Poorer People Are More Compassionate

According to a new study, there indeed appears to be an emotional difference of sorts between the rich and the poor, with the latter apparently getting more engaged in compassionate behaviors. Researchers explain this by arguing that the rich are less sensitive to the cues that usually trigger compassion.

Anecdotal evidence that this was the case have been around for many years, but thus far investigators failed to discover a ways of demonstrating this difference in scientific terms. The new investigation, carried out by experts at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB), finally managed to do so.

One of the reasons why this difference exists in the first place, experts say, is that experiencing hardships and difficult challenges are the primary methods through which both gratitude and compassion are learned – but the rich do not experience them in the same manner as poorer people.

The most important thing the experts kept in mind was that those who did well in life tended to be shielded from the type of experiences required to elicit a compassionate response in them. Even if they were not completely separated from what goes on in the real world, their exposure was limited.

UCB investigators explain that poor people – and lower socio-economic classes in general – are more likely to be physiologically attuned to experiencing and recognizing pain and suffering in others, which in turn made them more likely to display compassion, PsychCentral reports.

At the same time, rich people exposed to distress signals from their less-well-off peers seemed to have a difficult time detecting and responding to these social cues. This may explain why they are less likely to display what are commonly referred to as “kind” behaviors.

“It’s not that the upper classes are coldhearted. They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives,”explains Jennifer Stellar, who was the lead author of the study.

The paper was published in the latest online issue of the scientific journal Emotion. Stellar holds an appointment as a social psychologist at UCB. “These latest results indicate that there’s a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be borne out of threats to their well-being,” she explains.

What the new study demonstrates is that previous researches on the issue are wrong. Those studies argued that lower-class individuals were more likely to develop anxiety, and also to display hostility when faced with adversity and challenges.

“Recognizing suffering is the first step to responding compassionately. The results suggest that it’s not that upper classes don’t care, it’s that they just aren’t as good at perceiving stress or anxiety,” Stellar concludes.