Why The Rich Are Meaner Than The Poor

Ally Fogg comments in The Guardian:

So Messrs Maude, Hunt and Willetts think "it's startling that the richest third of donors in Britain give less, as a proportion of their income, to charity than the poorest third." I suppose the Tory doyens have been a bit busy of late to be browsing the current psychology journals, but had they done so, they might not have been quite so surprised.

Michael W Kraus, of the University of California, San Francisco, is one of a number of social psychologists who have recently been busy demonstrating that lower socioeconomic status (SES) is intricately linked to all sorts of prosocial behaviours. Everything else equal, the less wealth, education and employment status we have, the more charitable, generous, trusting and helpful we appear to become. In interactions with strangers, poorer people are more likely to use polite, attentive, respectful gestures. Most recently, in a paper just published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, Kraus et al report that lower SES subjects show significantly greater empathy than their richer, better educated counterparts. He argues that this tendency to empathise may at least partly explain the other observations of prosocial behaviour.

The tests used in the latest experiments recorded subjects' ability to read emotions in the faces of others, which is considered a reliable signifier of broader empathic skills. As expected, using both pictures and human interactions, SES was inversely correlated with empathic accuracy. Empathic emotions are central to compassionate and prosocial tendencies, and Kraus argues that these cognitive processes are necessary for survival; human beings who find themselves in a high-status position are more likely to believe that they can control their own destinies, able to use their power, authority or wealth independently to keep themselves safe and secure. Those further down the social pecking order are more vulnerable, and so more likely to need to co-operate to survive.

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