There is a funny paradox in
politics. Many people who are successful or wealthy recognize the combination
of talent and circumstances and plain luck that landed them where they
are. Those who are unsuccessful or poor
can recognize how things might have gone differently if their circumstances had
been different.
Yet, the recognition that success
and wealth do not happen purely on the basis of effort and merit does not
change people’s attitudes toward social policy.
While we recognize that there is substantial income inequality in the
United States, few people endorse specific policies that would redistribute
income and opportunity.
Why is that?
This question was explored in an
interesting paper by Larisa Ussak and Andrei Cimpian in the November, 2015 issue
of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
They suggest that from an early
age, people tend to explain the behavior of groups in terms of characteristics
that those people have rather than in terms of the social forces that act on
them. This focus on inherent
characteristics rather than extrinsic forces leads people to accept that groups
deserve to be in the social position they are in.
The first few studies in this
paper looked at 8-year-olds and adults.
They were given descriptions of groups of people from an alien
planet. They were told that the groups
had some kind of inequality (for example, one group might have a lot more money
than the other). Then, they were given
two explanations for that difference.
One explanation focused on inherent characteristics (one group is
smarter than the other). The second
explanation focused on extrinsic factors (one group found a lot of gold). Participants rated how plausible they thought
these explanations were. (Pilot studies
showed that thought each explanation was equally plausible as a description of
why one group might be wealthier than another.)
They also rated whether they thought the situation on the planet was
fair.
Both adults and 8-year-olds gave
higher ratings to explanations based on inherent characteristics than to those
based on external factors. Of interest,
the more strongly that a person preferred the inherent explanation to the
external one, the more that they thought the situation on the planet was fair.
Other studies in this series found
a similar result with children as young as 5.
In addition, studies found that children given the scenarios and asked
to generate an explanation for the difference on their own tended to give
explanations referring to inherent properties than to give explanations based
on extrinsic factors.
Interestingly, these differences
in explanations are observed when children think about groups, but not about
individuals. When they are told about
individuals from a planet who come from different groups and differ on some
characteristic (like income), they are equally likely to give explanations
based on inherent and extrinsic factors.
So, the effect I have described seems to apply just to beliefs about
groups.
One final study manipulated the
type of explanation and looked at fairness.
In this study, children were given either an inherent or an extrinsic
explanation for a difference between groups on a planet. Children given an inherent explanation
thought the difference between groups on the planet was more fair than children
given an extrinsic explanation.
Putting all of this together, when
children and adults look at groups of people, they often assume that group
differences result from characteristics of group members rather than
situational factors. As a result, they
tend to think those group differences are fair.
This suggests that one reason why people often fail to endorse public
policies that might help to repair differences between groups is that they
think that the differences between groups actually reflect aspects of those
groups that are causing the inequality rather than situational factors that
public policy might be able to fix.
