Ever since the President made a speech about income inequality and lack of opportunity in America, we have been inundated with handwringing about those subjects in the mainstream media. Allegedly thoughtful people, two years after the much-despised Occupy movement ("we are the 99%") withered away, have all of a sudden discovered that America is run by a predatory elite. Obama apparently gave them permission to think about it, and now they do! [Graph source here.]
Not that anything is going to be done about astonishing inequality in America. To quote George Carlin, the "owners of this country don't want that" for reasons which are all too apparent.
In my long essay Homo sapiens — The Rationalizing Animal, I made the fairly obvious point that mainstream media types, and many, many others who benefit from the status quo, will never suggest radical changes to current social arrangements. Don't rock the boat!
But what about those I called the Disenfranchised in the United States? These are the fuck-ees, not the fuck-ers. According to Pew Research, the disenfranchised are "relatively unconcerned" about the income inequality.
Americans are relatively unconcerned about the wide income gap between rich and poor. Americans in the upper fifth of the income distribution earn 16.7 times as much as those in the lowest fifth — by far the widest such gap among the 10 advanced countries in the Pew Research Center’s 2013 global attitudes survey. Yet barely half (47%) of Americans think the rich-poor gap is a very big problem. Among advanced countries, only Australians expressed a lower level of concern, but in Australia the top fifth earned just 2.7 times the income of the bottom fifth.
That's astonishing! The income distribution in the United States is far more unequal than it is in Spain or France, but far fewer Americans are concerned about it. How can we explain this apparent contradiction?
We turn to an academic paper by Kris-Stella Trump called The Status Quo and Perceptions of Fairness: How Income Inequality Influences Public Opinion.
This paper argues that public opinion regarding the acceptability and desirability of income differences is influenced by actual income inequality. When income differences are (perceived to be) high, the public thinks of larger inequalities of income as fair.
That's exactly what we see in the United States.
This phenomenon exists because of two psychological processes that advantage existing social arrangements: status quo bias and the motivation to believe in a just world. The phenomenon is demonstrated in three experiments, which show that personal experiences of inequality as well as information regarding national-level income inequality can affect perceptions of fairness in income gaps. A fourth experiment shows that at least part of this effect is due to the motivation to believe in a just world.
The results can help us explain the empirical puzzle of why higher income inequality across time and space does not systematically result in higher demands for redistribution.
The "puzzle" is explained by status quo bias, which falls under system justfication theory as described by social psychologist John Jost and his co-authors (follow the link above). Using psychological studies, these researchers posit a "general psychological tendency to justify and rationalize the status quo," even among those who are most hurt by existing socio-economic arrangements. (See the paper for details).
A Genetic Mandate? On page 32 of their paper, Jost, et. al. say the following:
We do not believe, however, that the existing evidence is sufficient to warrant
accepting the notion that hierarchy and inequality are genetically mandated at
either the individual or species level, as argued by Sidanius and Pratto (1993,
1999).On this issue, we are closer to the social constructionist position taken
by social identity theorists (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Jost & Kruglanski,
2002; Reicher, 2004; Tajfel, 1981).What seems less speculative to us (but speculative nonetheless, given the dearth of direct evidence concerning the circumstances of our evolutionary history) is the possibility that human beings have developed generally adaptive capacities to accommodate, internalize, and even rationalize key features of their socially constructed environments, especially those features that are difficult or impossible to change (e.g., Gilbert, Pinel,
Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Kay et al., 2002; McGuire & McGuire,
1991; Wilson, Wheatley, Kurtz, Dunn, & Gilbert, 2004).The social and political implications of this simple assumption are vast indeed, and they may help us to understand why, for better and for worse, the status quo exerts such a powerful hold on us, whether or not it serves our interests, and whether or not we are aware of its influence.
Jost, et. al. stop short of theorizing that "hierarchy and inequality are genetically mandated" at the species level, but seem to endorse the idea that "human beings have developed generally adaptive capacities to accommodate, internalize, and even rationalize key features of their socially constructed environments, especially those features that are difficult or impossible to change."
This is a significant point of difference between me and Jost, et. al. For example, social stratification has been a characteristic of every large, complex human society which had division of labor and surplus.
