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The Secret Ingredient of Compassion

ALISON GOPNIK

 

 

 




Last week I saw the great Canadian actor Colm Feore brilliantly play King Lear.

In one of the most heart-wrenching scenes, Lear, the arrogant, all-powerful king, humiliated by his daughters, faces the fury of the storm on the heath. Yet he thinks not about himself but the “poor naked wretches” whose “houseless heads and unfed sides” he has ignored before.

Oh I have ta’en too little care of this!
Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just
.”

As usual, Shakespeare’s psychology was uncannily accurate.

You might think that losing status would make us more selfish. But, in fact, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ("PNAS") by Ana Guinote at University College London and colleagues shows just the opposite.

When people feel that they are more powerful, they are less likely to help others; when they “feel what wretches feel,” they become more altruistic.

In the new paper, the researchers artificially manipulated how people felt about their place in the pecking order. They randomly told some students that their department was one of the best in the university and told others that it was one of the worst.

At the very end of the session, allegedly after the experiment was over, the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a box full of pens on the floor. The researchers recorded how many pens the students picked up and handed back. The students whose departmental pride had been squashed picked up more pens than the top dogs.

In another study included in the paper, the experimenters manipulated status temporarily in a similar way and asked the students about their values and life goals. The low-status students talked about altruistic goals, such as helping others, more than the high-status students did.

In a third study, the experimenters randomly told the students that they belonged to a group who had scored high or low on an arbitrary test. Then the students had a discussion with a group of other students about how to pick an apartment and a roommate. Independent coders analyzed their behavior (the coders didn’t know about the status manipulation).

The “low-status” students displayed more signals of niceness and cooperation: They smiled more and acted more warmly and empathically toward the other person. The “high-status” students were more focused on displaying their own competence and knowledge.

The researchers even got similar results with children age 4 and 5. They were asked to share stickers with another child. The more dominant the children were, the less they shared.

Why would this happen?

Dr. Guinote and her colleagues suggest that, in a hierarchical group, low-status people have to use other strategies to accomplish their goals. Mutual helpfulness, cooperation and altruism are ways to counteract the simpler and more obvious advantages of wealth and rank.

You can even see this in chimpanzees. If several lower-ranked chimps get together, they can overturn even the most impressive alpha male.

What’s interesting is that nothing about the students made them intrinsically nice or mean -- the only difference was their brief, immediate experience of high or low status. But these results may help to explain the results of other studies showing that people with more wealth or rank or power are less helpful, in general. When people are perpetually reminded of their high status, they seem to become less concerned about others.

The PNAS study and “King Lear” together suggest a modern way to “physic pomp.” The King, at least in Shakespeare, has his Fool to remind him of his true status.

Perhaps we should have a “fool app” that periodically pings to remind us that we are all just “poor, bare, forked animals” after all.


[Courtesy: The Wall Street Journal]
March 4, 2015
 

Conversation about this article

1: Hargobind Singh Khalsa (United States), March 06, 2015, 7:08 PM.

Thank you ... excellent article.

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