Rich People Pay Less Attention To Other People, Says Study (businessinsider.com) 259
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a small recent study, researchers from New York University found that those who considered themselves in higher classes looked at people who walked past them less than those who said they were in a lower class did. The results were published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science. According to Pia Dietze, a social psychology doctoral student at NYU and a lead author of the study, previous research has shown that people from different social classes vary in how they tend to behave towards other people. So, she wanted to shed some light on where such behaviors could have originated. The research was divided into three separate studies. For the first, Dietze and NYU psychology lab director Professor Eric Knowles asked 61 volunteers to walk along the street for one block while wearing Google Glass to record everything they looked at. These people were also asked to identify themselves as from a particular social class: either poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or upper class. An independent group watched the recordings and made note of the various people and things each Glass wearer looked at and for how long. The results showed that class identification, or what class each person said they belonged to, had an impact on how long they looked at the people who walked past them. During Study 2, participants viewed street scenes while the team tracked their eye movements. Again, higher class was associated with reduced attention to people in the images. For the third and final study, the results suggested that this difference could stem from the way the brain works, rather than being a deliberate decision. Close to 400 participants took part in an online test where they had to look at alternating pairs of images, each containing a different face and five objects. Whereas higher class participants took longer to notice when the face was different in the alternate image compared to lower classes, the amount of time it took to detect the change of objects did not differ between them. The team reached the conclusion that faces seem to be more effective in grabbing the attention of individuals who come from relatively lower class backgrounds.
Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new?
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually.. It's a case of the usual bs sociological broken rational.
The study process nothing at all because...
1. The amount of data collected is microscopic and therefore of zero statistical value.
2. There are no controls at all.
3. All the tests are uncorrelated as the situation is different for each.
4. And most importantly.. Correlation is not causation! You would think 'researchers' would know this.. But apparently not.
They would be so busy patting themselves on the back at discovering something they hav
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The amount of data collected is microscopic and therefore of zero statistical value.
The study included over 400 people. That is more than enough to be statistically valid.
2. There are no controls at all.
They used non-rich people as controls.
3. All the tests are uncorrelated as the situation is different for each.
What? They are testing for the same hypothesis.
4. And most importantly.. Correlation is not causation!
The researchers never claim it is.
discovering something they have preconceived (bad bad rich people!)
They do not put a value on any behaviors. There is nothing inherently "bad" about not looking at other people. In fact, maybe it is the other way around, and excessive attention to other people is holding back the poor. Steve Jobs once remarked that mediocre people focus on other people, while smart people focus on ideas. Of course, smart is not the same as rich, but they are correlated.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but the intent of the article and this 'research' is clear: to imply that being rich somehow implies less humanity.
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No, but the intent of the article and this 'research' is clear: to imply that being rich somehow implies less humanity.
"Rich" implies the possession of either large assets or high incomes. However, this study didn't ask for asset or income information. Rather, the labeling of rich people was based solely on self-identification. Thus, the more appropriate conclusion is that people think they are rich have the indicated behavior.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Interesting)
You sure? Are you sure you're not also biased, then? Should we just give up and embrace whatever personality/cargo/political cult gets us off?
A few quick searches to see if I was even close in my assumption.
The author of the businessweek text has a degree in zoology and 'science journalism'. ..and her twitter suggests a distinct political bias all of its own
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
https://twitter.com/linzasaur [twitter.com]
Pia Dietze has a major in psychology and focused on what? Yup. 'Class relations' etc.. To be fair, this looks like her phd thesis, at least based on this.. (scroll down or txt search for dietze)
https://psych.nyu.edu/programs... [nyu.edu] (note the reference to eric knowles in her bio)
https://psych.nyu.edu/knowles/ [nyu.edu]
I think that pretty much sums him up in terms of his bias.
My bias was on the right track. More progressives looking to play with numbers to justfy whining about rich people
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, your bias isn't on the right track.
Bias is irrelevant. The methodology is either valid or invalid in relation to the hypothesis and the results. Are the findings supported by the evidence?
These are the only things that matter. The hypothesis is relevant only in relation to these concerns. What you're doing is something along the lines of poisoning the well or relying on ad hominem attacks. If there is bias, you can have a valid point if you show evidence for that bias in the study. And I'm very much open to the idea that there could be methodological flaws.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Bias is irrelevant. The methodology is either valid or invalid in relation to the hypothesis and the results. Are the findings supported by the evidence?
