What Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” video reveals about the links between inequality, compassion, and happiness….
Wealth hurts happiness…
“Being compassionate, having empathic accuracy, being trusting and cooperative—these are keys to social connection and, in turn, happiness,” says UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Paul Piff, whose own research has found that people of higher SES were less willing to share money with a stranger or make charitable donations. (However, when they were made to feel lower status, they became more generous; the opposite was true for people made to feel high status—they became stingier.)
By Jason Marsh
