NYTimes | 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.