Bias can, and does, profoundly skew direct results and their interpretation. This is why double blind studies are so useful, to help avoid experimental bias. Thee was an excellent example of this in the 1970's, involving Jacques Benveniste, a supporter of homeopathic medicine in his immunological research. His positive results could not be replicated when the experiments were done by a review committee with better double blind methods.
The same can be seen in almost every business plan and employee evaluation.
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The same can be seen in almost every business plan and employee evaluation.
BULLSHIT, please cite references
LOL, you don't think there is often bias in employee reviews? Have you ever had a review?
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Interesting)
More progressives looking to play with numbers to justify whining about rich people
Your bias sees these studies as part of a political movement, mine sees them as part of the strangely recursive science of anthropology. From the moment we are born to the day we lose our mind, watching others is how we navigate the society we find ourselves in. Those at the top of the totem pole are no longer trying to navigate, they are either trying to steer or have anchored in a safe and pleasant harbour.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rich = Bad
Poor = Good
This is how you justify a Robin Hood mentality.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Average" people are tired of the crap, period.
We are assaulted all day, every day, about how horrible we are. We are too greedy, we are destroying the world, we are racists because we want the existing written law enforced. It is a non-stop assault and people are just tired of it. This study is outright flawed just to run the current narrative that middle class workers in the US are horrible people, and the more successful they are the worse they are.
Meanwhile, you have a presidential candidate doubling down on this while TAKING BRIBES. She not only takes bribes, but bashes police officers, PAYS people to riot at her political opponent's rallys, and basically says the successful middle class are the ones to blame. She takes BRIBES while in office, and lies, and corrupts the FBI and DOJ and then says WE are the problem and you jump up and down agreeing with that sentiment.
Keep it up. The days of intimidating people into being silent by threatening to call them names is nearly over.
When did you become so anti-middle class?
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe it's neither. A third possibility is that as rich people generally enjoy more insulation from physical hazards and risks in social situations, their biological instinct to assess random strangers for threat potential is duller than in poor people.
Anyone want to guess a fourth?
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Interesting)
Confidence gained from their private schooling.
I'm not a rich person, but some of the people in my social circle can certainly be classed as rich, while others should be classed as "middle class but working extremely hard to send their kids to private school", and others are normal middle class who send their kids to public school (I'm in the UK here). I have no kids of my own.
One thing you would immediately notice when interacting with the kids of this fairly diverse group is that those kids that go to private school have significantly more confidence in interaction and themselves than the kids that go to public school. They are taught in different ways, and they are individually fostered and curated by their school teachers and support assistance, and they have a lot of support when it comes to "soft skills" such as confidence and interaction.
Kids who go to private school are much more confident in themselves and their actions.
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American here. They don't even begin to cover as much material in the public schools here as they could.
It depends where you live. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, where half the families are Asian. It is surprising how much the schools here cover, and how hard they push the kids. The public schools do what the voters demand, and here the parents are demanding high standards and lots of homework.
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They are taught in different ways, and they are individually fostered and curated by their school teachers and support assistance, and they have a lot of support when it comes to "soft skills" such as confidence and interaction
Thanks for your insights. It means a lot considering you don't have kids yourself and I'm guessing you don't attend a private school yourself.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about all of the US but in my neck of the woods funding is not a problem with public schools. Spending per student is far above what it was decades ago even adjusted for inflation. I remember going to school to discuss problems with my daughter when she was in the 5th grade. After the meeting my daughter's teacher thanked me profusely for coming. It kind of surprised me and I asked her why in the world wouldn't I have come. She told me she had 7 meetings scheduled that week and I was the only parent to show up. It had never occurred to me that anyone wouldn't be interested in their child's education but as I started looking around I noticed more and more over the years that students that did well had parents that were involved and a lot of parents were not involved at all. A friend of mine's wife is a teacher and he has told me many horror stories about children who basically are raising themselves. This is not in the ghetto but a generally working class environment. In my almost 6 decades I've seen a lot of changes, some for the better but the breakdown of the US family structure is not a positive thing and it's accelerating.
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I'm not sure of your point. You mean you think children raising themselves with parents that have next to no involvement in their training and education is a good thing? Or did you simply read the last sentence and fail to get the context from the rest of what I wrote?
Eleanor Roosevelt. (Score:4, Interesting)
Steve Jobs once remarked that mediocre people focus on other people, while smart people focus on ideas.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt.
