I've tried being generous (and still donate, probably more than all my coworkers together), and I still get pissed upon by leftists. Talk about empathy.
I live in France, my parents weren't even that rich, but we strive to work hard. Being motivated by good marks at school makes you bullied because you're a krelboyne. At work, as soon as colleagues learn you've been to a private high school and top college (both of which cost <$100/month and have active policies for lower income families), people come up to you and explain all the reasons why students from good schools aren't so good at work ("They don't have the grit", they say, "They aren't street-smart" – Happened to me 4 days ago again). A lot of citizen in France think it's fine to be jealous to someone because he was good at school, comes from a good background or is Christian. It would be ok if there weren't actual discrimination from people who want to offset the supposedly "easy life" you've had: The boss who bullied me in plain sight of everyone also was the only boss who had a shorter degree than I had.
I've donated thousands to charities. I've volunteered for immigrants, kids of immigrants, I've volunteered in detention centers, I've volunteered in free events aimed at lower-income families, and with a team we went to help an orphanage abroad. I've given more than a thousand hours of volunteering in 5 years, in parallel to my studies and work. I never expected a "thank you". But a little consideration and respect from the leftists would do. But my life is still considered like a result of sheer luck, not a result of my hard work.
The problem isn't the poor: They do need help. The problem is the leftists who give lessons. There's a non-stop cliche that, since you're rich, you're an asshole. Even if you are generous and litteraly more generous than them, they won't stop the hate. This article is one of them, generalizing about "riches are assholes".
All in all, living in France, taxes are supposed to provide support for the poor. I'm tempted to leave it at that and stop donating, because I need to focus on my life now (no gf, no kids yet). But somehow I keep donating.
I have a somewhat similar background. When I was young (<18) I used to feel guilty from time to time. I mean there is no denying that I got a head start by being in a family that could support me in school, pressure me into getting an eduction, etc.
But after a while I started noticing a pattern. The people that are into shaming me are the ones that never do anything, never get involved into anything, all they do is attack others to feel better about their lack of results. Somebody who wants to change the world for the better sees an asset in me. I am smart, educated, have financial stability, I have resources to help others and it pays to have me working by their side.
So now in my middle age I laugh at these original sin proponents. White guilt, middle class guilt, born into money, cis, heterosexual, etc, just endless emotional bullshit by drama queens who never accomplished anything. I work and produce results. They just wanna tear down everything that makes them feel weak without having anything to replace it with. The freaking internet would stop without people like me and they would have no facebook and salon to bitch on.
>>There's a non-stop cliche that, since you're rich, you're an asshole.
I don't know how rich you are exactly, but in my experience, beyond a certain threshold (noticeable among upper-middle class and above), there is a strong positive correlation between wealth and assholeness - or at least traits we generally associate with assholeness.
The correlation is indirect, though. Wealth is correlated with income, which is correlated with rank (e.g. higher in the org = higher salary), which in turn is correlated with strength of personality. Assholes tend to push others aside (and take credit for everything) to get promoted, and those at the top tend to demonstrate sociopathic tendencies such as yelling at or otherwise abusing underlings, and making rules and policies that fuck over others.
There are of course exceptions, but there is little doubt in my mind that the correlation is real.
It makes sense that you feel frustrated by criticism, but you should recognise the fact that if you were poor you'd feel frustrated also. The point of there being an imbalance of opportunity ("privilege" and lack thereof) is that some people benefit from it and others are taken advantage of.
It's only reasonable to expect that the ones who are taken advantage of will feel frustrated, regardless of any acts of redress offered as a compensation from those who benefit form the imbalance.
>> The problem isn't the poor: They do need help.
I don't think that's the problem. I think the real problem is that in a society that values material wealth above all else, everybody wants to have more of it in order to be valued as a human being.
So the poor want to become rich and the rich want to become richer. You can't fix that with donations, unless you and everyone else who is some level of rich share your entire fortunes with everyone else... or unless the entire financial system changes radically and fundamentally (which will happen around the same time as pigs grow wings and fly away).
>> The boss who bullied me in plain sight of everyone
I mean, I don't think you sound that rich even (not 30+ meter sailing yacht rich, say). It is definitely unacceptable for people to treat you badly, for whatever reason, not to mention your income. On the other hand, if you were that rich you wouldn't have to put up with them in the first place, so that's doubly wrong.
When you buy a BMW, you have an extra asshole installed.
