Many of us have likely had the experience of feeling ill at ease around wealthy, powerful people, especially if we didn’t grow up that way. Whether there should be or not, there’s real power in status, and it can be hard not to let that mess with your head when you’re in their presence.

But it turns out there might be a lot more to the reasons we view people of different statuses in different ways. New research shows that it’s not just power at play, but an entirely different set of social skills. In fact, people of a lower social class are better at communicating, and that’s the key to setting others at ease.

People of lower social class make others feel at ease, research shows.

In a just-published study conducted by Yale University, New York University, and Singapore Management University, researchers observed social interactions between 264 people of differing socioeconomic status to observe not just how differently they behave towards each other, but also to figure out why.

Socioeconomic status refers to a person’s social standing in society based on their income bracket and the various status markers that come with it. This includes everything from income, education, and occupation to completely subjective things like how they dress or where they live.

One’s socioeconomic status is tightly bound to which obstacles a person faces in life and how they are impacted by them, and the study found that those experiences have a major impact on how people perceive and interact with each other.

In short, people with lower socioeconomic status tend to make others feel at ease. But it’s not because people find them less threatening or “beneath” others, or at least it’s not only because of that. Rather, it seems that the struggles that come with lower socioeconomic status result in better social skills.

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Lower socioeconomic status was tied to better empathy and attunement skills in conversations.

We talk a lot these days about the so-called “soft skills” that make people effective communicators, connectors, and leaders in environments like the workplace, and it turns out that lower socioeconomic status tends to give people a huge advantage in this area.

The study arranged 264 subjects in pairs that had the same age, gender, and race but differing socioeconomic levels and asked them to complete one of three different kinds of social interactions, like having a conversation about a topic or solving a word game together.

The study found that people of lower socioeconomic status were much better at physiological attunement skills in conversations, like the types of behavior we often refer to as “body language,” for example.

It seemed that the obstacles they’d faced in life due to their status made them more empathetic and attentive, more responsive conversation partners, and better at mirroring their partner’s physiological cues, one of the key ways humans show each other they’re listening and caring.

Researchers consistently found, by measuring things like heart rate, that people were more at ease when interacting with a person of lower socioeconomic status who had these more advanced skills. They also found that both this knack for “soft skills” and the impact they had on others were consistent, whether the lower socioeconomic status people were speaking to someone of their same economic level or not.

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Being more relaxed did not seem to make people of different statuses like each other more, however.

What’s perhaps most interesting, and unnerving, about the study’s findings is that while the better empathy and attunement skills among lower socioeconomic status people served to make everyone more at ease, it didn’t seem to impact how people of different statuses felt about each other.

When asked how they felt about their social interactions with the other subjects, they consistently reported liking people of similar backgrounds better than others. The fact that the physiological markers measured said otherwise didn’t seem to affect the “nurture over nature” effect of the social conditioning that tells us how to feel about people of higher or lower status than us.

Oleg_bf Oleg Borisov | Pexels

However, one of the study’s authors, Jacinth J. X. Tan of Singapore Management University, told PsyPost that this study focuses only on single interactions, raising the question if more interaction would have actually shifted these perceptions.

Regardless, the study makes one thing very clear: The class divisions that are causing so much anger and strife in our country these days are illusory at best. Our bodies don’t lie, and they made clear in this study that what actually matters to us, all of us, no matter how much money or power we might have, is empathy and care. 

If we can find our way back to that instead of letting society and culture and perhaps especially politics tell us how we’re SUPPOSED to feel about each other, we might actually be able to find a way to fix what’s broken.

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.