Explaining Donald Trump

Whatever your feelings about Donald Trump's politics, few would contend that he seems like a kind and compassionate man. Turns out, there’s plenty of evidence to support the notion that privilege tilts people’s brains.

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, wanted to understand how power affects cerebral functioning. Along with his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlich, Obhi randomly assigned a feeling of being powerful or powerless to subjects by asking them to write either about a time they were dependent on others for help or in absolute control of a situation involving others. Then the subjects watched an incredibly boring video of a hand squeezing a rubber ball while the scientists monitored the activity of mirror neurons in the subjects’ brains. Mirror neurons are key to human compassion in that they fire whether you are skiing down a mountain or watching someone else ski down a mountain. The mirror system is the part of the brain that allows us to get inside each other’s heads. What Obhi and his colleagues found helps explain why poor people give away a greater proportion of what they have than rich people do: powerlessness boosts the mirror system, but power dampens it. Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner agrees. “What we’re finding is power diminishes all varieties of empathy. Whether you’re with a team at work [or] your family dinner, all of that hinges on how we adapt our behaviors to the behaviors of other people. And power takes a bit out of that ability, which is too bad.”

It is too bad, because any reduction in our capacity for empathy leads directly to social isolation, which is another reason it’s so lonely at the top. In my personal favorite of their studies, Keltner and Piff decided to tweak a game of Monopoly. (Quick aside: Monopoly was originally called “The Landlord’s Game,” and was invented as a teaching tool used to demonstrate the evils of concentrated ownership and the tendency of wealth to accumulate in the hands of the already-rich.) The psychologists rigged the game so that one player had huge advantages over the other from the get-go. They ran the study with over a hundred pairs of subjects, all of whom were brought into the lab where a coin was flipped to determine who’d be “rich” and “poor” in the game. The randomly chosen “rich” player started out with twice as much money, collected twice as much every time they went around the board, and got to roll two dice instead of one, so they moved twice as quickly. None of these advantages were hidden from the players. Both were well aware of how unfair the situation was. But still, the “winning” players quickly showed the tell-tale symptoms of Rich A$$hole Syndrome (RAS). They were far more likely to display dominant behaviors like smacking the board with their piece, loudly celebrating their superior skill, even eating more pretzels from a bowl positioned nearby. In Piff’s words, “The rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they’re doing.”

After 15 minutes, the experimenters asked the subjects to discuss their experience of playing the game. Amazingly, when the rich players talked about why they’d won, they focused on their brilliant strategies rather than the fact that the whole game was obviously rigged to make it nearly impossible for them to lose. “They talked about what they’d done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game,” said Piff. “What we’ve been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases.” As Piff explained to Maia Szalavitz, “There’s this idea that the more you have, the less entitled and more grateful you feel; and the less you have, the more you feel you deserve. That’s not what we find. This seems to be the opposite of noblesse oblige.” Textbook RAS.

(Adapted from Civilized to Death, coming soon from Simon and Schuster.)