Remember that t-shirt message — I was born smart, education ruined me — well it has been proven right in parts by research.

Investigations have shown that our less educated brethren be they our maid servant or driver, the gardener or the watchman are likely to understands us better than more educated ones around us. It appears that their simplicity of approach to complex things makes it so.

A study published in the Psychological Science proves this and goes on to say that people with higher education or higher social class are less likely to understand the emotions of people around them suggesting that higher education is equal to lesser emotional quotient.

You would think that as educated people we might have a better grip on nebulous things like emotions. But research on emotion perception says the opposite. People with lower education and social standing are better at reading emotions.

Researchers believe that as people from lower educational and social background depend human interaction for clues to complex things, hence they tend to understand people better. They simply have more experience when it comes to human interaction and they are likely to be more clued in to the body language and other nuances of human communication. People with higher education and from high society do not do this, hence they score low on emotion perception.

Technology makes us less human

There is something else we all have experienced about technology. It makes us less human, maybe because it demands so much of our time and energy that we are left with little for real interactions. As we become more out of touch with human interactions we tend to depend more on technology for clues to human behavior. We may feel it below our dignity to admit not knowing something and we will try to pass off recently garnered internet information as our own knowledge and try to appear knowledgeable and well informed. We use technology to create this mask for us. People with no access to technological tools have no such possibility and they easily admit their lack of knowledge without feeling that they have made themselves vulnerable. In other words, they have a robust ego which does not break just because they do not know something.

So if you are tech savvy and educated, you know what to watch out for.