Fascinating new research study from the University of California titled Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy indicates that “the wealthy” have an “empathy deficit” compared to people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale. That’s right, poor people were found to have superior skills at accurately reading human emotions. The wealthy, not so much.

Rich people, because they don’t often need anyone else’s help, don’t use the empathy muscle much, and so it goes a bit flabby, I suppose… I know of someone who once bragged of eating a $500 hamburger to his staff who made much less than that a week and who didn’t have health insurance.

There are a hell of lot of societal ramifications because of these differences, obviously. Might even explain why some people watch FOX News or vote Republican!

Here’s the abstract:

Recent research suggests that lower-class individuals favor explanations of personal and political outcomes that are oriented to features of the external environment. We extended this work by testing the hypothesis that, as a result, individuals of a lower social class are more empathically accurate in judging the emotions of other people. In three studies, lower-class individuals (compared with upper-class individuals) received higher scores on a test of empathic accuracy (Study 1), judged the emotions of an interaction partner more accurately (Study 2), and made more accurate inferences about emotion from static images of muscle movements in the eyes (Study 3). Moreover, the association between social class and empathic accuracy was explained by the tendency for lower-class individuals to explain social events in terms of features of the external environment. The implications of class-based patterns in empathic accuracy for well-being and relationship outcomes are discussed.