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.”