/snark
But seriously, in my early 20s I did land surveying. I found that the richer the neighborhood, the nastier the neighbors were. I've had people be rude to me because they think "something is up" when we were simply trying to document how one neighbor can buy 6 inches from another to make a legal setback for a garage. And then I've had just random people offer me coffee on a chilly morning. I'll let you guess which was the upscale and which was the working class neighborhood.
There is also a big difference between old money and new money. And hard-earned money vs. inherited money.
My dad used to deliver furniture as a side job for a local upholstery shop. Most of the clients had money, but some were rude while others (esp. the "old hard earned money" types) were extremely friendly.
> Americans gave nearly $1 billion more to the approximately 3,000 victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks than they gave to victims of the South Asian tsunami three years later, even though the latter tragedy killed more than a quarter of a million people
Does anyone else find this conclusion unfair? I am not trying to down play what happened in Asia but American's uniting for their country isn't able to be compared to American's supporting crisis in other parts of the world. I suspect their conclusion is true but suggesting American's give less because of how much they donated to 9/11 versus a storm on the other side of the world isn't a fair comparison.
Objectively, a tragedy that killed 83 times as many people is deserving of at least the same funding as a local tragedy, I would hope.
That said, locality bias is a strong thing, and to some degree what makes us human. I don't find it to be critical, merely descriptive of the way people work.
Talk about stereotyping! This headline is no better than "how can you tell if someone is a criminal? Look at their skin colour".
Correlations in large populations do not mean that every individual shares the identified characteristics. I find it absolutely shocking that a paper at the level of the Washington Post would publish such drivel.
Socioeconomic status is an important factor in how we behave. The argument here is that people with more money are less kind because having more money makes them less kind. Unless you're making a specific argument were someones skin color is the prime factor in making someone more criminal that statement isn't factually correct. So no, it's not the same thing, but your frequent rhetorical outrage is noted.
It's exactly a stereotype. AKA weak bayesian evidence for a characteristic based on other, easier to measure, characteristics.
EDIT: I thought the result was going to be exactly the opposite before I made this comment. My first impulse was to go and delete it. I'll leave figuring out implications of such biases in reasoning as an exercise to the reader :(
I'd wait for a bunch of other studies that back this up, or fail to.
The trouble is that there may be loads of studies that find the opposite, but they are more likely to be stuffed in a file drawer somewhere because they contradict what we'd like to believe is true.
In my area, in the fun, dirty and gritty part of the city is where there are dive bars, vape shops and crazy little variety stores and head shops, you have to have your head on a swivel when crossing the road to not be sideswiped by some rusted out Geo or Nissan with the tailpipe being held up by a coat hanger.
On the flip side, in our most affluent immediate suburb, people give you right of way constantly. Everyone stops for pedestrians, even if they had plenty of time to go anyway. I mean they are almost religious about it.
I don't know about driving offenses, but we can quantify other harmful behaviors. The poor are far more likely than the rich to deliberately do things that harm others - rob them, engage in violence, etc.
Economic motivation for crime is a possible confounder. But we can eliminate that confounder by examining crimes with no plausible economic motive: intimate partner violence, assaulting family members, rape. Poor people engage in these crimes at 4x the rates of others.
(Another interesting fact - contra Trump - is that poor Hispanics seem far less criminal than poor whites/blacks. This also contradicts popular left wing narratives - if poverty makes poor whites/blacks beat their wives via "stressors" or other mysterious phlogiston, why are Hispanics immune?)
"But it is beginning to seem that the problem isn’t that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: It triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains."
Empathy does not seem to be an involuntary ability like eyesight or smell. We smell regardless of the circumstances, but empathy can be keen or absent. Empathy for someone seems to come naturally to the extent that they can be helpful or loyal to us, and it requires discipline to extend our empathy to those who are useless or opposed to us.
It is interesting that the ability for someone to be a powerful force in our lives does not naturally elicit empathy for them. It suggests that we suppress empathy when we anticipate the need to act aggressively towards someone. Empathy for our enemies could be very valuable except that it might make us hesitate to hurt or kill them. We can see this in the U.S. elections right now, when both sides encourage us to believe that the motivations of the other side's voters are either inscrutable or malevolent.