Since the earliest-known writings on the nature of human societies, there has been recognition that social stratification is a central part of all human organization (Lenski 1966). In his Politics, in 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote of the natural ranking of free people and slaves. More recently, during the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu wrote of the feudal system of social stratification and its inequities (Zeitlin 1968; Strasser 1976). By the mid-1800s, the classic sociological theorists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber began more systematic analyses of system of social stratification using concepts that remain with us to this day.
From the root word strata, we can recognize that social stratification refers to a ranking of people or groups of people within a society. But the term was defined by the earliest sociologists as something more than the almost universal inequalities that exist in all but the least complex of societies. Social stratification refers to a system with rather predictable rules behind the ranking of individuals and groups, which theories of social stratification are meant to uncover and understand. The existence of a system of social stratification also implies some form of legitimation of the ranking of people and the unequal distribution of valued goods, services, and prestige. Without belief systems justifying the inequality and unequal ranking, it is unlikely that a stratification system would remain stable over time. Beyond agreement on a definition of social stratification, however, the classic sociological theorists agreed on little else. From this classic period of sociology, we have, in fact, a triple legacy of social stratification theories from the works of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber.
If hierarchy and inequality are not genetically mandated, then it seems to be an extremely unlikely coincidence that all large, complex human societies exhibit social stratification (including wealth & income inequality) to various but significant degrees.
My personal recommendation for social psychologists is that they start drinking with sociologists with the goal of getting everybody on the same page.
The "motivation to believe in a just world" (aka. the just world fallacy) is an interesting concept which I haven't discussed on DOTE (follow the link in the quoted text above).
The Misconception — People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it.
The Truth — The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.... In a 1966 study by Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons, 72 women watched a woman solve problems and get electric shocks when she messed up. The woman was actually pretending, but the people watching didn’t know this. Lerner based these studies on the things he had seen working with the mentally ill. He noticed how he and other doctors, nurses and orderlies would sometimes insult people who were suffering or come up with assumptions about what kind of people they were, or joke about their illness. Lerner thought this behavior might be an attempt to protect the psyche of people facing an abysmal, unrelenting amount of misery and despair.
In his study, when asked to describe the woman getting shocked, many of the observers devalued her. They berated her character and her appearance. They said she deserved it. Lerner also taught a class on society and medicine, and he noticed many students thought poor people were just lazy people who wanted a handout. So, he conducted another study where he had two men solve puzzles. At the end, one of them was randomly awarded a large sum of money. The observers were told the reward was completely random. Still, when asked later to evaluate the two men, people said the one who got the award was smarter, more talented, better at solving puzzles and more productive.
Research since Lerner seems to show evidence for your tendency to want the world to be fair. When in doubt, you pretend it is.
“Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to ‘feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims.’”
- Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez from an essay at The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
You’ve heard “what goes around comes around” before, or maybe you’ve seen a person get what was coming to them and thought, “that’s karma for you.” These are shades of the Just World Fallacy.
These last paragraphs are important.
It sucks to think the world isn’t fair. It feels better to believe in karma and justice, in fairness and reward. A world with the righteous on one side of the scale, and evil on the other — that seems to make sense. You want to believe those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead, and those who are lazy and cheat do not.
This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family and random chance. All the hard work in the world can’t change those initial factors, which is not to say you should just give up if you were born poor.
It makes total sense that people would cling to the delusion that the human-made world is just. To assume otherwise, humans would have to confront themselves (and discomfiting randomness, aka. luck) in a way in which they've shown no inclination or ability to do up to now.
Thus the disenfranchised in America tend to believe that the top 1% (or top 0.1%, etc.) deserve what they've got. They seem to have internalized the notion that their own "inferiority" (low social status) is part of the natural order of things. Therefore they are not much concerned about great income & wealth inequality in America, which is the status quo they are rationalizing.
It appears that relatively weak social dominance by an elite plus deteriorating economic conditions (as in Europe) leads to conflict. Overwhelming dominance plus deteriorating economic conditions leads to submission, as in America, although there are some clear exceptions in the data, especially in the emerging market countries.
And because the disenfranchised want to believe they live in a just world, they seek the opportunity to become wealthy themselves, as opposed to advocating redistribution of the wealth, because they mistakenly believe that if they only had that opportunity, they could achieve the success they most certainly deserve.
