On October 5, 2013, Daniel Goleman writes in The New York Time:
Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.
These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.
A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.
Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
A first step to achieving economic justice is to acknowledge CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of productive capital wealth and to engage in a national discussion within academia, the national media, and politics. For EVERY American to be independent and financially secure it will require that EVERY citizen acquire private sector ownership, as individuals, in the FUTURE wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital asset growth of the economy using insured capital credit loans to acquire the assets with the earnings of the investments.
Republicans and Democrats, start introducing bills as part of an Ownership Act to broaden individual ownership of FUTURE wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets, and start seriously creating new owners, without taking anything away from those who already OWN America.
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement athttp://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice
Support the Capital Homestead Act athttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm andhttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm. See the full Act athttp://cesj.org/homestead/strategies/national/cha-full.pdf
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/rich-people-just-care-less/?_r=0