Empathy isn't a sense, it's derivative from the senses and works by analogy with one's self. When what you sense from others seems similar to what you imagine others sense from you, by analogy you imagine that they have a similar inner life to you. The more difference from how you imagine that others would sense you, the more different you imagine their inner life to be from yours. When you see them to be similar to you, but more perfect in your opinion, you imagine that their inner life is more perfected than yours. If you see them as less contrived; less put together, you see their thought process as more honest, or more grounded than yours. If you see them as dirty or sloppy, you imagine their thoughts to be more perverse or more slipshod. If their movements or speech are slower than yours, you imagine them to be more stupid or more careful than you are.
It's the search for souls in other people, required to decide whether they feel pain in the same way that you do. You can never confirm that other people have souls and feel pain, it's a leap of faith that you have to make - what Hobbes would call a covenant - a unilateral agreement that you make with others without their participation in the hope that your good faith will lead them to reciprocate.
It's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise.
For an interesting contrast, see Who Really Gives?
Partisanship and Charitable Giving in the United States, by two political scientists at MIT [1]. The results there surprised me, for example, there is a positive correlation between the states that voted for Bush in 2004 and charitable giving.
Also from the conclusion "Although previous research indicates that conservatism is a reliable proxy for identifying potential donors or donor communities, our results suggest that organizations would be better off simply targeting wealthier donors, regardless of political beliefs."
As this paper and others describe, the difference is almost entirely attributable to giving to religious causes, most notably the local church. I'm not going to say it's not charity to give to a thing that's a charity, but if the cause is evangelizing Christianity, then that's not the same as giving some poor kid food and education. Of course, the whole thing is confounded by the fact that the guy evangelizing is often also providing food and education, but without knowing the percentages it's hard to see if the numbers still line up when you subtract that cost.
The rich person: "What's $5 for a tip? It's nothing, so why bother."
The poor person: "$5? That's a lot, and I can afford it, so let me give it."
Basically rich people value money less, and it doesn't occur to them that giving small amounts can still help people. And obviously it's not the custom to give large amounts as a tip.
Rich people value money more, and compared to them, depending on how rich they are, effectively everyone needs it more. And they know if they start giving money away to everyone that needs it more they'll run out of it pretty quickly.
Poor people don't realize the predicament they're in and give away their money because they think someone needs it more, yet they're at a very high risk of becoming someone who cannot live independently and then needs to go find another source of charity to support them. This does not scale well. I understand why it happens but it's not something we should be raising to a level of sainthood.
The need for charity is a symptom of a dysfunctional social system and people falling through the cracks. There shouldn't be any mothers earning 19k in the first place. Giving them $5 doesn't fix anything, because you know there are a few million more of them and when you really want to change things it's really not enough and you need to attack it at the higher level.
The title of this piece seems misleading to me, and an example of how many people misunderstand statistics. I haven't seen any of the studies referred to, but I'm sure they don't establish a connection between wealth and empathy as strong as the one suggested. More likely, they show that rich people, on average, tend to have less empathy than less-rich people. But surely some very rich people have great empathy and some very poor people have very little empathy. And all combinations in between, even if, on average, greater wealth tends to correlate with less empathy.
The point above, I'm sure, is obvious to most people reading HN. But certainly not to everyone, especially people with poor understanding of statistics. So it bothers me that the title seems calculated to increase the likelihood of misunderstanding. Okay, rant over.
There seems to be a glaring problem in statistics in general that large scale statistics may completely hide small group effects. I.e., if there is something that really benefits from X for 5%, but doesn't benefit from X for 95%, statistics will make it look like it doesn't benefit anybody. Yet that 5% group may absolutely be relevant. This always sits in the back of my head when I read things like: "Children are not influenced by their parents but by their peers", or "twin study proves this".
But I haven't seen this discussed much or brought up, even though it sounds a lot like what you're saying. Is this relevant? Is there a name for this? Is there some reason as to why I shouldn't worry about this that I'm missing?
The whole concept of tipping is broken and needs to be done away with. The restaurant in the story should be charging the customers more than $11, so that it can pay its staff properly.
Not sure why you were downvoted, but some states allow paying wait staff less than minimum wage. What most needs to change is not allowing sub-minimum wage jobs subsidized by tips.
For people who live in California, FYI, wait staff is required to be paid minimum wage, which can not have tips counted against it.
I like tipping. When I have great service, I tip 25%+. When it's terrible I have two times tipped zero. Employers must pay minimum wage. If a tipped employee isn't being made up their wages up to the minimum I will (and have) happily supported their contacting the appropriate authorities.
