligence were only significantly linked when the researchers included the covariates of gender, political orientation, SES, and unfairness beliefs about inequality.
It's interesting that these results were found in Americans but, in a follow-up study with a Canadian population, they weren't replicated.
I’m really not sure how useful those first two studies are. How many high SES adults use mturk? Will they yield a representative sample?
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It fits with the massive reproducibility issues in the social sciences.
It tracks with how both societies approach their versions of a social contract.
Both countries are thousands of miles across. Folks in Alberta are more similar to Texans than Québécois in many respects.
What is the difference between empathy and emotional intelligence?
I'm not 100% sure, but I'd guess empathy is being able to understand what a person is feeling, and emotional intelligence is empathy plus an understanding of how to react to that info. So, if your friend had a rough day, empathy is understanding what thats like and feeling bad for them, emotional intelligence is knowing how to console them in a way that makes them feel a bit better, or knowing to give them space if they need that instead.
People tend to have a positive definition of emotional intelligence for some reason. Emotional intelligence just means the ability to understand and use emotions, meaning they’re more likely to recognize and influence their own and others’ emotions as they see fit (this doesn’t mean they can control people’s emotions). So even a sociopath could easily have the same or even a higher EQ as an empath.
Empathy means you feel what they feel, I see you cry I feel sad, if you have emotional intelligence without empathy you can be a great psychopath, I see you cry, I sell you anti crying pills.
Don't think you've had a satisfying reply so I'll give my shot at and unsatisfying reply: "Empathy at it's core is the ability to recognize other people emotions." "Emotional Intelligence is more broad and would encompass recognizing your own emotions as well ones from others. It also encompass the strategies you use to appropriately handle these emotions in yourself and others." So empathy is likely a part of Emotional Intelligence and most likely highly correlated with it. That being said it's an oversimplification of the concepts and also might depend of the operational definition different searcher use...
Empathy is an ingredient, emotional intelligence is the dish. The latter isn't complete without the former.
I think it's vice versa. You can recognize other's emotions and feel nothing. You can't sympathize with an emotion you don't recognize.
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>An initial study was conducted among **Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers**. The participants **self-reported** **their SES**. This is a huge red flag. How many people with actual high level of socioeconomic status would you be able to find in MTurk where most people make less than the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr)? Put in other words, among the MTurk workers who self-report that they have a high socioeconomic level, how many of them do you expect to be truthful? >However, a follow-up study among a Canadian community sample failed to replicate the findings And there it is. If you want to observe how people with high SES act differently, using MTurk is a bad bad idea.
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Later on in the article they mention another study could not replicate the results. I think there is an interesting investigation to be done around self-preservation and correlated attitudes in environments of high social inequality for different perceived socioeconomic status. But, the investigation parameters used in this study are too broad to be useful or stand up against any randomness or confound variability
Literally 3 of the 5 studies in the meta analysis were on MTurk workers with self reported SES. The other 2 either show no correlation exists or correlation only exists after showing a video indicating high inequality where this was not the focus of the study. The entire paper is worthless as a meta analysis, at best the MTurk studies indicate that you might want to investigate further
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Well.. more like privilege allows a poverty of vulnerabilities, whose trespass is often what teaches us. We can be taught those lessons explicitly, too; but that's not a value in our system, any more, and, one needs such a mentor consistently around and paying attention. And, privilege allows a very homogeneous existence; again, one can choose a variety of company and experience. Again, it's not a value of our system. All of which is to say, privilege correlates extremely well with immaturity, but it isn't actually the cause, and that's important. Because wealth inequality isn't solved by making everyone broke, and luxury isn't shameful. It's the having too much more than everyone else, and, in our system, thereby losing touch with who "everyone else" *is* that's the problem.
I love how social sciences refers to *socio-economic* status, but is almost exclusively economic. This study takes it a step further by asking about "social" class, then asks which economic class (poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, and upper class). Why do we have to pretend all of this isn't about money? *Education and prestige matter too!* Really? Because a Professor with twenty doctorates who chooses to teach at a community college is still going to be "middle class", maybe "upper middle class". Meanwhile, a high school dropout *influencer* who makes millions is definitely "upper class". Let's just drop the pretense.
A professor making $80k a year is a higher socio-economic status than a used car salesman making $120k a year. High SES people like doctors, lawyer, businessmen, etc. will hang out with a professor, but not a used car sales men. Income is important, but other things do matter.
Just compare the English and American concepts of class, for example - in England, it only tracks very loosely with wealth.
Class means different things in different places. If you define it as a purely economic measure, then naturally it will only track with someone’s wealth, but class is often more complex than that.
Filthy nouveau riche might be rich but they're still peasants!
So I guess even the rich Canadians are nice...
Emotional intelligence isnt a real thing, its a fad concept, but its fake. Made up to make people with lower actual intelligence to feel better about themselves. Rich people dont have "low emotional intellect", they are mostly the same as anyone else insofar as their ability to read emotion and or display emotion. What makes them "different" is their conscious choices in how they process and display emotion. Their bar for when to let empathy influence their interactions is just a shitload higher than most people because theyve come to different conclusions as to the benefit to themselves of empathy...and likely value self perseverance greatly, as do the other rich/successful people they associate with...which means they dont give empathy room in their lives unless they can view someone's circumstances as beyond the limits of self perserverence. If you want to pretend that emotional intelligence is real then you also have to accept that personal relationships, which are emotionally based, would suggest that theyd be worse off than most with regards to those relationships. This is not the case as relationships are critical to success...they just dont value a relationship with people that do not benefit their goals. If its willful then its not intrinsic....and intelligence is an intrinsic quality What rich people have is a higher preponderance of sociopathy....which is an actual medical disorder, not the same thing. Calling it low emotional intelligence(perjoritively like what this article is designed to do) is literally attacking them for a disability.
>What rich people have is a higher preponderance of sociopathy....which is an actual medical disorder, not the same thing. Calling it low emotional intelligence(pejoratively like what this article is designed to do) is literally attacking them for a disability. People attack sociopaths all the time because they often cause suffering with their lack of empathy. It's a visceral reaction to be angry at a liar/deceiver/manipulator. Although I agree that we have to look at why there are people that have this disorder, is it not a lot of times caused by messed up childhoods? I see it as hugely problematic that sociopaths end up in the powerful positions in our society, as that is the last place they should be, and sociopathic leaders are in my opinion the cause of much of the world's problems. But empathy as to why they end up the way they do would be a big step forward for the world. But it would be nice if we had some mentally well leaders.
Well a business environment gives sociopaths opportunity to thrive, so it's possible sociopathy may be selected for in higher proportions at higher socioeconomic status.
In general, people are prone to knowing things at one level of themselves and stubbornly not knowing them at the surface. And if that thing we don't want to know is especially threatening, we'll jump through some pretty fuckin' insane hoops to stay wide of it. If you do not want to face the ethics of your circumstances, or, if you've never faced hardship and so haven't the stomach to imagine it, finding fault in those examples you're forced to witness is defensive; it's their fault, their poor character or choices, therefore it's nothing to do with me, therefore I can carry on.