Scientists have found unexpected qualities that are characteristic of the elite and the social bottom
Do you think that the rich differ from the poor only in the level of income? Then you are deeply mistaken. Scientists argue that property status affects not only the perception of the world, but even changes the physiological properties of a person. For example, as you move up the social ladder, your sensitivity to pain decreases! It sounds quite unexpected, because we are used to perceive the elite as people of pampering, and representatives of simple professions seem to us to be insensitive brutal dorks. But the scientific team of psychologists led by Professor Eileen Chow from the University of Virginia (USA) assures that in fact everything is much more complicated than the scheme that has stuck in our brain.
FILLED WALLET REPLACES ANALYZER
The impetus for the study was given by the world economic crisis of 2008. For America, it was an extremely painful test, comparable in scale to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Eileen Chow and her colleagues suggested that stress, anxiety, a sense of insecurity in the future should have affected the physical well-being of people. They pulled up data from consumer research in 2008, which reached an impressive 33,720 people. Scientists were interested in the statistics of purchases of painkillers. At the same time, an interesting feature was discovered: families where both husband and wife were left without work purchased analgesics 20% more than families where at least one of two adults worked.
“This suggests that self-doubt and the precarious financial situation can cause physical suffering,” explains Professor Chow.
In total, the scientists conducted six different studies. Among them were banal Internet polls, when participants were asked to recall how often they experienced a feeling of physical pain during times of financial difficulties and how regularly they encountered pain in prosperous periods of life (in lean years, people remembered about sores almost twice as often - ed.). But exotic experiments were also carried out. For example, Chow once divided students into two groups. Some of the children were told about the great difficulties awaiting them in the labor market after graduation. Others drew their future in rainbow colors. And then the students were offered to play a competition: who will hold their hand in the icy water longer. As a result, students, frightened by the horrors of unemployment, had a lower level of pain tolerance, and they left the game earlier. And those,to whom life was painted as a series of brilliant victories, the poor fellows easily “endured”.
“We believe that the feeling of our own financial solvency goes far beyond purely economic concepts,” explains Eileen Chow. - It relates to personal safety. Property distress leads to a feeling of insecurity, people lose control over their lives. They experience stress and anxiety, and since the same neural mechanisms are at work here that are responsible for physical pain, it is not surprising that the poor run to the pharmacy for pain relievers.
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TWITTER IS THE BEST TAX DECLARATION
Your social media profile can tell you everything about how much you earn, according to linguist Daniel Preotic-Pietro from the University of Pennsylvania.
With the help of a computer program, he analyzed 10 million messages posted on their pages by 5,191 Twitter microblog users. Those who like to exchange short messages were divided into several groups, taking into account their age, education, ethnicity, religion and social status. Then, for each group, we determined the keywords that characterize its participants (fortunately there are few words - the size of a tweet cannot exceed 140 characters), and the frequency of their use was calculated. The result is interesting data that clearly illustrates how the rich differ from the poor:
WELLNESS CITIZENS
- prevailing emotions - fear and resentment.
- discuss political and economic problems, the activities of non-profit organizations. They mostly express their own thoughts, ignore popular network "jokes".
- use social networks for professional purposes or to disseminate information. Have a lot of subscribers.
PEOPLE WITH LOW INCOME
- prevailing emotions - pretended optimism, gaiety. Obscene language is often used.
- discuss mainly personal topics (for example, how to lose weight or look beautiful) or some everyday stories. They often share "jokes", great aphorisms, wise maxims wandering in the net.
- use the social network for personal communication with friends. Have an insignificant number of subscribers.
DIRTY IS THE NORM OF LIFE
But a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona, Michael Varnum, discovered in rich people such an unsympathetic quality as callousness. He found that despite the high level of education and culture, moneybags are less able to feel empathy for the suffering of others.
Varnum was conducting an interesting experiment. To begin with, he recruited a motley team of volunteers from the elite and social base. Then the participants had to undergo a complex visual test, while in parallel the volunteers did an encephalogram of the brain. The main trick was as follows: Varnum was not at all interested in the test results, where he had to recognize and distribute hundreds of photographs into groups. This test distracted attention from the main thing: images of people with faces distorted from pain appeared on the next screen from time to time. And the encephalogram was supposed to record how the brain of the volunteers reacted to the pain of another person.
“We have found that the nervous system of people with a higher socioeconomic status does not respond significantly to the suffering of outsiders,” says Michael Varnum. - Wealthy people are focused on their own feelings and experiences, therefore they are less attentive to others.
Perhaps the loss of empathy is due to the fact that a successful person is by nature self-centered. After all, he connects life victories with individual achievements. However, the social status did not prevent Count Tolstoy from discarding the conventions inherent in people of his social circle, and plowing the land on a par with his peasants. So you shouldn't hide behind your social origin. Not only does it dictate our habits, but also personal character traits.
Yaroslav KOROBATOV