On average, Rich people get more practice making decisions, are less stressed when making a decision, and are more emotionally detached from the decision, allowing them to use more logical reasoning to make a good decision.  They are also better educated, and so have more knowledge with which to make a better decision with.  All these factors make the Rich better at making decisions than the Poor.  By learning what sets the Poor back and what helps the Rich succeed, you can benefit by applying the lessons to your life and improving yourself.  Here’s a more in-depth examination:

Rich people can afford to be in more activities than poor people, and they are more likely to be involved in helping to organize or run events or organizations, placing them in a position to face more decisions in general.  Practice makes perfect, and the Rich get a lot  more  practice than the Poor.

A consequence of this unequal distribution of decision making is that the Poor, by facing so few decisions, are more affected by each one.  There are several reasons for this: impact, memory, and money. When you have $10, making a $1 decision is difficult; when you have $100, it’s easier to make a decision about $1.  Same idea.  Also, if you only make one decision a day, you’re going to remember that one decision, whereas if you make 20 in a day, you are more likely to forget most of them.  Finally, Poor people dwell longer on the decisions, classically conditioning (wiki) themselves to feel certain emotions when faced with a decision.   They dwell on past decisions more because they don’t get many opportunities for upward mobility, so the few times they did have an opportunity stand out.  These emotions toward past decisions are usually negative, because it is unlikely for them to be making good decisions due to all the reasons we’ve covered. In fact, the fact that they are still poor is a daily reminder of their poor decision making.  All this translates into stress that would affect anyone’s ability, Rich or Poor, to make a good decision, and this stress, anxiety, and negative emotional state are all triggered by decisions, which significantly reduces a Poor person’s chance at improving their decision making.  Rich people are less at risk for this because Rich people make many decisions that change the course of their lives, and constantly make new ones to flush out any bad memories of the old.  This contributes to the Poor being stuck mentally and emotionally in the past and being unable to move forward and progress, which in turn keeps them poor.

The role of emotion in decision making is also fundamentally different: for the Rich, they believe that the best decisions are made using critical thinking, and leaders are honored for remaining calm under pressure (How Successful People Stay Calm – Forbes).  For the poor, since they are uneducated, they don’t have the knowledge or frameworks to think with logic anyway, so instead they rely on the only thing they have to make decisions: gut feelings and emotions.  This is why a crafty salesman will succeed at manipulating a poor person, because the poor person will be led on by the feel good tactics of sales, but will never trick a smart and savvy investor who uses numbers and financial intelligence to make purchases.  Thus, a Poor person is more likely to be taken advantage of than a Rich person, making the chances of a Poor person making a good decision even worse.

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

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The Rich vs. Poor Series is a collection of articles that discuss differences in habit and behavior between the rich and poor. The Series is written with the intent to 1. Reduce class warfare and hate by promoting understanding and empathy through articles that explain the different perspectives towards topics and issues the rich and poor have, and 2. Educate the poor on how they can improve their own situation.

Rich people are better able to express themselves with their body language than poor people.  This is because speaking good body language is a skill decays over time like any other language or skill.  If you don’t practice your second language, your instrument, your sport or craft, then after a few years you will lose most of your abilities.  Rich people, being wealthy enough in free time and expendable income, can afford to attend more social events than poor people, and so have more opportunities to maintain the skill of body language than poor people.  Going out with friends to a gathering, party, or event costs money and time.  Thus, as the years go by, a rich person’s body language gets more and more refined by practice while a poor person’s body language gets worse by a lack of practice. 

One could argue that some skills are timeless and once learned are never forgotten, like riding a bike or drinking water.  To that I say: rich children are more likely to learn body language growing up than poor children.  The first reason is opportunity; the rich have more social events and therefore more opportunities for practice, and practice is necessary for learning, so the rich kids improve while the poor kids don’t.  Rich parents know good body language, and so teach it to their children, while poor parents don’t have good body language, and so instead teach bad body language to their children.

Poor people body language is typically being still and uncommunicative.  This is because this body language is born out of fear: by not communicating anything, you minimize the risk of speaking bad body language and causing problems.  This is a self perpetuating cycle because by not making mistakes, they never learn how to correct the mistake.  By never seeing good body language, they never see how to correct the mistake.

Furthermore, differences in the environment they live in result in expressive and positive emotional body language being more acceptable and common for rich people, and unexpressive and negative emotional body language being more acceptable and common for poor people.

In poor neighborhoods, crime is higher.  Because body language can attract criminals and trouble, you protect yourself by restricting your body language; in rich neighborhoods, crime is lower, so it is safe for a rich person to use their entire body to talk to you: face, hands, arms, etc.  If you talk to homeless people, they typically have a dead-pan facial expression, and will react slowly and carefully, because they don’t know if you mean harm or good, and they don’t want to risk offending you and bringing harm to themselves.  This risk is particularly great because a homeless or poor person has little to back them up, hence being poor.  So their future is very dependent upon how this specific event will turn out: if it ends up badly, the poor person will have little to no help recovering, whereas a rich person has safety and security in friends, family, and wealth to recover.  Because so few people talk to homeless or poor people, every opportunity is much more valuable to a poor person. A rich person knows more will come, so the importance of each individual interaction is reduced (see Scarcity vs Abundance), meaning the rich person is more willing to take risks with expressing his or her opinions and standing up for them while a poor person will be quicker to take back what he or she said, and it is easier to claim miscommunication when your body language wasn’t clear in the first place.

In the workplace, poor people are more likely to be employees rather than managers, so they must be more cautious about what they say and do in case they get fired. You don’t have to worry about offending the boss and getting fired when you are the boss, and rich people are more likely to be the boss. Because poor people are more likely to be low level employees, the body language that they do learn is that of subordination and obedience, rather than the assertive and independent, free thinking body language associated with higher level employees. Poor people develop the body language of nodding downwards when greeting or acknowledging people or conversations (the modern relic of bowing), because that’s what is appropriate in the workplace in order to give the respect due to their managers.  Rich people are more likely to nod upwards, because they are in charge.  

Because poor parents spend most of their day without authority, they are more likely to assert it at home, over their children, further perpetuating the body language education of subordination.  Poor parents are tired from work, and will tell their children to be quiet, robbing them of opportunities to practice and learn how to express themselves.  Rich parents on the other hand, spend most of their day with authority, so they are more likely to give their children more freedom to be themselves rather than hide themselves.  In fact, rich parents place more emphasis on manners like speaking when spoken to, therefore providing their children with more opportunities to practice expressing and being themselves than poor parents.  Poor families have more problems at home, or problems with life in general, so the conversation topics and consequent body language is primarily about power, anger, and violence, which is what the will children learn.  Rich families have more time for joy, and so while they still may have problems at home, they also have many positive experiences and stories to outweigh the bad, and on the whole teach positive body language instead.  

Body language has a strong influence on your personal identity, which shapes your behavior for the future.  You can break out by faking it until you make it, see this TED talk by Amy Cuddy on Body Language

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

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