Why politicians may find it hard to understand ordinary voters

The 2024 election has seen party leaders strain to present themselves as being in touch with the struggles ordinary people are facing in the cost of living crisis. And yet they don’t appear to be convincing anyone.

In truth, if political leaders seem lacking in understanding of what is happening to ordinary citizens, it may be because they are. Research in social cognition – how we understand other people – suggests that having power and status affects our ability to interpret others and understand their lives.

This is significant – in the UK, politicians tend to come from a narrow subsection of society – they have a higher status than those they represent. This status can be a barrier to empathy.

How we read other people

One tool that humans have at their disposal is the ability to interpret other people’s behaviour in terms of their psychological states (their intentions, beliefs, desires, emotions and moods). Philosophers call this everyday understanding we have of each other “folk psychology”.

Just as we can navigate the world of material objects without expert knowledge of atomic structure or physical forces, we are able to navigate the world of people without expertise in psychology or neuroscience. If I throw a tennis ball up in the air, I know that it will come down and approximately the path that it will take. I have only a hazy grasp of the physics underlying the ball’s trajectory (I’m a philosopher after all), but, fortunately, not being a physicist has never prevented me from catching a ball.

Likewise, the many of us who aren’t trained in psychology are not generally stumped by other people’s behaviour in day-to-day life. When you see a man at a shop counter contorting his facial muscles and emitting loud noises, your understanding that he is angry will affect both how you react and what you predict he will do next.

But do we all have the same folk psychology? It’s recognised that there are cross-cultural differences in how people explain events. Some cultures are more individualistic and so people living in those cultures are more likely to see people as more in control of the events happening around them. But it looks like one’s position within a culture also has an effect. People with high social status are less likely to explain events in terms of the contexts in which they occur, preferring explanations of events that emphasise a person’s role in them. In short, they are less likely to see people as victims of their circumstances.

In one study, people with low social status ranked external factors as more responsible when asked to explain why a person might contract HIV, become obese or get into medical school. They were more likely to believe that it is harder for some people to get into medical school or to eat well or that some people’s life circumstances might make them more vulnerable to contracting HIV.

Those with higher social status – on both the left and right of the political spectrum – were more likely to think that people were individually responsible for these circumstances. If a person fails to get into medical school, it’s because they didn’t work hard enough rather than because they faced barriers as a result of inequality.

This difference in the way people with high and low social status explain the world has been found across cultures.

Living together means understanding each other

People with low status have also been found to give more attention to the facial expressions of people in their proximity, suggesting they have a greater instinct to try to understand what other people are thinking and feeling in order to assess how they should react.

Going back to our example of the angry man in shop, the person with low status might have noticed the man’s grumpy toddler and the plodding pace of the cashier. And if asked explicitly about the man’s emotional state, they would be more likely to accurately identify it. A person with high status might have missed this wider context, which would lead them to a more simplistic view of why the man is angry.

This difference is potentially explained by the fact that people with lower status are more likely to depend on others, such as their family, community or public services, in their day-to-day lives. They are also more likely to be caring for others. Basically, the thoughts and feelings of others are going to play more of a role in their own highs and lows, so understanding them as much as possible makes a lot of sense.

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Over time, a person with low status forms a “socio-cognitive pattern” that is more oriented towards others than than the pattern formed by those of high status. In turn, this leads to a greater experience of a wider variety of facial expressions, which may explain why people with low status retain greater accuracy in identifying others’ emotions even in studies where they have to judge emotion only by looking at a picture of a person’s eyes. They essentially have a bigger reference library.

Being a good politician should mean making good decisions on behalf of others. So being able to understand how they experience the world and how they are feeling matters. But given that politicians are by definition powerful, and are more likely to come from higher status backgrounds, they may need to put more effort into that understanding. Unfortunately, it appears that power really does go to the head.

Emma Otterski received funding from The Scottish Government to complete her PhD, from which the ideas in this article are drawn.