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Nope.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2... [quoteinvestigator.com]
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Good catch; but regardless of the source it's a good observation.
For a guy, looking at people often means looking at women with an eye to sexual properties. That's not a path to great accomplishments; that's why the people watchers are poor. Looking at things involves thinking "I can buy that", or better, "I can make that", and that leads to productive activity. The rich person thinks "I can improve that", he's in the realm of ideas with the potential to make things better for a lot of people and profit on
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The study shows rich people are more focused, less easily distracted.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, GP loses at bad-research bingo. Also, he missed the actual problem with this research: the subjects are divided into classes by self-reporting. So the headline should read, "People who consider themselves above other people pay less attention to others." It's not an un-interesting result, but it is not quite as interesting when you put it that way.
I've worked with people of all classes, and anecdotally at least I've found that F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: the rich aren't like you and me; they have more money. Old money at least lives a little bit like the people you read about in Jane Austen books; a lot of their energy goes into socializing with others of their class. So it would be interesting to look at old money/new money this way. Another interesting confounding factor is urban/rural. Rural people tend to be poorer. Urban people actually get more human interaction per time while participating in less per person encountered.
In most interesting social science research it's not the first and obvious way of dividing up people that draws your attention (e.g. rich/poor, young/old, male/female); it's the second cut. That's because most of our pop-psych deals in the first cuts (men are from Mars, women from Venus); the second cut tells us the ways our intuitions are limited.
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If you don't like the conclusion, attack the study.
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I'm an old time leftie; I'm perfectly OK with a study that says rich people are bastards -- if it can back that up. However I'm a nerd first -- particularly a data nerd. Sloppy inferences really piss me off.
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They do not put a value on any behaviors. There is nothing inherently "bad" about not looking at other people. In fact, maybe it is the other way around
Yes; maybe the down-and-outs are looking for rich people to mug.
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1. The amount of data collected is microscopic and therefore of zero statistical value.
The study included over 400 people. That is more than enough to be statistically valid.
I don't have access to the actual paper, but it's not clear how many people are included in each of the categories. Past studies have suggested that people have a tendency to self-identify as middle-class, moderate, etc. So, I would expect that the bulk of the 400 people were in the middle-class category. If the "rich" people were intended to represent the "1%", then I would expect about 4 rich people if the people were randomly selected. If more than 1% of the 400 self-identified as rich, then perhaps,
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Steve Jobs once remarked that mediocre people focus on other people, while smart people focus on ideas.
He may have said it, but it certainly isn't his quote. It looks like the quote comes from Charles Stewart in 1901:
"Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas."
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2... [quoteinvestigator.com]
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2. There are no controls at all.
They used non-rich people as controls.
Are you sure about that? From the summary "those who considered themselves in higher classes" where the focus group. Was the control "those who considered themselves in lower classes"? If so, it says nothing about rich and poor people, but only about people's idea of their place in society. All of the groups were self-identified. A valid control would be one in which the researchers, based on empirical data, assign individuals to specific socio-economic groups.
Re: Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:4, Informative)
I would guess it's a paraphrase of this quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt (from my search results anyway):
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
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Curiously, digging deeper the actual quote is probably attributed to Henry Thomas Buckle, and then later got attributed to E.R. when she either paraphrased or quoted it.
Who is Henry Thomas Buckle? I have no idea. That's a people question, and I don't want to delve into small mind territory to find out.
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Thank you, small mind.
(Just kidding...)
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Sociopaths gonna sociopath.
The problem with nonsense like this is that you completely ignore social dynamics. If I'm going to rob someone, would I rather rob someone who doesn't have a penny to their name or a rich person? If I'm going to scam someone, who's it going to be? You have time, think about it.
Rich people are targets for a fair portion of the general population while poor people aren't. Disengagement is a defensive mechanism against the sociopaths of society, not because somehow being rich is sociopathic.
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Interesting. On the same path, I once heard a quote something like this: "It costs you nothing to be friendly when your friendship isn't worth anything." I've often wondered if people would tend to become friendlier if you convinced them they were worse off than their peers, because in a friendship they'd have more to gain and little to lose.
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Well also the more you have the more you can lose.
This really isn't new. Back in the great depression much of this discussion of this as well.
