Crises
are said to bring people closer together. But a new study from UC Berkeley
suggests that while the have-nots reach out to one another in times of trouble,
the wealthy are more apt to find comfort in material possessions.
"In
times of uncertainty, we see a dramatic polarization, with the rich more
focused on holding onto and attaining wealth and the poor spending more time
with friends and loved ones," said Paul Piff, a post-doctoral scholar in
psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published online this
month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Results
from five separate experiments shed new light on how humans from varying socio-economic
backgrounds may respond to both natural and human-made disasters, including
economic recessions, political instability, earthquakes and hurricanes. They
also help explain why, in times of turmoil, people can become more polarized in
their responses to uncertainty and chaos.
For
example, when asked if they would move across the country for a higher-paying
job, study participants from the lower class responded that they would decline
in favor of staying close to friends, family and colleagues. By contrast, upper
class participants opted to take the job and cut ties with their community.
Although
the study does not provide a definitive reason for why the upper class, when
stressed, focuses more on worldly goods than relationships, it posits that
"material wealth may be a particularly salient, accessible and preferred
individual coping mechanism … when they are threatened by perceptions of chaos
within the social environment."
Each
experiment was done with a different group of ethnically and socio-economically
diverse participants, all of whom reported their social status (household
income and education) as well as their level of community mindedness and/or
preoccupation with money.
In a lab
setting, researchers induced various psychological states in their subjects --
such as uncertainty, helplessness or anxiety -- so they could accurately assess
how social class shapes the likelihood of people turning to others or to wealth
in the face of perceived chaos.
Chaos is
defined in the study as "the feeling that the world is unknown,
unpredictable, seemingly random … a general sense that the world and one's life
have turned uncertain and topsy-turvy." This uncertainty typically
triggers either a fight-or-flight or a "tend-and-befriend" response,
which researchers used to assess participants reactions to induced stress.
In the
first experiment, a nationwide sample of 76 men and women ranging in age from
18 to 66 were tasked with selecting, online, a visual graph that best reflected
the trajectory of economic ups and downs they believed they were likely to face
in their lifetimes. The results showed that the upper class and, to a small
degree, Caucasian participants, were less likely than the lower class and
minorities to anticipate financial instability. Lower-class participants who
expected more turmoil in their lives were more likely to turn to community to
cope with perceived chaos, the study found.
In the
second experiment, 72 college students were asked to write about positive and
negative factors that could impact their educational experience. Potential
threats that they cited included canceled classes, tuition hikes and academic
failures. Again, worries about chaos and helplessness spurred lower class
college students -- but not the upper class ones -- to say they would turn to
their community for support.
In the
third experiment, 77 students were put through computerized tasks in which they
rearranged into sentences words that either alluded to chaos or something
negative. This exercise was designed to prime certain participants to see their
environment as unpredictable and scary. When these participants were offered
five minutes to take part in a community building task where they could develop
friendships with a group of their peers, only lower class participants jumped
at the opportunity.
The
fourth experiment had 135 students unscramble similar words into sentences and
then report on how much they agreed with such statements as "Money is the
only thing I can really count on" and "Time spent not making money is
time wasted." When made to feel as if the world was chaotic, upper class
participants consistently agreed more strongly with these statements.
In the
fifth experiment, 115 students were given a hypothetical scenario in which an
employer offered them a new job for a higher salary, with the caveat that they
would need to move, and potentially lose touch with their current network of
family, friends and colleagues. Again, when primed with feelings that the world
was uncertain and chaotic, upper class participants were more amenable to
cutting ties and taking the job, whereas lower class participants opted to stay
close to their support networks.
"Given
the very different forms of coping that we observe among the upper and lower
classes, our research suggests that in times of economic uncertainty and social
instability, disparities between the haves and the have-nots could grow ever
wider," Piff said.
Other
coauthors of the study are UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner; Daniel
Stancato, a psychologist in Seattle, Wash.; Andres Martinez of George Mason
University and Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
Story
Source:
The above
story is reprinted from materials provided byUniversity of California - Berkeley. The original article
was written by Yasmin Anwar.
Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please
contact the source cited above.
Journal
Reference:
1.
Paul K. Piff, Daniel
M. Stancato, Andres G. Martinez, Michael W. Kraus, Dacher Keltner. Class,
Chaos, and the Construction of Community.. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 2012; DOI: 10.1037/a0029673
