"Understandably, we focus on the people we value most. If you are poor, you depend on good relationships with friends and family whom you may need to turn to for help--say, when you need someone to look after your four-year-old until you get home from work. Those with few resources and a fragile perch on stability "need to lean on people," says Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"So the poor are particularly attentive to other people and their needs.
"The wealthy, on the other hand, can hire help--pay for a day care center or even an au pair. This means, Keltner argues, that rich people can afford to be less aware of the needs of other people, and so can be less attentive to them and their suffering.
"His research has surfaced this disdain in just a five-minute get-acquainted session. The more wealthy (at least among American college students) exhibit fewer signs of engagement like making eye contact, nods, and laughing--and more of those for uninterest, like checking the time, doodling, or fidgeting. Students from wealthy families seem standoffish, while those from poorer roots appear more engaged, warm, and expressive.
"And in a Dutch study, strangers told each other about distressing episodes in their lives, ranging from the death of a loved one or divorce to loss of a love or betrayal, or childhood pains like being bullied. Again the more powerful person in the pairs tended to be more indifferent: to feel less of the other person's pain--to be less empathic, let alone compassionate.
"Keltner's group has found similar attention gaps just by comparing high-ranking people in an organization with those at the lower tiers on their skill at reading emotions from facial expression. In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation--all signifying a lack of attention.
"In contrast, people of lower social status tend to do better on tests of empathic accuracy, such as reading others' emotions from their faces--even just from muscle movements around the eyes. By every measure they focus on other people more than do people of higher status.
"The mapping of attention on lines of power shows up in a simple metric: how long does it take person A to respond to an email from person B? The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes.
"There's an algorithm for this, a data mining method called "automated social hierarchy detection," developed at Columbia University. When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person's emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures.
"Power and status are highly relative, varying from one encounter to another. Tellingly, when students from wealthy families imagined themselves talking with someone of still higher status than themselves, they improved on their ability to read emotions in faces.
"Where we see ourselves on the social ladder seems to determine how much attention we pay: more vigilant when we feel subordinate, less so when superior. the corollary: The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay--and the more attention you pay, the more you care. Attention interweaves with love."
This was my favorite two pages in this book. The author summarizes some really interesting studies by other people, but then doesn't do much with this information and ends with the silly sentence: "Attention interweaves with love." The whole book is like this, and I had trouble understanding what, if any, thesis the book had.
I think the point of this book is to say that different people "focus," or pay attention to, different things in different situation. As important as intelligence is the ability to have self-control over what you pay attention to, given the context. This author would have approved of my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Jensen who forced all of the children to sit still with their legs crossed and backs straight and exercise "self-control" for 30 seconds before gym class began.
I didn't really like this book overall, because it just seemed like a rambling summary of a bunch of research. All of the research was on related topics, but the author never really tied everything together to make a coherent book. Topics include how modern technology is creating a lot of distractions, conscious versus subconscious thinking, that people with ADD are sometimes better at finding solutions outside the box, that people are happier in a "flow" state, the value of meditation/mindfulness, the value of taking a walk in nature, the value of doing what you believe in despite what others advise, the importance of nonverbal communication to show emotional empathy, the value of willpower and delayed gratification, what part of a person's brain circuitry is activated in different situations, the value of detachment for physicians, the value of empathetic engagement for physicians, global warming, the "10,000 hour rule," Larry David and the success of certain corporations and their leaders.
I guess the author feels that as a "science journalist," his job is just to summarize a bunch of scientific literature; the book doesn't really need to have a point. But I would have preferred a book that didn't just read like the notes of some guy who has read a lot of stuff and talked to a lot of people about how people think about stuff.