We Asked You to Walk, Bike, or Run for Charity. 4,000 of You Did It.

If you’ve ever attended a party where everyone is dressed in fancy clothes and sipping champagne carried around on platters, there’s a decent chance you were either A) doing well in life and feeling perfectly at ease in this luxurious setting or B) suffering a severe case of imposter syndrome and wondering if everyone at said event was thinking to themselves, "Who invited this person?" Of course, I’m basing that hypothetical purely on my own concept of social status, not any concrete data. But a fascinating new study suggests a strong correlation between one’s self-perception of "class" and their ability to perceive other people’s emotions.

As the study’s authors noted in Scientific Reports, they found "a negative relationship between individuals’ social status and empathic accuracy," noting, "[S]pecifically, those with lower social status were better at identifying emotions in other individuals." Perhaps if you felt out of place at the aforementioned fancy luncheon, you would have been more likely to spot someone else with that same struggle.