Does Emotional Intelligence (EQ), Empathy and Compassion Decline Among the Wealthy?
It’s only in recent years have researchers examined the emotional states of those individuals who would be deemed as wealthy or having high socioeconomic status.
Several recent studies have shed more light on this issue, and found that the emotional intelligence of wealthy people does indeed decline or is considerably less than those with lower economic status.
Anita Schmalor and Steven J. Heine published a study in Social Psychological and Personality Science, in which they conclude that those with high socioeconomic status read the emotions of others poorly and when people experience economic inequality, they develop a more competitive mindset and, as a result, their emotional intelligence decreases.
University of British Columbia psychologist Heine, one of the authors of the study, says: “There’s more to gain and more to lose when there’s more inequality; people become more self-focused.” He argues that when resources for lower economic classes shrink and competition for success increases, so does a more self-serving behavior. “What we find is when people see more economic inequality, that makes them behave more like wealthier people,” he says.
Heine says that “economic inequality has been increasing in many countries around the world, especially in the United States. When there’s more inequality, people become less interested in each other,” Heine says. This leads to more criminal behavior, more corruption, more people willing to cut corners and cheat, he says. “All these situations have been found to occur when people are a little more selfish and self-focused,” he says, and “more competitive and less attentive to their fellow citizens.” Heine and Schmalor argue that one of the reasons countries with lower inequality experience (eg: Norway, Denmark, Finland) fewer societal problems may be that the people in those countries are more concerned about the welfare and to the struggles of others.
The Connection between EQ and Success
“The relationship between success and emotional intelligence is fairly weak and this is probably due to a lot of factors,” Michael Kraus, a social psychologist at the Yale School of Management and colleagues Stephane Cote and Dacher Keltner concluded in his study published in Psychological Science His study showed lower-income people scored better than higher-income people in three separate tests measuring empathy, accurately judging the emotions of another person with whom they’re interacting and accurately reading emotions based on photos of people’s eyes.
A 2016 study by Pia Dietze, and Eric D. Knowles, published in Psychological Science, wealthy people can afford to be more self-sufficient and independent, whereas people in lower economic strata don’t have or have access to material resources to make their lives better and therefore are more dependent on others and government institutions to help them. The authors argue that growing up, these people are far more able and motivated to read the facial expressions and emotions of others.
Dietze and Knowles determined that allowing study participants to self-identify their socioeconomic status produced consistent results. When research subjects self-identify as poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class or upper class, her January 2021 study in Social Psychological and Personality Science found, those from the two lower classes showed greater emotional intelligence, and those at the highest levels showed the least, with a stark line between working-class participants and middle-class participants. The biggest difference was between those whose parents had not attended college and those whose parents had college degrees, Dietze says.
In poor and working-class families, people tend to pay attention to others because other people can be more threatening or have more control over one’s work environment, she says. “If you think of social caste, it’s not only about money, but how you grew up, what you were taught, what your parents thought about the world,” Dietze says. “Upper-class people have the resources and money to be independent and follow their goals.”
Michael Kraus’s studies published in 2009 Psychological Science and in Psychological Science in 2010 demonstrated that wealthy people are generally less engaged with others, and pay less attention to nonverbal cues when judging others’ emotions and perceive others’ emotions poorly. Kraus says, “Put simply, other people’s feelings have less influence on your outcomes, which are more under your own control. So, this can lead to either an intentional ignorance of others’ mental states or, over time, a lack of practice with them.”
Kraus and his colleagues found those with lower economic status were more concerned about the suffering of strangers, according to their 2012 study published by the American Psychological Association. In one of three studies conducted to measure concern for others, while watching a video designed to induce compassion, lower-class participants’ heart rates slowed — a physiological response that signals engagement with others.
Is Capitalism the True Culprit?
