Why do we think poor people are poor because of their own bad choices? Maia
Szalavitz
The Guardian, 5 July 2017
The psychological concept of “fundamental attribution error” is a
natural tendency to see the behaviour of others as being determined by their
character – while excusing our own behaviour based on circumstances. “If an unexpected medical emergency bankrupts
you, you view yourself as a victim of bad fortune [but see] other bankruptcy
court clients as spendthrifts who carelessly had too many lattes. If you’re
unemployed, you recognize the hard effort you put into seeking work, but view
others in the same situation as useless slackers. Their history and
circumstances are invisible from your perspective.”
Hard work and a good education used to help upward mobility in the US.
Americans born in the 1940s had a 90% chance of doing better than their parents,
but those born in the 1980s have only 50/50 odds of doing so.
But elements of normal psychology combine to keep many convinced that
the rich and the poor deserve what they get – with exceptions made, of course,
mainly for oneself.
As a teen cashier, watching people commit food stamp fraud with food
stamps and using cellphones that he could only “dream about”, writer JD Vance saw
the food-stamp recipients as lazy and supporting addictions rather than working
honestly. But the reality was often using illicitly purchased alcohol to soothe
grief, pain and trauma; buying something special to celebrate a child’s
birthday; without supportive family members, as he had had.
A retired Pennsylvanian factory worker in a Washington Post article about
immigrants: “They’re not paying taxes
like Americans are. They’re getting stuff handed to them. Free rent, and
they’re driving better vehicles than I’m driving and everything else.” The
truth is that immigrants do pay taxes (as do millions of undocumented
immigrants) and they don’t typically get free rent either.
In “actor-observer bias”, when we watch others, we tend to see them as
being driven by intrinsic personality traits, but not that for us it is
circumstance that constrains our choices: we acted angrily because we’d just
been fired, not because we’re naturally angry people. In other words, other
people are poor because they make bad choices – but if I’m poor, it’s because
of an unfair system. As a result of this phenomenon, poor people tend to be
hardest on each other.
Among the wealthy, these biases allow society’s winners to believe that
they got where they are by hard work alone and so they deserve what they have –
while seeing those who didn’t make it as having failed due to lack of grit and
merit.
Rising inequality increases physical and geographical segregation by
class, which then reduces cross-class contact and decreases the ability to
interact and empathize. Less empathy then fosters greater political
polarization and justification of inequality, which in turn causes the cycle to
repeat.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/05/us-inequality-poor-people-bad-choices-wealthy-bias
