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Do you ever wonder why Donald Trump seems so heartless and severe when giving “feedback” to people on The Apprentice? Sure, some of it is contrived for the TV audience, but it could be that he truly doesn’t have the ability to empathize with his poor underlings.
New research just published in Psychological Science has found evidence that people from higher-class backgrounds have lower emotional intelligence than people from lower-class backgrounds. Through a series of experiments researchers discovered that people who are less well-off were better able to read the emotions that others are feeling and scored higher on a test of empathic accuracy.
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A sample of more than 300 upper- and lower-class people was asked to interpret the emotions of people in photos and of strangers during mock job interviews. In both cases, those with more education, money and self-defined social status were significantly less able to determine if a person was angry, happy, anxious or upset as their lower-class colleagues.
It makes me wonder if richer people have lower Versatility than the rest of us. Unfortunately we don’t collect this type of data so I can’t answer the question. Besides, converting the euro, yen, pound, dollar, rupee, franc, rand, and peso into a common metric is more hassle than it’s worth!
Read an MSNBC story on this topic.
Download the Psychological Science article.
Learn more about Emotional Intelligence.