"I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" - composed in 1934 by George Gershwin
"Folks with plenty of plenty.They've got a lock on the door. Afraid somebody's going to rob 'em.While there out (a) making more - what for"
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Don't worry. Presumably the journal of the Association for Psychological Science is not owned by a rich person but you can rest assured that the media that the rich people do own that is consumed by hundreds of millions won't mention this and continue to state that being disabled, an immigrant, whatever is being scapegoated in the geographical location, is bad.
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Perhaps to them all of us peasants look the same?
Not the peasant girls.
Re:Sociopaths gonna sociopath. What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
ON the other hand, perhaps those folks' attention is more often in thought of how to be successful and planning their next step in life, rather than just idle people watching all the time.
I'm not wealthy, but I do alright.
And don't get me wrong, there ARE times I like to kinda just sit and people watch, especially since I live in New Orleans, and man...we have some real characters here.
But that's on relaxing days off. During the work week, however, I'm usually lost in thought on what to do, what I want to do, what I need to do....and I likely don't notice people while I'm out and about either. I'm focused on goals and what I need to do to make a buck, or enhance my pleasure in life.
So, it may not just be elite-ism....it's just that successful (and often wealthy) people have on their minds what it actually takes to be successful, and aren't spending as much time day dreaming about other peoples' lives.
I don't really see that as a bad thing...?
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Goodness...pot calling the kettle black maybe?
Wow...that's quite a jump in logic.
No, when I'm with my friends in person, I'm f
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He was saying:
"Mind you don't walk into my fist, glasshole".
Seriously, this study is skewed. It only covers people who would consent to walk down the street wearing google glass.
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He was saying:
"Mind you don't walk into my fist, glasshole".
Seriously, this study is skewed. It only covers people who would consent to walk down the street wearing google glass.
Very true, but there's also another effect: the "observer effect." Basically, if someone is aware that their behavior is being observed and monitored, that often has an impact on the behavior itself. The 800-pound gorilla equivalent of this is the exercise in acting class where a student is made to sit down on a solitary chair facing the rest of the class...and is told to "just relax and be yourself."
I have to think that strapping a Google Glass onto someone's head and making them walk down the street is
Rich people are self absorbed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
... News at 11.
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Even more shocking: people who think they are 'upper class' are more self absorbed.
"These people were also asked to identify themselves as from a particular social class: either poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or upper class"
Re:Rich people are self absorbed.... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, all two of them! Which of course is an entirely adequate sample to extrapolate from the relative performance of self-identified lower and middle class people to self-identified upper class people... if you are a social science major with no understanding of statistics or the scientific method.
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The article even brags about letting an "independent group" anayze the Google glass images, as if this was part of a blind, scientifically valid study, when the self-identification is the sledgehammer in the bias room.
Re:Rich people are self absorbed.... (Score:4, Funny)
... and therefore easier to mug! :-p
Re:Rich people are self absorbed.... (Score:4, Interesting)
... News at 11.
Quite. Only last night I was reading Joseph Conrad's "The Arrow of Gold" written 1919, where he describes two gawkers (Blunt and his mother, themselves middle=class) come to watch a high society painter (Henry Allègre) and his mistress on their morning ride in the Bois de Boulogne.
Mr. Blunt and his indiscreet mother .. had one more chance of a good stare. ... [Allègre and his mistress] came riding very slowly abreast of the Blunts. ...[The girl's] expression was serious and her eyes thoughtfully downcast. .. Mr. Blunt had never before seen Henry Allègre so close. .... Blunt was .... wondering if [Allegre would] take off his hat. But he did not. Perhaps he didn’t notice. Allègre was not a man of wandering glances.
Things have always been so.
Re: Rich people are self absorbed.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Whilst most unemployed people are poor, most people who are poor work, sometimes multiple jobs, and have less free time than some wealthy people.
dallah! (Score:5, Informative)
You got a dallah you can give me? My car jus broke down and I need to get my kids some medicin from da cvs.
You think I am kidding? I have had that exact conversation with a few variations, many times with many different people.
Keep your head down. Dont make eye contact. Maybe they will not bother you.
"I Don't Want Your Money" (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting. I had a fellow on the the train yesterday ask me for food. When I told him I didn't have any money (true), he said he didn't want money, just a loaf of bread. I had just spent nearly the last of the money in my bank account at the grocery shop (due to a banking stuff-up, payday was delayed a couple of days this month). I didn't have any bread, but I gave him one of the two bricks of cheese I'd just purchased and wished him luck in finding some bread to go with it.
