I read a sociology book a few years ago that said that poor people tend to pay little attention to detail, well-off people pay a lot of attention to detail, and the middle class is somewhere in between.
The book, however, did not explain why.
So, how could your class impact your ability to pay attention and remember details in your work and environment? Why are details more important to upper class people?
Which book? Certainly an aristocrat like you can remember little details like the title or author.
From my experiences with a few rich folks & a few poor folks & a shitload of middle class folks–I can’t say I agree.
How do you (or the book) define class? What sort of details are we talking about? Did the book cite the results of a study, or was this just someone’s opinion?
Not really enough to go on here.
I’m poor. Therefore I cannot remember. 
But seriously, case in point. I’m oblivious to many details that surround me. I have experienced financial hardship most of my life. So have a lot of my family members, and guess what? They have the same trait. It seems the more poor they are, the worse off.
Two examples: I have a sick cousin in a different state. Her closest relatives are poor. She has been near death for two months now. They have not yet been able to tell me what’s wrong with her. All I know is that she had brain surgery. They cannot tell me if she had a stroke, aneurysm, tumor or whatever.
There was a family reunion in the beginning of the month, in St. Louis. My great uncle (poor) who got this together told me it was “off Hamilton near those animals at some park”. Good thing I have some familiarity that city…it was actually of HAMPTON two blocks away from the zoo, in Forest Park.
I was just amused that I read somewhere that this trait is correlated with class. What I thought was a eccentricity in myself and some family members could possibly related to some larger pattern with socio-economic class.
By income. Where they grew up. She came up with a lot of traits that correlated to those income levels.
I believe most of the stuff was her opinion, but there may have been some studies too. Why would this matter?
Perhaps the correlation goes the other way, those that pay attention to details get rich. Of course wealthy and high class don’t always correlate either.
I vaguely remember a story about an oil man, maybe John Paul Getty. He and a geologist were out surveying a place. The geologist poopooed its potential as an oil field. The oil man, that later got filthy rich, noticed a freight train gathered speed after passing a certain point. He recognized that point as the top of a dome, bought the oil rights and brought in a new oil field.
Sounds like BS to me. I’d imagine people in the same social circumstances e better at remembering the details that matter to each other (the lawyer remembers what make of BMW he saw, the pensioer remembers what brand of toilet paper is on sale). People without as much background of travel .ight not remember details of new cities the way a freqent traveller does. Having a smaller vocabulary will lead to more unfamuliar (and thus easier to forget) words.But I think the poor as just at good at noticing culturely neutral stuff.
If you are poor, you are likely not so bright, or lazy, or just unlucky in life and trying to keep your head above water. On** average **I’d say none of those things are condusive to noticing things/details around you. Note, this not a judgement regarding poor folks (besides reasons they might be so).
So–you remember the author was female. Keep going. Perhaps more facts will pop up.
Yes, “studies” would matter, too. It appears that you agree with the Mystery Woman. Do you even have any personal, anecdotal data to add?
Looks like your middle class habits failed you again. 
Well, I read a sociology book just a couple of weeks ago that said…
–Aw, hell. Turns out I can’t remember anything about it at all!
ETA: Just kidding, anybody can write a book and say pretty nearly anything, and there are people who can make statistics say just what they want. For instance, people who sit to pee rather than peeing standing up have fewer problems with prostate cancer! In fact, among the sit-to-pee group it’s practically unheard of. It’s incredible! By doing this one little thing, you could prevent a tragic illness in later life.
It’s the sort of detail I like to pay attention to. 
You did not pay much attention to the book.
Case closed.
If accurate, I would assume (based on the many studies regarding intelligence and socio-economic status) that both one’s class and ability to pay attention to details are affected by one’s intelligence. So, people with low intelligence both tend to not notice details and be poor, and vice versa for people with high intelligence.
It’s easy to make claims that are believable, but much harder to make claims that match up with reality.
Attention to detail is a valuable job skill. That’s about it. Plenty of employed people are poor in this day and age. Plenty of rich people didn’t earn their riches. It’s a pretty poor indicator.
I’m oversimplifying, but at least part of the class disparity is due to the way people are brought up.
Wealthier people (in terms of money, family support, etc.) are taught to explore the world and to speak up for themselves. Poorer people are taught to fit in and mind their own business.
Wealthier people are taught to fight for what they know is right and to be themselves, whereas poorer people are taught that they should stay out of trouble.
Wealthier people are encouraged to follow their dreams, whereas poorer people are often brought up to believe that their highest aspiration is to grow up without getting put in prison.
Obviously the skill of paying attention benefits the wealthier group more than the poorer group. And because success in the US or any capitalist country relies on generating attention, which people from the latter group may have been taught to avoid. It’s not quite so easy to break out of mindset instilled in someone since he or she was a small child: it’s possible but not always rewarding.
So the poor people likely pay just as much attention as the “higher classes”; however they might decide speaking about what they observe might not be in their best interests, or they are too busy to focus on these details that might capture other peoples’ interests.
Well of course. In our society, the smarter and better educated tend to get ahead. And those who grow up wealther tend to be better educated. Most high paying jobs in finance, law, medicine, technology, accounting and so on require a lot of attention to details. Running a business is nothing but details.
Although if some ho shows up short at the end of the night, I’m sure that pimp will notice those details!
With regard to income earned by working, this seems like a contradiction. Low-wage workers often have to do just a small number of relatively simple tasks, and a missed detail or two can get them in trouble eventually. By contrast, upper level managers and executives seem to have a knack for resolving conflicting interests and priorities without necessarily understanding every nuance and detail of what his or her people are working on. For instance, I don’t think a CIO necessarily has to have a full working knowledge of ASP.NET or MVC 3, even though that might be what the software developers at that company are using.
ETA: Addressing the OP, rather than msmith537 in particular.
As long as we’re speculating and WAGing, I can see how the correlation might work, and how there might be some causation either way.
On the one hand, rich people may grow up in and live in environments where there are lots of details to pay attention to (well-furnished homes, intricately-flavored foods, complex social interactions, educational opportunities), while poor people might grow up in environments where they learn to tune out the details around them as a survival mechanism (noisy neighbors, vermin, squalor).
On the other hand, it might be that the ability/willingness/habit of paying attention to details is part of what helps people to get rich, while inattention to details (when bills are due, how much money things cost, attending to the details of one’s job in a timely manner without being closely supervised) could be a major factor in causing or continuing low financial circumstances.