Political progressive Robert Reich is confused about why Americans are not revolting.
People ask me all the time why we don’t have a revolution in America, or at least a major wave of reform similar to that of the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society.
Middle incomes are sinking, the ranks of the poor are swelling, almost all the economic gains are going to the top, and big money is corrupting our democracy. So why isn’t there more of a ruckus?
The answer is complex, but three reasons stand out.
First, the working class is paralyzed with fear it will lose the jobs and wages it already has.
In earlier decades, the working class fomented reform. The labor movement led the charge for a minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.
No longer. Working people don’t dare. The share of working-age Americans holding jobs is now lower than at any time in the last three decades and 76 percent of them are living paycheck to paycheck.
No one has any job security. The last thing they want to do is make a fuss and risk losing the little they have.
Besides, their major means of organizing and protecting themselves — labor unions — have been decimated. Four decades ago more than a third of private-sector workers were unionized. Now, fewer than 7 percent belong to a union.
Second, students don’t dare rock the boat.
In prior decades students were a major force for social change. They played an active role in the Civil Rights movement, the Free Speech movement, and against the Vietnam War.
But today’s students don’t want to make a ruckus. They’re laden with debt. Since 1999, student debt has increased more than 500 percent, yet the average starting salary for graduates has dropped 10 percent, adjusted for inflation. Student debts can’t be cancelled in bankruptcy. A default brings penalties and ruins a credit rating.
To make matters worse, the job market for new graduates remains lousy. Which is why record numbers are still living at home.
Reformers and revolutionaries don’t look forward to living with mom and dad or worrying about credit ratings and job recommendations.
Third and finally, the American public has become so cynical about government that many no longer think reform is possible.
When asked if they believe government will do the right thing most of the time, fewer than 20 percent of Americans agree. Fifty years ago, when that question was first asked on standard surveys, more than 75 percent agreed.
Now Reich goes off the rails. It's a pity he isn't conversant with the psychological and sociological literature.
It’s hard to get people worked up to change society or even to change a few laws when they don’t believe government can possibly work.
You’d have to posit a giant conspiracy in order to believe all this was the doing of the forces in America most resistant to positive social change.
It’s possible. of course, that rightwing Republicans, corporate executives, and Wall Street moguls intentionally cut jobs and wages in order to cow average workers, buried students under so much debt they’d never take to the streets, and made most Americans so cynical about government they wouldn’t even try for change.
But it’s more likely they merely allowed all this to unfold, like a giant wet blanket over the outrage and indignation most Americans feel but don’t express.
Change is coming anyway...
No, you don't have to posit a giant conspiracy to believe that 1) an elite exists; 2) that elite acts entirely out of self-interest; and 3) the moral preferences of America's elite have diverged significantly from those of the large majority of America's citizens. I discussed these things in my longer essays Homo sapiens — The Rationalizing Animal (linked-in above) and Economics As A Moral Science? At least Reich understands that much.
Everything Reich says about cowed workers and students or cynicism about government is true, at least superficially. Apparently, America's elite has The People just where they want them
But the situation seems to be far worse than Reich imagines, which is why change isn't coming. If observations based on status quo bias, system justification theory, inevitable social stratification and the just-world fallacy do indeed reflect unconscious psychological processes at work, and I believe they do, then the fundamental motivation among The People (beyond fear and cynicism) to work for profound social change simply does not exist.
In short, disenfranchised Americans are not going to work for reform, let alone rebel against the Powers That Be. They're going to pick up the TV remote and change the channel instead.
That's what we observe in the Real World, and no system-wide conspiracy is required to make the theory work
I'd speculate that an innate human tendency to believe in a just social system and hold a bias towards the status quo (or, framed differently, a reluctance to upend the status quo) could have quite predictably developed somewhere along the long line of gradual biological and social/technological development of the human genus. Prior to the contemporary world's relatively extreme tolerance for personal and contrary opinions, belief and expression and relatively extreme avoidance of routine violence (please note the "relatively"), radically challenging the status quo of one's own system was probably fairly likely to result in pain, death or margnilisation unto deprivation.
This is a plausible theory, no?
Posted by: rumor | 02/21/2014 at 01:47 PM