Re:"I Don't Want Your Money" (Score:5, Insightful)
But, of course, there are also scammers and begging 'organisations', so the only guide is intuition. Better to be sometimes wrong than do nothing though.
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Virtue signaling is less about actually doing things and more about talking about doing things.
Giving a buck or a sandwich to a beggar on the street is a fairly private affair, so it doesn't really qualify as virtue signaling. Now setting up a charitable foundation and naming it after yourself or donating to a hospital/university/whatever and getting a building or wing named after you is probably the most extreme example that I can think of.
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If you want clarification that will make sense in your particular context, why don't you share a little more of that context? What country are you from? Why so cagey?
All the posts... (Score:2)
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Correlation vs causation??? (Score:3)
I'd say that if you are the type of person that hasn't much concern for other humans, then perhaps that is one of the prerequisites of getting into the "upper class" category.
Just personal observation, no scientific studies here.
Another Faulty Study (Score:2)
You don't just ask people what class they fall in...you'll get inaccurate results. How many "rich" people volunteer in a group of 61?...or even 400.
There are regional and generational differences...the article didn't say if the experiment occurred in just one location or if they experimented in a variety. Or, did they consider the age of the participants.
Also, it's quite possible there's another explanation. There's plenty of prior work showing that more successful people are able to assess things more q
Re:Another Faulty Study (Score:5, Insightful)
It certainly wasn't the researchers who jumped to any SJW conclusions. The researchers found self-described rich people took less attention to random strangers. That's all. Attention is not the same as empathy.
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As a midwestern transplant to the DC area, I was surprised how unfriendly people in the DC metro area are. Say hello to someone you don't know?...you'll get a look like you've got a third eye on your forehead. I've been here for 35 years, and can't wait to get the hell out when I retire.
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Wealthy is relative. When I lived in Africa for 30 months in the mid 1980s, I was (as a white man) presumed to be very wealthy by a far higher percentage of people than I was in the USA. And in fact, relatively speaking, I probably was far wealthier. I found a lot of "fast friends" were attracted to engaging with me, some out of common decency to make outsiders feel welcome, but others definitely on the bet that if they befriended me they could ask for a loan or a favor.
Naturally, the more people are tryin
Is it just an American thing (Score:3)
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Um, no. Typically in the entire Western sphere class is defined precisely by income. India is really the only remaining major country where you are born into a class and cannot leave it.
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No, it's just a nonsense thing. The premise is foolish because the concept of "class" is both nonsensical, and in this case, self-defined.
No, its whiny jealous people (Score:2)
The stereotypes you hear on Slashdot about rich and wealthy people are just that.....stereotypes. IMHO, stereotypes aren't much use in this area because of the distribution of
Expectations (Score:4, Insightful)
This outcome may possibly arise from a lifetime of interactions where people treat you like you owe them something. I remember I was sitting outside a church waiting for my wedding to begin when a man approached me and asked me for some money for the bus or for gas. I didn't have any cash on me, and when I told him this he became irritated and belligerently responded "can't you just walk to the gas station and use the ATM?!". I've had countless interactions with people who take eye contact as an invitation to stop you on the street to try and sell something, for a survey, to beg, or in some way impede you. If I'm out an about, its because I have places to be, so I keep my head down and keep to myself.
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At first I assumed the Germans were less friendly, but I was later told that when I did the typical 'American smile' to strangers, the Germans would assume I was attempting to sell them something or otherwise solicit them.
This, by the way, is the end result of marketing-types coopting positive interpersonal gestures and mannerisms for their own sleazy ends. By abusing the tendency for people to take a smile or eye contact (or any of the other aspects that they're destroying) as a sign of friendliness or trust, they strip those gestures of their genuineness.
lousy study (Score:5, Interesting)
The study only had two nominally "upper class" individuals in it, meaning the study has too few samples to say anything about "upper class". The only thing you might infer is that middle class people pay less attention than lower class people.
But the class assignment is based on self-reports. A lot of rich people consider themselves middle class, and some middle class people by income consider themselves upper class. So, the study really says that people who consider themselves to be of a higher class pay less attention.
But wait, that's still not right. What they actually measured is "dwell time". The differences in dwell time are small and they recorded only 1 minute of video or used images on monitors. In addition, they didn't control for other factors that vary with socioeconomic status, such as level of education and IQ.
So, the study says nothing about "rich people" and next to nothing about "upper class people". And what it says about lower vs middle class may have nothing to do with attention or class.