Kraus says “particularly with how capitalism structures society, [when] being really rich requires a measure of not caring about someone else.” “Maybe it is the warehouse worker fulfilling Christmas shipping orders or communities in Africa devastated by the mining of cobalt and other raw materials for batteries that we use for electric vehicles. To accumulate wealth requires paying less attention to the suffering experienced by those that are exploited by that accumulation.”
Significant Wealth Makes People Less Empathetic and Compassionate
According to researcher Jennifer Stellar, lead author at the University of California-Berkeley, people who grew up in economically comfortable circumstances are less attuned to the suffering of other people. In multiple trials that involved both questionnaires and physical-response tests, the researchers found that young adults whose upbringing involved some degree of financial struggle were quicker and more likely to register signs of empathy than young adults who came from affluent backgrounds.
While some wealthy people have defended themselves as merely embodying the ideals of American capitalism — a system where, the argument goes, anyone can make it to the top if they’re willing to work hard — many critics have offered a less flattering theory: that the rich, as a class, simply aren’t concerned with the well-being of anyone else.
The findings of the UC Berkeley team seem to suggest that this might be true, though the researchers make a point of saying it’s likely the result of inexperience on the part of the rich, not necessarily malice.
“It’s not that the upper classes are cold-hearted,” Jennifer Stellaris quoted as saying in a press release. “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.”
Psychologist Dacher Keltner, has published at least twice before on the correlation between economic struggle and empathetic response.
Keltner, Stephane Cote and Michael Kraus published their research in Psychological Science that found that wealthy people had greater difficulty reading facial expressions. Keltner and others argued that financial security seems to be associated with an impulse to think about oneself more than others — and that a dozen separate studies had produced the same implication.
But the relationship between wealth and compassion may work both ways. In 2005, a study from the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, goes one step further. The research, led by forensics expert Pascal Scherrer and prison administrator Thomas Noll, finds that professional stock traders actually outperform diagnosed psychopaths when it comes to competitive and risk-taking behavior. The researchers found that if a stock trader suffers from some kind of emotional impairment — that is, brain damage that prevents them from fully experiencing their own emotions — it may allow them to make more profit on the market, since they can make decisions based more firmly in rationalism.
Keltner, is his published study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology also said “ Wealthy people give more money to charity because they have more money to give. But studies show that middle-class and poorer people give higher proportions of their money to charity. In our own research, when we’ve given volunteers of different income levels just $10 they could share with a stranger, lower income people gave more. By now, we’ve done several studies that look at how your wealth, education, and prestige of your career or family predict generosity. And the results are consistent: poorer people assist other people more than wealthy people.”
In an article in Scientific American, Daisy Grewal, a psychologist at Yale University, states “ Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal — the poor person or the rich one? It’s tempting to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.”
Political scientists such as Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens have found notable differences in the policy preferences of affluent versus middle-class Americans, not only on purely economic matters like taxation but also on public-education funding, racial equity, and environmental protections, all of which the rich have been significantly less likely to support. This matters because of the influence the rich have over government officials. In one study, Gilens, combed through thousands of public survey responses and discovered that, on issues where the views of wealthy voters diverged significantly from those of the rest of the populace, the policies ultimately put in place “strongly” reflected the desires of the most affluent respondents — the top-earning 10 percent. Those policies, the study concluded, bore “virtually no relationship to the preferences” of poorer Americans.
Raymond Fisman, a behavioral economist at Boston University, has found that the elite — regardless of political affiliation — tend to be “efficiency minded” as opposed to “equality minded.”
The psychologists Kraus and Keltner have found that people who rank themselves at the top of the social scale are significantly more likely to endorse essentialism, the notion that group characteristics are immutable and biologically determined — precisely the sort of beliefs used to justify the mistreatment of low-status groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities. Countless studies, Kraus writes, point to an upper-class tendency toward “self-preservation.” That is, people who view themselves as superior in education, occupation, and assets are inclined to protect their group’s status at the expense of groups they deem less deserving: “These findings should call into question any beliefs in noblesse oblige — elevated rank does not appear to obligate wealthy individuals to do good for the benefit of society.”
