via:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... c-lot.htmlFew people have much sympathy for the rich who have lost millions in the latest share price crash.
But then a new study has revealed the wealthy are unlikely to be to bothered about those who are struggling to make ends meet.
According to psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner the rich are usually self-obsessed and only worried about their own well being.
Keltner said they were 'less empathetic, less altruistic and generally more selfish' as a result of having so much money.
He said they have an 'ideology of self interest' and more likely to think about themselves whereas those less well off were more likely to help others.
'We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behaviour in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,' he said.
'Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.'
Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, said the rich tend to stay focused on themselves.
He said wealth, education and prestige and a higher station in life gave them the freedom to only worry about themselves.
To prove his point Keltner video recorded various groups of people in conversation.
He said rich people appeared more distracted, checking mobile phones,doodling and avoiding eye contact.
Being busy makes you rude, period. I'm more interested in the survey data, though....and of course, behavior is the real indicator of beliefs and the past two decades have made things starkly clear.
via:
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2634(From Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, by Daniel Dorling. Policy Press, Bristol, 2010. Slightly reformatted for the screen.)
The five tenets of injustice are that: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable.
Because of widespread and growing opposition to the five key unjust beliefs, including the belief that so many should now be ‘losers’, most of those advocating injustice are careful with their words.
And those who believe in these tenets are the majority in power across almost all rich countries.
Although many of those who are powerful may want to make the conditions of life a little less painful for others, they do not believe that there is a cure for modern social ills, or even that a few inequalities can be much alleviated.
Rather, they believe that just a few children are sufficiently able to be fully educated and only a few of those are then able to govern; the rest must be led.
They believe that the poor will always be with us no matter how rich we are.
They have also come to believe that most others are naturally, perhaps genetically, inferior to them.
And many of this small group believe that their friends’ and their own greed is helping the rest of humanity as much as humanity can be helped; they are convinced that to argue against such a counsel of despair is foolhardy.
It is their beliefs that uphold injustice.