European service, in contrast, is terrible. I've similarly found myself avoiding no-tip restaurants in New York - their service is noticeably worse.
And why wouldn't it be? If you are a good server, you pull a multiple of the minimum wage. Only your inferiors would prefer a guaranteed lower tier. Hence, self selection.
I have a pet theory that restaurants are implicitly subsidised by everyone. Here's the prospective chain:
* Restaurant pays servers minimum wage
* Servers make more than that via tips
* Servers do not report tips (maybe past some threshold, let's say min wage) on taxes since they receive them in cash
* Restaurant pays payroll taxes on minimum wage, servers pay income tax on minimum wage
* The remainder that the server keeps and the lowered payroll tax comprise the subsidy.
If the restaurant had to keep server pay constant, it has to compensate for the tips and the income tax on the tips, and it has to pay increased payroll tax on the rest. Not doing this is highly advantageous to every party here except the taxpayer. And the taxpayer doesn't care about the few microcents on the dollar.
I still tip because that's just how things work here, of course.
It's only natural to feel more empathy for people in situations we've been in, but this isn't the entirety of morality. I've never been a cow but I go out of my way to avoid causing suffering to cows and other animals.
Rich people haven't necessarily experienced much hardship, so they need to have a more abstract kind of empathy, but this doesn't make them worse people. Indeed, if a rich person felt that had done enough by paying taxes, I wouldn't blame them. From a utilitarian perspective, I would rather have another person who pays $100,000 in taxes and gives $0 to charity than someone who pays $20,000 in taxes and gives $1,000 to charity.
I would be suspicious of the correlation was really so straight. There are a lot of complicated factors around why one might be nice or not nice and in my experience it hasn't been anywhere near this simple.
As an example, people who had hard lives often become hard themselves, and that may make their conduct worse. People in countries where things are not going well are not exactly super duper nice. People also tend to treat different people differently, so they may be nice to one group and not nice at all to another group. People may especially be not nice to a group if they perceive that group as a threat.
A lot of the definitions here seem rather tailored. Giving large tips is not really the information I'd use to determine whether or not someone was nice, especially since this gets layered on top of social signaling in a specific culture. Generally, things like giving money, donating to charity, etc., may be viewed as shallow level contributions by the rich and they'd rather do something they perceive as more significant, such as lobbying or starting a company.
Some of this reminds me a bit of accusing meat eaters of animal cruelty. Meat eaters didn't invent it, even if they're receptors of the end product. There are some meat eaters that promote animal cruelty directly, though, and there are also systems that promote it, and those should be the subject of scorn.
I'm sure there are empathy gaps because people don't share experiences. But a person is not evil if they simply don't support those less fortunate, or if they don't understand them. That's just an empathy gap, and people are generally quite bad at relating to experiences they don't have in general, in both directions. A person needs to actually be doing bad things to be classified as bad.
Breezing through life without life changing adversity gives little opportunity for self reflection and contemplation unless one happens to be interested in problems beyond one's own.
And if the thinking of 'us and them' takes hold whether in the rich, poor or other groupings there is always dehumanization, reductionism, blame and sociopathy.
Those in adversity or have faced adversity will identify with others and may need or have received the help of other people leading to some kind of mutual empathy.
The article provides ~12 examples of how rich people are less generous. It proxies "rich people" with parameters such as nicer neighbourhoods. It shows that proximity to the victims creates more empathy (e.g. 9\11 victims vs Tsunami victims, or experience being a waiter, etc) and gives it as a reason for the rich people being less empathetic towards poor.
I was having this problem, but it turns out my ad blocker (uBlock Origin) had the "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek" filter disabled. Turning that on fixed the problem!
tldr; studies show that when presented with images of money, people were less likely to pick up pens or donate to a hypothetical charity.
I think another aspect might play a role: when you're well-off, but not obscenely rich, you're probably risk-averse. You don't want to end up in the lower-class, dependent on other peoples' charity, so you're holding your money together.
When you're already within reach of that you're more likely top end up there, but the difference isn't as stark.
