The invisible currency of the poor

I am not one to romanticize poverty but I have come across reason to share with you that indeed, blessed are the poor for they are, to cut to the chase, nicer. This is not one of those verses that I paraphrased from religious text. I am paraphrasing from a study published last Oct 25 in the journal Psychological Science. It turns out that the great divide between the rich and the poor is not just money (or the lack of it) but empathy – the ability to think and feel for others. The poor, it turns out are, in general, nicer human beings.

Led by Michael W. Krauss of the University of California in San Francisco, they had 200 subjects of varying socio-economic status in the university read facial expressions. Being able to read facial expressions as a representation of how people feel is a known indicator or empathy. It was clear from the findings that those who belonged to the lower socio-economic status scored higher in recognizing emotions than those who belonged to the higher socio-economic ladder. 

They carried the test further and made the subjects place themselves in relation to a famous wealthy individual or to the poorest one they can imagine. Those who ranked themselves relatively poorer than the famous wealthy person scored more “empathy” points than the ones who ranked themselves higher than the imagined poor individual. This shows that it is not simply being poor that makes you nice toward others, it is also thinking that you are poor. In the same way, even just imagining you are richer than someone makes you less able to feel for others. The researchers also subjected them to fake job interviews and asked to rate their partner’s emotions. Those who were poorer, once again showed significantly higher levels of empathy than the richer subjects.

I also have known of a local study done a few years ago on fundraising which tallies with these recent findings in Psychology. The local study found that poorer Filipinos are in proportion to their income, much more generous in giving than the rich.

The researchers of the study in Psychological Science said that this kind of behavior could probably be explained in terms of the “survival” benefits for the poor if they showed more empathy. They said that being poor, you have to be able to know and read emotions very well in order to have more allies who can help you in life. They said that when one is rich, he or she has a greater sense of control over his or her life and may find less of a need to understand people through their emotions. I cannot help but wonder what this could mean in terms of describing the role of empathy especially in a society like ours, where 70 percent of our people live on or below the poverty line.

Empathy is some kind of surrender to another. It is like saying “I will forget myself for a while and hear you out and feel for you.” Setting aside the romance that inhabits literature on being poor, could it be that it is this kind of “giving” that has kept this economically poor country of ours afloat? Has this kind of empathy, readily shown by the poor, served as a kind of social currency that kept our society from totally disintegrating?

From personal experience, this seems to hold true. There were people like our dear Aling Chayong, who helped my young struggling parents raise me and my siblings, and who gave her whole life for us even if my parents could not pay her more, considering she barely had a roof or enough to eat for her own family.  

From my experience with groups, I have observed that the extent of help given by the poor is, relatively, so much more than that given by the rich. I have seen this among my friends who are public school teachers. They will give up their measly salary to fund the school supplies of their destitute students. They will give up their vacations to help build schoolhouses which will not otherwise be built.

But that is not to say that all rich people are automatically selfish beings. There is no doubt that there are rich individuals who are empathetic and generous. But after what this study has revealed to us, when we do encounter rich folk who are also nice, it just means it is now understandable why we may suspect them as aliens and thus, are wired differently. It also proves that the poor who are not nice, may be thinking that they have some claim to a yet undisclosed fortune. But if you are the serious type like some scientists, then it would be natural to be curious and design experiments to know what makes for those kinds of beings because they seem to be an anomaly in the general scheme of the rich or poor mentality.

So indeed, blessed are the poor for they are nicer. Blessed are the rich for they will still be rich without being nicer. But lest we forget, blessed too are the “undecided” for they will just linger in the middle and write columns about what science found out about nice poor people and nasty rich folk.

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