The Cold Ruling Class

Some recent research (here’s the researcher, by the way) might shed some light on a lot of what happens both inside modern capitalist societies and between the West and the rest of the world–or at least on how some things are allowed to happen. Not coincidentally, the same light is shed on intra-organizational behaviours, which means this is probably something about which I will be able to have fascinating discussions with my wife.

There’s a short write-up of the research at the APS site. Here’s a bit of it:

…individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another’s suffering, compared to low-power individuals. In addition, high-power individuals’ RSA reactivity increased (as indicated by lower heart rate) as they listened to the painful stories; that is, high power participants showed more autonomic emotion regulation, which buffered against their partner’s distress.

Analysis of the participants’ final surveys (where they rated their thoughts about their partners) revealed that high-power individuals reported a weaker desire to get to know and establish a friendship with their partner. In other words, powerful people were not motivated to establish a relationship with distressed individuals. This idea is supported by the fact that the distressed participants reported less of a social connection with high-power partners compared to low-power partners. The authors suggest that powerful people’s tendency to show less compassion and distress towards others reinforces their social power.

The short write-up isn’t great, and immediately set me to worrying about correlation versus causation (e.g. maybe people who end up with “high social power” end up that way because of some other factor X which also causes them to be less prone to compassion and empathy), so I went and found the paper itselfI think you’re actually only supposed to be able to get that PDF if you’re a subscriber to the journal, since I couldn’t find a way to navigate to a page that linked to it on the journal site without logging in, but the link in Google’s search results gave it to me.. If you’re interested at all in the idea, you should give the paper a read–there’s some statistics in there, but you don’t need to be able to do the math to follow the paper. The discussion section in particular is interesting (and I was happy to see the explicitly state that “it is possible that the observed effects were due to other variables correlated with power that were not measured” in there.)

Here’s the key bit of the conclusion from the paper:

Our data suggest that social power attenuates emotional reactions to those who suffer. Higher-power participants experienced less reciprocal emotion (distress) and less complementary emotion (compassion) in response to another individual disclosing an experience of suffering, and they showed more autonomic emotion regulation as well.

So maybe the reason so much of what the people in power decide seems inhuman to me, is that being in that position of power, for one reason or another, means that they are literally incapable of the degree of compassion and empathy that I am capable of. (And, by extension, I would probably be less capable than people with less power than me.)

There’s some thinking to do about this bit of the discussion as well (I’ve edited out the citations for easier reading by non-academics):

These findings qualify the widespread idea that powerful individuals pay less attention to their social environment than do less powerful individuals. Our findings suggest that high-power people do not necessarily attend less to others; rather, they appear to be less motivated to respond to others. This conclusion is compatible with recent work on conflict indicating that high-power parties are not insensitive to their opponent’s emotions, but react selectively to these emotions when doing so can further their own goals.

I wonder also about the extent to which outsider status and “low social power” during the formative years would affect capability for compassion and empathy over a lifetime.

It also raises a bit of a question about what to do about it… but I guess we’d need to look at why, and not just what, before we could attack that.