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Let us not forget that the individuals were aware that they were being recorded. Awareness of a measurement biases the results.
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TFA talks about "rich people", which the publication had nothing to do with; that is TFA was biased and tendentious.
The researchers should not have added two "upper class" individuals to the study, because they only add noise. The fact that they did add these two people suggests that the researchers had an agenda and a bias, which calls the whole study into question.
Finally, "class" and "self-reported
And it's New York (Score:2)
In NYC you're generally on your way to somewhere, so anyone that stops for a study is going to be kind of weird.
Rich People Pay Less Attention To Other People (Score:2)
They failed to double-blind the experiment. (Score:3)
They failed to double-blind the experiment.
They also failed to have a set of test subjects which they tested, and *post hoc* asked them to self-identify their social class.
It would also be interesting to scale "self identified social class" vs. "actual social class", across the results vectors.
Pretty crappy experiment. Sorry.
This reminds me of a proverb. (Score:2, Interesting)
Proverbs 18:23 When the poor speak, they have to be polite, but when the rich answer, they are rude.
Aspiration (Score:2)
Makes sense. Most people aspire to be better off. (yes, Anonymous Coward, I know, you're the exception)
There have been studies done that suggest that people tend to "dress up". What I mean by that is, if someone moves into an area where dress codes are more formal, or more affluent looking, people in those areas tend to adapt to that dress code.
If someone moves to an area where people dress more slovenly than they are accustomed to, they tend to not change their clothing- they would rather stand out as t
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Easier and Cheaper way to proceed (Score:2)
Step 1: get car
Step 2: drive the 101 from say hopland to san francisco
Step 3: notice that the cock behavior crescendos around Marin, and is mostly attributable to autos at or near the six figure mark
Rich people don't need others (Score:3)
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People pretending to be other people... (Score:3)
All of the test subjects were instructed to pretend to be part of various classes of society. How is pretending to be rich, poor or middle class while walking down a street supposed to discover how people that are actually rich, poor or otherwise truly behave? Everyone has preconceived notions of how people in other classes behave. If you think that rich people walk with a swagger, you're going to walk with a swagger when instructed to pretend to be rich.
I get that the researchers were attempting to isolate behavioral changes based on differences in environmental circumstances but I would have been more impressed if they had actually recruited real wealthy people to put on the glasses and do the walk. Seems to me that by not doing that, they artificially influenced the actual test subjects by allowing for those subjects to exercise their own bias.
Trusting? (Score:2)
It seems to me that the primary reason to look at strangers you pass is if you feel insecure and scared of assault of theft from them.
Their is probably also a large correlation to mating behavior.
Most likely this just shows that Rich people are more likely happily in a relationship and trusting of strangers.
Anyone trying to correlate staring at strangers you pass in the street with caring about these strangers is doing so with no evidence or theory.
Successful People need Less from Others (Score:3)
Perhaps those that are on the right half of the curve just simply recognize that more often than not, that other people bring them down and have nothing to offer. Those on the left side of the curve see almost anyone as someone who can help them.
Besides the trust-funded 1% who suck at life but live in the ultra-upper class, most successful people are just more capable.
What was that? (Score:2)
Sorry, I wasn't listening.
PC Master Race vs. Console (Score:2)
Why is this on Slashdot? (Score:2)
It's been 8+ hours since this story appeared on Slashdot and I'm going to claim a "First" and ask why this story is on Slashdot and not Salon.
It's a primate thing (Score:2)
Pretty generally, among the social primates, individuals pay attention to higher status individuals.
High status individuals are the ones who might have something to offer you.
Alternately, they are the ones with the resources to attack you.
You need to keep track of where they are; what they are doing; what they are interested in; who *they* are looking at.
Just walking down the street, a rich person sees fewer richer people around him than a poor person, and thus, fewer people that he needs to pay attention t
There is a definite difference (Score:2)
At many points in my life, I've worked with all classes of people from the poor to executives. The following are absolute facts:
1. Anyone in the "very rich" class, consciously or subconsciously, does pay less attention to "normal people" -- they don't have to in their minds.
2. Anyone with any hope of becoming very rich (think upper middle class SV startup execs, etc,) will mirror-match the behavior of the target class.
The other pieces of (anecdotal) evidence I'd cite in this case would be the California exe
Sorry. (Score:2)
explains sociologists (Score:2)