'Rich People Just Care Less'

From today's links:

Rich People Just Care Less, by Daniel Goleman, Commentary, NY Times: ...A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. ... Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley,... 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 ... may stem in part from the empathy gap. ...

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...

Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century. ... 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.