[+] [-] tajen|9 years ago|reply
I live in France, my parents weren't even that rich, but we strive to work hard. Being motivated by good marks at school makes you bullied because you're a krelboyne. At work, as soon as colleagues learn you've been to a private high school and top college (both of which cost <$100/month and have active policies for lower income families), people come up to you and explain all the reasons why students from good schools aren't so good at work ("They don't have the grit", they say, "They aren't street-smart" – Happened to me 4 days ago again). A lot of citizen in France think it's fine to be jealous to someone because he was good at school, comes from a good background or is Christian. It would be ok if there weren't actual discrimination from people who want to offset the supposedly "easy life" you've had: The boss who bullied me in plain sight of everyone also was the only boss who had a shorter degree than I had.
I've donated thousands to charities. I've volunteered for immigrants, kids of immigrants, I've volunteered in detention centers, I've volunteered in free events aimed at lower-income families, and with a team we went to help an orphanage abroad. I've given more than a thousand hours of volunteering in 5 years, in parallel to my studies and work. I never expected a "thank you". But a little consideration and respect from the leftists would do. But my life is still considered like a result of sheer luck, not a result of my hard work.
The problem isn't the poor: They do need help. The problem is the leftists who give lessons. There's a non-stop cliche that, since you're rich, you're an asshole. Even if you are generous and litteraly more generous than them, they won't stop the hate. This article is one of them, generalizing about "riches are assholes".
All in all, living in France, taxes are supposed to provide support for the poor. I'm tempted to leave it at that and stop donating, because I need to focus on my life now (no gf, no kids yet). But somehow I keep donating.
[+] [-] trabant00|9 years ago|reply
But after a while I started noticing a pattern. The people that are into shaming me are the ones that never do anything, never get involved into anything, all they do is attack others to feel better about their lack of results. Somebody who wants to change the world for the better sees an asset in me. I am smart, educated, have financial stability, I have resources to help others and it pays to have me working by their side.
So now in my middle age I laugh at these original sin proponents. White guilt, middle class guilt, born into money, cis, heterosexual, etc, just endless emotional bullshit by drama queens who never accomplished anything. I work and produce results. They just wanna tear down everything that makes them feel weak without having anything to replace it with. The freaking internet would stop without people like me and they would have no facebook and salon to bitch on.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|9 years ago|reply
I don't know how rich you are exactly, but in my experience, beyond a certain threshold (noticeable among upper-middle class and above), there is a strong positive correlation between wealth and assholeness - or at least traits we generally associate with assholeness.
The correlation is indirect, though. Wealth is correlated with income, which is correlated with rank (e.g. higher in the org = higher salary), which in turn is correlated with strength of personality. Assholes tend to push others aside (and take credit for everything) to get promoted, and those at the top tend to demonstrate sociopathic tendencies such as yelling at or otherwise abusing underlings, and making rules and policies that fuck over others.
There are of course exceptions, but there is little doubt in my mind that the correlation is real.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|9 years ago|reply
It's only reasonable to expect that the ones who are taken advantage of will feel frustrated, regardless of any acts of redress offered as a compensation from those who benefit form the imbalance.
>> The problem isn't the poor: They do need help.
I don't think that's the problem. I think the real problem is that in a society that values material wealth above all else, everybody wants to have more of it in order to be valued as a human being.
So the poor want to become rich and the rich want to become richer. You can't fix that with donations, unless you and everyone else who is some level of rich share your entire fortunes with everyone else... or unless the entire financial system changes radically and fundamentally (which will happen around the same time as pigs grow wings and fly away).
>> The boss who bullied me in plain sight of everyone
I mean, I don't think you sound that rich even (not 30+ meter sailing yacht rich, say). It is definitely unacceptable for people to treat you badly, for whatever reason, not to mention your income. On the other hand, if you were that rich you wouldn't have to put up with them in the first place, so that's doubly wrong.
[+] [-] ionised|9 years ago|reply
That doesn't help anybody.
[+] [-] bubo_bubo|9 years ago|reply
/snark
But seriously, in my early 20s I did land surveying. I found that the richer the neighborhood, the nastier the neighbors were. I've had people be rude to me because they think "something is up" when we were simply trying to document how one neighbor can buy 6 inches from another to make a legal setback for a garage. And then I've had just random people offer me coffee on a chilly morning. I'll let you guess which was the upscale and which was the working class neighborhood.
[+] [-] derekp7|9 years ago|reply
My dad used to deliver furniture as a side job for a local upholstery shop. Most of the clients had money, but some were rude while others (esp. the "old hard earned money" types) were extremely friendly.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] notyourwork|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone else find this conclusion unfair? I am not trying to down play what happened in Asia but American's uniting for their country isn't able to be compared to American's supporting crisis in other parts of the world. I suspect their conclusion is true but suggesting American's give less because of how much they donated to 9/11 versus a storm on the other side of the world isn't a fair comparison.
