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This is one of those studies with results that more or less obvious to those who aren’t the ones being studied, but Matthew Huston’s Slate analysis of it is still an interesting read. Excerpt:
In several experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley explored what they call social class essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. One sees categories as natural, discrete, and stable. Dogs have a certain dogness to them and cats a certain catness.
[…]
Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.
Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)
Higher-class Americans may well believe life is fair because they’re motivated to defend their egos and lifestyle, but there’s an additional twist to their greater belief in a just world. Numerous researchers have found that upper-class people are more likely to explain other people’s behavior by appealing to internal traits and abilities, whereas lower-class individuals note circumstances and environmental forces. This matches reality in many ways for these respective groups. The rich do generally have the freedom to pursue their desires and strengths, while for the poor, external limitations often outnumber their opportunities. The poor realize they could have the best genes in the world and still end up working at McDonald’s. The wealthy might not merely be turning a blind eye to such realities; due to their personal experience, they might actually have a blind spot.
I also, in particular, recommend checking out the second page of the article, where Huston gets into assessing the practical ramifications of these findings.
Understanding the psychology of both the wealthy and the reasonably comfortable economic strata will give us a better idea of which rhetoric by supporters of various social justice agendas (and justice system reform agendas) is effective or ineffective, in terms of selling the agenda to the unconverted. That kind of thing — figuring out whether rhetorical appeals are landing or missing the mark within people’s existing worldviews — is right in my area of interest.
There’s also reason to be very concerned about the high levels of wealth in Congress here in America (as well as in the ruling Conservative Party in the UK, according to Huston) in terms of what legislative actions they might take to reinforce existing inequality. It’s one thing to casually neglect a population because you’re just wildly out of touch with the plight of the impoverished. It’s an entirely other and even more pernicious thing to intentionally start rolling back prior efforts to help the poor or propose expanding harsh sentencing targeted at low-income populations and (poorer than the average) minority racial populations because you think they somehow “deserve” their condition and should be kept away from the superior humans. In recent decades, that agenda is exactly what we’ve seen a lot of.
If we don’t figure out the political communication pathway to appeal to the middle classes effectively and convince them that this worldview isn’t true, we’re in for a big resurgence of open social Darwinism.
The United States still has a long way to go on reducing poverty in the United States, but all things considered, things have gotten better. On a number of key underlying metrics as well as quality of life standards, we’ve seen improvements since the beginning of the “War on Poverty,” fifty years ago this month, under President Johnson.
It’s worth keeping this knowledge in mind when the “War on Poverty” social programs — Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, Job Corps, welfare, etc. — that have provided safety nets and opportunities for low-income and struggling Americans are coming under attack today. They’re often dismissed as ineffective because topline poverty hasn’t moved very much since 1964 (though it also hasn’t exploded out of control, despite much higher levels of inequality, which is a good sign). So knowing the positives is key to defending them.
The New York Times published a short piece today summarizing the successes and failures of the anti-poverty efforts since January 1964.
The good:
Still, a broad range of researchers interviewed by The New York Times stressed the improvement in the lives of low-income Americans since Mr. Johnson started his crusade. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, millions of women have entered the work force, malnutrition has all but disappeared. After all, when Mr. Johnson announced his campaign, parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing.
Many economists argue that the official poverty rate grossly understates the impact of government programs. The headline poverty rate counts only cash income, not the value of in-kind benefits like food stamps. A fuller accounting suggests the poverty rate has dropped to 16 percent today, from 26 percent in the late 1960s, economists say.
So on the brass-tacks/basics/fundamentals level, we’ve seen big improvements. And being poor, while certainly still no picnic, isn’t as horrendously bad as it was a half century ago, when it was still only a step or two away from “Grapes of Wrath” territory.
Then, the bad:
But high rates of poverty — measured by both the official government yardstick and the alternatives that many economists prefer — have remained a remarkably persistent feature of American society. About four in 10 black children live in poverty; for Hispanic children, that figure is about three in 10. According to one recent study, as of mid-2011, in any given month, 1.7 million households were living on cash income of less than $2 a person a day, with the prevalence of the kind of deep poverty commonly associated with developing nations increasing since the mid-1990s.
However, I still think on balance it’s been more successful than not, and we should keep fighting for more gains and not turn our backs on these programs by mythologizing their failures.
There’s a lot of wishful, rose-colored-glasses nostalgia surrounding the 1950s and early 1960s, in terms of glamorous economic good times. There’s at least some truth to that, in that the United States was the only industrial economy left standing for a brief time and high-paying jobs were plentiful for many segments of the workforce. But it was, in reality, also a period (as noted above) where large parts of the country still didn’t have electricity or other basic features/services of modern society.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotations:
“In the world of politics, nostalgia is a kind of quitting. It says, ‘I can’t deal with today, can we go back to yesterday?’ But a particular yesterday, without its attendant problems.”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
The War on Poverty hasn’t done as much as we had hoped it would. But it has made a difference for many millions of Americans over the past fifty years. I also agree with those who say that broader economic efforts — including raising the minimum wage need to be made to reduce poverty more widely. Even so, I still want prioritize protecting and strengthening these social programs, not gutting them.