[+] [-] foofoo55|9 years ago|reply
> We give more easily to the people and causes we see
All she is saying is that the amount of giving is correlated to the proximity, which you seem to agree with. It's just a statement, not a judgement.
[+] [-] jaggederest|9 years ago|reply
That said, locality bias is a strong thing, and to some degree what makes us human. I don't find it to be critical, merely descriptive of the way people work.
[+] [-] briandear|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cperciva|9 years ago|reply
Correlations in large populations do not mean that every individual shares the identified characteristics. I find it absolutely shocking that a paper at the level of the Washington Post would publish such drivel.
[+] [-] uola|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhaps0dy|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: I thought the result was going to be exactly the opposite before I made this comment. My first impulse was to go and delete it. I'll leave figuring out implications of such biases in reasoning as an exercise to the reader :(
[+] [-] musha68k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldmanjay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adiabatty|9 years ago|reply
The trouble is that there may be loads of studies that find the opposite, but they are more likely to be stuffed in a file drawer somewhere because they contradict what we'd like to believe is true.
[+] [-] thekevan|9 years ago|reply
In my area, in the fun, dirty and gritty part of the city is where there are dive bars, vape shops and crazy little variety stores and head shops, you have to have your head on a swivel when crossing the road to not be sideswiped by some rusted out Geo or Nissan with the tailpipe being held up by a coat hanger.
On the flip side, in our most affluent immediate suburb, people give you right of way constantly. Everyone stops for pedestrians, even if they had plenty of time to go anyway. I mean they are almost religious about it.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|9 years ago|reply
Economic motivation for crime is a possible confounder. But we can eliminate that confounder by examining crimes with no plausible economic motive: intimate partner violence, assaulting family members, rape. Poor people engage in these crimes at 4x the rates of others.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf
(Another interesting fact - contra Trump - is that poor Hispanics seem far less criminal than poor whites/blacks. This also contradicts popular left wing narratives - if poverty makes poor whites/blacks beat their wives via "stressors" or other mysterious phlogiston, why are Hispanics immune?)
[+] [-] imgabe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
People are nicer to you if you're a jerk (I say this from my personal experience having being both a nice guy and a jerk).
No one respects nice people.
Nice people don't get promoted, they don't get funding, they just don't get invited places.
[+] [-] rifung|9 years ago|reply
"But it is beginning to seem that the problem isn’t that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: It triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains."
[+] [-] gjolund|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|9 years ago|reply
It is interesting that the ability for someone to be a powerful force in our lives does not naturally elicit empathy for them. It suggests that we suppress empathy when we anticipate the need to act aggressively towards someone. Empathy for our enemies could be very valuable except that it might make us hesitate to hurt or kill them. We can see this in the U.S. elections right now, when both sides encourage us to believe that the motivations of the other side's voters are either inscrutable or malevolent.
[+] [-] pessimizer|9 years ago|reply
It's the search for souls in other people, required to decide whether they feel pain in the same way that you do. You can never confirm that other people have souls and feel pain, it's a leap of faith that you have to make - what Hobbes would call a covenant - a unilateral agreement that you make with others without their participation in the hope that your good faith will lead them to reciprocate.
It's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise.
[+] [-] bubo_bubo|9 years ago|reply
But my wife has accused me of selective hearing...
/rimshot
I'm here all week. Try the veal.
[+] [-] todd8|9 years ago|reply
Also from the conclusion "Although previous research indicates that conservatism is a reliable proxy for identifying potential donors or donor communities, our results suggest that organizations would be better off simply targeting wealthier donors, regardless of political beliefs."
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1100...
[+] [-] arjie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|9 years ago|reply
The rich person: "What's $5 for a tip? It's nothing, so why bother."
The poor person: "$5? That's a lot, and I can afford it, so let me give it."
Basically rich people value money less, and it doesn't occur to them that giving small amounts can still help people. And obviously it's not the custom to give large amounts as a tip.
[+] [-] projektir|9 years ago|reply
Poor people don't realize the predicament they're in and give away their money because they think someone needs it more, yet they're at a very high risk of becoming someone who cannot live independently and then needs to go find another source of charity to support them. This does not scale well. I understand why it happens but it's not something we should be raising to a level of sainthood.
The need for charity is a symptom of a dysfunctional social system and people falling through the cracks. There shouldn't be any mothers earning 19k in the first place. Giving them $5 doesn't fix anything, because you know there are a few million more of them and when you really want to change things it's really not enough and you need to attack it at the higher level.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsitz|9 years ago|reply
The point above, I'm sure, is obvious to most people reading HN. But certainly not to everyone, especially people with poor understanding of statistics. So it bothers me that the title seems calculated to increase the likelihood of misunderstanding. Okay, rant over.
[+] [-] projektir|9 years ago|reply
But I haven't seen this discussed much or brought up, even though it sounds a lot like what you're saying. Is this relevant? Is there a name for this? Is there some reason as to why I shouldn't worry about this that I'm missing?
[+] [-] hossbeast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ac29|9 years ago|reply
For people who live in California, FYI, wait staff is required to be paid minimum wage, which can not have tips counted against it.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|9 years ago|reply
European service, in contrast, is terrible. I've similarly found myself avoiding no-tip restaurants in New York - their service is noticeably worse.
And why wouldn't it be? If you are a good server, you pull a multiple of the minimum wage. Only your inferiors would prefer a guaranteed lower tier. Hence, self selection.
[+] [-] arjie|9 years ago|reply
* Restaurant pays servers minimum wage
* Servers make more than that via tips
* Servers do not report tips (maybe past some threshold, let's say min wage) on taxes since they receive them in cash
* Restaurant pays payroll taxes on minimum wage, servers pay income tax on minimum wage
* The remainder that the server keeps and the lowered payroll tax comprise the subsidy.
If the restaurant had to keep server pay constant, it has to compensate for the tips and the income tax on the tips, and it has to pay increased payroll tax on the rest. Not doing this is highly advantageous to every party here except the taxpayer. And the taxpayer doesn't care about the few microcents on the dollar.
I still tip because that's just how things work here, of course.
[+] [-] danieltillett|9 years ago|reply
Tipping needs to die.
[+] [-] code_sardaukar|9 years ago|reply
Rich people haven't necessarily experienced much hardship, so they need to have a more abstract kind of empathy, but this doesn't make them worse people. Indeed, if a rich person felt that had done enough by paying taxes, I wouldn't blame them. From a utilitarian perspective, I would rather have another person who pays $100,000 in taxes and gives $0 to charity than someone who pays $20,000 in taxes and gives $1,000 to charity.
[+] [-] projektir|9 years ago|reply
As an example, people who had hard lives often become hard themselves, and that may make their conduct worse. People in countries where things are not going well are not exactly super duper nice. People also tend to treat different people differently, so they may be nice to one group and not nice at all to another group. People may especially be not nice to a group if they perceive that group as a threat.
A lot of the definitions here seem rather tailored. Giving large tips is not really the information I'd use to determine whether or not someone was nice, especially since this gets layered on top of social signaling in a specific culture. Generally, things like giving money, donating to charity, etc., may be viewed as shallow level contributions by the rich and they'd rather do something they perceive as more significant, such as lobbying or starting a company.
Some of this reminds me a bit of accusing meat eaters of animal cruelty. Meat eaters didn't invent it, even if they're receptors of the end product. There are some meat eaters that promote animal cruelty directly, though, and there are also systems that promote it, and those should be the subject of scorn.
I'm sure there are empathy gaps because people don't share experiences. But a person is not evil if they simply don't support those less fortunate, or if they don't understand them. That's just an empathy gap, and people are generally quite bad at relating to experiences they don't have in general, in both directions. A person needs to actually be doing bad things to be classified as bad.
[+] [-] lucio|9 years ago|reply
Any article claiming all $x are (not nice|$y) will be marked as classist|sexist|racist.
Let's talk about double-standards.
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
And if the thinking of 'us and them' takes hold whether in the rich, poor or other groupings there is always dehumanization, reductionism, blame and sociopathy.
Those in adversity or have faced adversity will identify with others and may need or have received the help of other people leading to some kind of mutual empathy.
[+] [-] bachmeier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tajen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosstex|9 years ago|reply
tldr; studies show that when presented with images of money, people were less likely to pick up pens or donate to a hypothetical charity.
[+] [-] Tomte|9 years ago|reply
When you're already within reach of that you're more likely top end up there, but the difference isn't as stark.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Mz|9 years ago|reply